Katharine S. Milar

Drugs and Stimulus Control

The term “stimulus control” derives from operant conditioning experiments in which stimuli are said to “control” responding if changes in the stimuli are associated with changes in the accuracy or rate of responding. The “degree” or “level” of stimulus control in these experiments is defined by the extent of the covariation between stimulus changes and response changes. The most commonly used measure of stimulus control is response accuracy.

Psychology as a Science

What is scientific psychology? Most people know that psychologists study mental functioning, but comparatively few appreciate the scope of modern psychology or know what psychologists actually do. There is good public awareness of the roles of psychologists in clinical and mental health settings, also in schools and the workplace, but much less knowledge of psychologists as laboratory scientists. This report aims to give a brief account of psychology as an academic discipline, to differentiate science and practice in psychology, and to illustrate how fundamental and applied problems are interdependent. Finally, the report outlines the needs of psychology as a scientific discipline, if it is to continue to flourish in Canada and to address major problems presently facing Canadian society.

A coarse and clumsy tool: Helen Thompson Woolley and the Cincinnati Vocation Bureau.

From 1911 to 1921, Helen Thompson Wooley served as director of the Vocation Bureau of the Cincinnati Public Schools. In this position she designed and supervised a massive longitudinal study comparing the development of adolescents who remained in school with those who left school to go to work. Although the original goals of this study were not accomplished, the achievements of the Vocation Bureau brought national recognition to the city and to Helen Wooley. The accomplishments of the bureau reflected Wooleys view of the role of experimental psychology in contributing to the scientific understanding of adolescents and to educational and social reforms.

“The difference being a woman made” Untold Lives in personal and intellectual context

To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Scarborough and Furumotos classic work Untold Lives, and to honor the intellectual legacy of Elizabeth Scarborough (1935-2015), we introduce this special issue devoted to the histories of women, gender, and feminism in psychology. We provide a short biographical sketch of Elizabeth, highlighting her own marriage-career dilemma, then contextualize the publication of Untold Lives within the historiography on women in psychology at that time. We conclude by discussing intersectionality as an analytic framework for the history of psychology as a way to extend and enrich this historiography.

A special relationship: Race, child study, and Rockefeller philanthropy

In 1928, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial granted funds to the University of Cincinnati to establish a child study and parent education program for African Americans. This paper traces the origin of the idea for this program to a special relationship between the family of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Spelman College, an African American womens college in Atlanta, Georgia. This relationship embodied Rockefellers interest in women and children, in Baptist charities, in higher education (especially in the South), and race. The case study of this relationship addresses the larger question: To what purpose was the African American woman to be educated?