125 years of the American Psychological Association.

Abstract

The American Psychological Association (APA) began 125 years ago as a small club of a few dozen members in the parlor of its founder, G. Stanley Hall. In the decades since, it has faced many difficulties and even a few existential crises. Originally a scientific society, it spent the decades between the world wars figuring out how to accommodate the growing community of applied psychologists while still retaining and enhancing its scientific reputation. After World War II, with an expanded mandate, it developed formal training models for clinical psychologists and became an important player in legal cases pertaining to civil rights and other social justice issues. With practitioners taking an ever-greater role in the governance of the organization in the late 1970s, and the financial viability of the association in doubt in the 1980s, many psychological scientists felt the need to create a separate organization for themselves. The 1990s and early 2000s brought more challenges: declining divisional memberships; a legal dispute over fees with practitioners; and a serious upheaval over the APA Board of Directors' cooperation with governmental defense and intelligence agencies during the "war on terror." These clashes appear to have precipitated a decline in the association's membership for the first time in its history. The APA has faced many storms over its century-and-a-quarter, but has, thus far, always ultimately found a way forward for itself, for its members, and for the wider discipline of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Ouroboros of Psychological Methodology: The Case of Effect Sizes (Mechanical Objectivity vs. Expertise)

“…Psychologists have long understood and worked with the embankment protecting the experimentalists from being tainted by the correlationalists—the pure researchers from the applied (see Cronbach, 1957, for his classic call to unite these two disciplines; see also, Stout, 1987). In fact, disciplinary tensions between academic and professional members of the APA led to the Task Force on the Structure of the APA in 1985 and the consequential creation of the Association for Psychology Science (West, 2008; also see Green & Cautin, 2017, for an overview of APA's long history). Research psychologists, largely experimentalists committed to the ostensible truths of their statistical methods, were exasperated with how the APA was transforming more and more into an association for clinicians and other professionals.…”

“The highest values are individual”: The life and times of Eleanor Harris Rowland Wembridge.

“…She concluded that the assessment battery used "accomplished the purpose by classifying 11 subnormal girls by an objective standard in a relatively short space of time" (p. 249). In 1913, there were only a handful of psychology journals and Eleanor's work was published in the journal Psychological Review (Green & Cautin, 2017), making Eleanor's study likely the first of its kind in or out of the correctional psychology arena.…”

Considerations for an Integrated Undergraduate Comparative and Clinical Psychology Course

“…Now, granted that combining comparative and clinical psychology is a hopeful way of looking at how the APA functions, some may argue that the likelihood for members of one branch of the APA to work with another branch is limited at best and impossible at worst (Green & Cautin, 2017). Terms like "turf wars" are often used to describe large and professionally diverse organizations like the APA.…”