Insight Editions · No. 91
Psychology: The Key Concepts
Graham Richards
Graham Richards's reference work defines key concepts across psychology, tracing their origins, theoretical uses, and controversies in experimental, social, developmental, clinical, and psychoanalytic traditions.
A study guide to Psychology: The Key Concepts by Graham Richards. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The design is alphabetical with cross-references. A short entry defines a term in a line or two (Synapse, Halo Effect, Psychosomatic); a medium entry gives the term's origin, its main users and a critical comment; a long entry surveys a whole field with lettered sub-entries (Memory, Psychoanalytic Concepts, Schools of Psychology, Learning and Learning Theory).
The seven clusters that the book's cross-references knit together.
The author's voice is personal, wry and historically minded. Richards, a leading British historian of Psychology, says in the Preface that "objectivity is an illusion" and that he will state his own view where it seems useful. He does so often: the 'direct versus indirect' perception debate is "conceptually confused", Psychoanalysis is "now widely regarded as a failed theory" yet still indispensable, and undergraduates are warned off ESP projects.
| Cluster | Core entries | Central question |
|---|---|---|
| Learning and behaviour | Behaviourism, Learning theory, Conditioning, Reinforcement | How does experience change behaviour? |
| Mind and cognition | Memory, Attention, Cognitive Psychology, Connectionism | How is information represented and processed? |
| Development | Piagetian theory, ZPD, Attachment, Moral development | How does a child become a competent adult? |
| Personality and testing | Personality, Intelligence, Projective tests, Validity | How do people differ, and can it be measured? |
| Social behaviour | Attitude, Obedience, Conformity, Social identity | How do situations and groups shape action? |
| Disorder and therapy | DSM, Schizophrenia, Depression, CBT, Psychoanalysis | What counts as disorder, and what helps? |
| Theory and history | Schools of Psychology, Reductionism, Reflexivity, Social constructionism | What kind of science is Psychology? |
Table 1. The seven clusters that the book's cross-references knit together.
Since 2009 the discipline has changed in ways that bear directly on the entries. First, the replication crisis: Daryl Bem's 2011 precognition paper and the Open Science Collaboration's 2015 attempt to repeat 100 studies (roughly 36 to 39 per cent replicated, depending on the criterion) exposed weak methods across social and cognitive Psychology, and gave rise to preregistration, Registered Reports and large multi-lab replications. Second, psychiatric classification moved on: DSM-5 (2013) and its text revision DSM-5-TR (2022), and the WHO's ICD-11 (in force from 2022), removed Asperger's syndrome as a separate diagnosis, recast multiple personality, learning difficulties and hysteria, and added prolonged grief disorder. Third, several of the book's classic studies (the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Kitty Genovese story, Milgram's obedience work) have been substantially re-examined.
Who wrote it, and how it shows. Graham Richards, for some years Director of the British Psychological Society's History of Psychology Centre, wrote widely on the history of Psychology, including Mental Machinery, Putting Psychology in its Place and 'Race', Racism and Psychology. The book's strongest entries are historical: phrenology, physiognomy, the schools, positivism, eugenics, lobotomy, temperament.
About this book
Psychology: The Key Concepts by Graham Richards, 2009. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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Psychology, psychology and the Problem of Key Concepts
Audience and stance
The book is aimed at students from Advanced GCSE level through undergraduate study, and at general readers. Richards admits that objectivity is an illusion in a work of this kind: selecting about 300 terms and describing them involves judgement, and he will occasionally state his own position rather than hide behind a false neutrality. He adopts the convention, used throughout his historical writing, of capital-P Psychology for the discipline and lowercase psychology for the subject matter it studies.
Four difficulties
Everyday words with a technical spin. Terms such as personality, ego, attitude and intelligence existed before the discipline and still carry popular senses. No firm boundaries. Psychology overlaps with philosophy, biology, medicine, sociology and anthropology, so many entries (Anomie, Positivism, Pragmatism) are borrowed terms. No consensus vocabulary. Rival schools use different words for similar things, or the same word for different things. Shifting meanings. A term's sense in 1920 may differ sharply from its sense in 2009, and the entries often trace this history.
The Preface's four difficulties.
How a key concept travels inside the book.
How to use the entries
Entry length reflects how much needs explaining, not importance: Synapse gets one line, Memory over 3,600 words. Each entry ends with references, chosen as accessible starting points. Richards recommends web resources (Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the British Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association) and thanks colleagues Geoff Bunn, Alan Collins and Elizabeth Valentine for advice.
Achievement Motivation to Aversion Therapy
Achievement motivation to Affect
Achievement motivation (N-Ach). Henry Murray's late-1930s list of human needs included a need for achievement, which soon attracted more research than any other, producing a large literature from the late 1950s into the early 1960s (above all by David McClelland) and methods of measuring N-Ach beyond Murray's own Thematic Apperception Test. Richards notes the cultural fit: a need to achieve suited post-war America. Acquiescence response set is the tendency to agree with questionnaire statements whatever they say, so that someone may endorse both "sexual immorality is very widespread" and "its level is often greatly exaggerated"; the remedy is to counterbalance item direction.
ADHD. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder combines poor sustained attention, impulsive activity and difficulty keeping still; ADD was the label where hyperactivity is absent. The term spread in the 1980s, though earlier case descriptions exist. Richards is sceptical: diagnosis rose dramatically, the main treatment is Ritalin, and many regard ADHD as the extreme end of normal temperamental variation, a possible case of medicalisation of fidgety children. Adolescence, roughly 13 to 19, is an old word (fifteenth century) but became a psychological topic only in the late nineteenth century, when schooling extended into the teens. Affect is a neutral-sounding synonym for emotion; Richards adds a usage note on the endlessly confused affect and effect.
Agency to Altruism
Agency is the power to initiate events intentionally, a concept bound up with the human need to ascribe responsibility. Aggression covers behaviours that share only actual or threatened violence, from a heated argument to a pub brawl to a door kicked in frustration, so a single theory of "aggression" may be chasing a word rather than a phenomenon. Ethological, psychoanalytic, frustration-aggression and social learning accounts (Bandura's Bobo doll) each explain a different slice. Agnosia ("not knowing") names brain-damage conditions in which people cannot grasp the meaning of objects: simultanagnosia (parts but not scenes) and prosopagnosia (faces).
One word, many behaviours: why a single theory of aggression struggles.
AI (artificial intelligence) is computer simulation of intelligent performance; Richards dates modern AI to Newell, Shaw and Simon (1958) and notes it as a central strand of Cognitive Psychology. Alexander technique, devised by actor F.M. Alexander (1869-1955), fuses postural and psychological methods. Alienation, from the early Marx, is a felt disconnection from one's work and social world (the assembly line is the classic case); anomie, from Durkheim, is a lack of purpose caused by weak social norms rather than economic disempowerment.
Altruism, helping without expectation of reward, became a battleground in the sociobiology controversy of the 1980s. Robert Trivers (1971) argued that apparent altruism brings covert benefit, coining reciprocal altruism, which many find oxymoronic. Richards lists the problems: defining altruism by consequences rather than motives makes it unidentifiable; self-sacrifice in battle differs from risk that falls only if the act fails; and everyday kindness (a coin for a busker) involves neither real cost nor hidden gain. Later writers (Lumsden and Wilson 1981) back-tracked towards motivational and social factors.
ANOVA to Anxiety
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) apportions the variance in data between variables. If one set of scores is all 10s and another all 12s, all the variance is due to the set; if scores alternate within sets, none is. The entry then explains main effects and interactions for designs with two or three factors.
Analytical (Jungian) Psychology. After breaking with Freud in 1912, Jung developed his own theory. Its distinctive concepts include the collective unconscious and its archetypes (anima, animus, shadow, persona), the complex (which Jung first identified with his word-association test), individuation, the mandala, numinosity, the transcendent function and the four psychological functions (thinking and feeling as rational, sensation and intuition as irrational). Combined with extraversion and introversion, these yield 16 types, later the basis of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Richards notes that Jung's academic reputation slumped after 1950 but revived with historical scholarship (Shamdasani 2003).
Jung's model of the psyche: personal layers above the collective unconscious.
Anorexia nervosa is self-starvation, typically in adolescent females, linked to obsession with body shape; Richards notes the rise of pro-anorexia websites and implicates family dynamics, the fashion industry and dieting culture. Anthropomorphism is ascribing human qualities to animals; the classic check is Lloyd Morgan's Canon (1894, restated 1903): never interpret an animal's act by a "higher" faculty if a "lower" one will do. Anti-psychiatry (mid-1960s to mid-1970s: Laing, Cooper, Szasz) attacked psychiatry as dehumanising and politically conservative, especially over schizophrenia, drugs and ECT. Anxiety in Psychology usually means free-floating anxiety, without a specific object (the psychoanalytic Angst).
Aphasia to Attention
Aphasia is loss of language after brain damage, Broca's (production) and Wernicke's (comprehension) being the classic forms. Apperception, from Leibniz through Herbart to Wundt, means the active assimilation of a perception into existing mental content. Arousal is general activation, related to performance by the inverted U (Yerkes-Dodson). Associationism, from Locke and Hartley to James Mill (1829), held that complex ideas are built from simple ones linked by contiguity, similarity and contrast; it fed directly into learning theory. Ataxia names disorders of muscular coordination, often genetic or cerebellar.
Asperger's syndrome. Richards describes people with marked social difficulties, narrow intense interests and often high academic functioning, notes that an increasingly organised Asperger lobby asserts its normality or even superiority, and declines to offer any statement that might suggest an "authoritative consensus". He recommends skipping Wikipedia for a support-group website.
Attachment. John Bowlby introduced the idea in 1951 and set it out in Attachment and Loss (1969, 1973, 1980): a natural bond between infant and primary caretaker that may template later relationships. Bowlby's emphasis on maternal deprivation was later contested: loving care, not the carer's sex or biological tie, mattered, and feminists noted its fit with a post-war wish to return women from paid work to the home. Attention is the process of selecting a stimulus from the sensory array, central to Cognitive Psychology since Broadbent's filter model (1958) and its successors.
Attitude to Aversion therapy
Attitude dominated North American social Psychology from the 1930s to the 1970s. The word first meant bodily posture; its psychological sense dates from the early twentieth century, and it flourished because it suited questionnaire measurement (Thurstone, Likert scales). LaPiere's (1934) finding that hotel staff who refused Chinese guests by letter served them in person exposed the weak link between expressed attitudes and behaviour. Attribution theory, rooted in Heider and launched by Kelley (1967), asks how people explain behaviour, distinguishing internal (dispositional) from external (situational) causes; the fundamental attribution error is overweighting the former.
Attribution theory: the basic choice, and the bias towards dispositions.
| Concept | Origin | What it measures or explains | Status in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Achievement motivation | Murray 1938; McClelland 1950s | Need to excel | Absorbed into goal and self-determination theories |
| Attitude | Thurstone, Likert 1920s to 1930s | Evaluative stance towards an object | Alive; implicit measures (IAT) contested |
| Attribution | Heider 1958; Kelley 1967 | Lay explanations of behaviour | Core of social cognition |
| Authoritarianism | Adorno et al. 1950 | Deference, rigidity, prejudice | Revived as right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer) |
| Attachment | Bowlby 1951; Ainsworth 1970s | Infant-carer bond | Influential; effect sizes debated |
Table 2. Five A-entry constructs and how they have fared.
Authoritarianism. Anticipated by Erich Fromm, the concept reached English-speaking Psychology with The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950), whose F-scale measured a syndrome of deference, rigidity and prejudice traced to harsh upbringing. Critics found acquiescence bias in the all-positively-worded scale and a political slant (authoritarianism of the left was ignored).
Autism. Before the 1960s "autism" meant autistic thinking, self-absorbed and cut off from reality, typical of schizophrenia (Bleuler's term). "The autistic child" emerged as a concept in the 1960s: difficulty with social interaction and communication, repetitive behaviour, onset in infancy. Richards stresses the rising reported incidence, obscure causes and "confusion" about most aspects. Aversion therapy, introduced in the 1960s from learning theory (Rachman and Teasdale 1969), paired undesirable behaviour with unpleasant stimuli; it was notoriously used on gay men with electric shocks, and less controversially on smoking and alcoholism (with nausea-inducing drugs).
From two eponyms to a single spectrum diagnosis.
Attitude, authoritarianism and autism: arguments restored
Attitude research defined mid-century social Psychology: relatively stable evaluations of objects, people or issues, measured by Thurstone, Likert and Guttman scales, then linked (uneasily) to behaviour. LaPiere's 1934 Chinese-couple study already showed attitude-behaviour gaps. Festinger's cognitive dissonance (A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, 1957; source once says 1959) made inconsistency a drive. The dual-process era added fast/slow and implicit/explicit splits; the IAT (Greenwald et al. 1998) became famous, then meta-analyses (Oswald 2013; Forscher 2019) found weak behaviour prediction (2026 attitude box).
Authoritarianism. From Frankfurt School studies of Nazism to Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and its F-scale, then Altemeyer's right-wing authoritarianism and Feldman/Stenner's child-rearing items. Core cluster: submission to strong authority, aggression toward sanctioned targets, conventionalism. Criticisms hit ideological one-sidedness and tautology; the construct revived after 2016 populism research.
Attitude research: measurement, the behaviour gap, then dissonance.
Adorno/Altemeyer core of authoritarianism.
From eponyms to spectrum.
Autism. Kanner (1943) and Asperger (1944) described overlapping patterns; DSM-IV (1994) listed Asperger's; DSM-5 (2013) folded it into autism spectrum disorder; ICD-11 followed a single ASD. Czech (2018) and others documented Asperger's Nazi-era context, complicating eponymous honour. Prevalence estimates rose with broader criteria and awareness; the entry's older figures are historical baselines, not current epidemiology. Richards's cross-links (theory of mind, weak central coherence, extreme male brain) mark the cognitive theories that dominated fin-de-siècle research.
Attachment (Bowlby; Ainsworth's Strange Situation: secure, avoidant, resistant/ambivalent; later disorganised) became the developmental lingua franca for early bonds. Aggression entries stress that one word covers argument, brawl, kicked doors and warfare, so single-cause theories struggle. Altruism and kin selection (Hamilton's rule rB > C) sit beside reciprocal altruism and empathy debates.
Behaviour to Bystander Effect
Behaviour and behaviourism
Behaviour as a general word for all activity dates from C. Lloyd Morgan (1900) and was then taken up by J.B. Watson. Behaviourism, launched in Watson's 1913 paper, avoided the difficulties of studying consciousness by restricting science to overt behaviour and the laws linking stimulus and response, with a strong ambition for rigorous experiment and reporting. Richards traces its phases: Watson's founding programme; the neo-behaviourism of Hull, Tolman and Guthrie (1930s to 1950s), with intervening variables and formal theory; and Skinner's radical behaviourism, which rejected inner causes and studied operant behaviour. Cognitive Psychology displaced it from the late 1950s, but its methods and its applied offspring survive.
The phases of behaviourism traced in the entry.
Behaviour therapy applies learning principles to unwanted behaviour. It was promoted in Britain by H.J. Eysenck as a hard-line, scientific alternative to psychoanalysis, and like all such innovations proved suitable for some conditions (phobias) and not others.
Biorhythm to Broca's area
Biorhythms are cyclical biological processes (sleep, alertness, hunger), whose disruption causes jet lag. Bipolar disorder replaced "manic depression" as the name for oscillation between elated hyperactivity and depression; Richards notes it is compatible with high creativity and usually treated with drugs. Blindsight (Weiskrantz 1986): after visual cortex damage, people deny seeing stimuli in the blind field yet point to them accurately, a striking dissociation of awareness and visual guidance.
Borderline personality disorder. DSM-IV defined it as "a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity", diagnosed when five of nine criteria are met. Richards, noting that he meets three, objects that the wording is deceptive and the category elastic. Brainwashing became a popular term after the Korean War (Hunter 1951), when a few US prisoners changed sides; Lifton (1961) remains the classic study, Sargant's Battle for the Mind (1957) the psychiatric one. Broca's area, in the left inferior frontal gyrus, was identified by Paul Broca in 1861 as controlling speech production; comprehension depends on Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe.
The two classic language areas and their aphasias.
Bulimia to Bystander effect
Bulimia is binge-eating, often cycling with anorexia, again most common among women. Bullying became a research topic as public concern grew; Richards links it to the authoritarian personality, ethological pecking order and displaced aggression. Bystander effect. People in groups are less likely to help someone in difficulty. It became famous after the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, "allegedly" witnessed by 38 people who did nothing; Latané and Darley's experiments (1968) then showed that the more bystanders present, the less likely any one is to act (diffusion of responsibility).
Latané and Darley's decision model: more bystanders weaken step three.
Behaviourism's phases and the bystander sequence
Watson (1913) issued the behaviourist manifesto; neo-behaviourists (Hull, Tolman) restored intervening variables; Skinner named radical behaviourism (1945) for his own operant programme. The cognitive turn from the late 1950s ended laboratory dominance without erasing applied behaviour analysis. Broca and Wernicke mapped production and comprehension aphasias onto left-hemisphere areas.
Bystander intervention (Latané and Darley) is a five-step decision tree: notice, interpret as emergency, take responsibility, choose aid, act. More bystanders weaken the responsibility step. Later historical work on the Genovese case (2016 revisions) complicated the founding anecdote without erasing the experimental phenomenon.
Latané and Darley bystander steps; diffusion hits responsibility.
Methodological versus Skinner's radical behaviourism.
Category Mistake to Cyclothymia
Category mistake to Cognitive Psychology
Category mistake. Gilbert Ryle (1949) coined the phrase for ascribing the wrong logical type to a term: a visitor shown the colleges, the Bodleian and the Sheldonian asks "but where is the University?" Ryle argued that Cartesian dualism makes the same error about the mind. Central executive is the component of Baddeley and Hitch's working memory model that regulates and integrates information flow; Richards suspects it is in some respects the cognitivist equivalent of the Ego. Cognition is close to reasoning and thinking, which need not be conscious; the word replaced "thinking" from the late 1950s.
Cognitive Psychology. Inspired by computing and information theory in the 1940s, it began with Kenneth Craik (1943) in Cambridge and became a movement in the United States in the early 1950s, consolidated by Neisser's Cognitive Psychology (1967). Cognitive map was coined by the behaviourist E.C. Tolman (1948) to explain latent learning in rats, and became standard for internal representations of a layout.
Milestones of Cognitive Psychology.
CBT and cognitive dissonance
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) focuses on the present and the behaviour the client wants to change, and on identifying and correcting irrational beliefs (Ellis's "musts" and "shoulds"). Richards notes official backing, especially for short-term therapy in the NHS, and other practitioners' fear that CBT is becoming a panacea and a bandwagon.
Cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger's theory concerns how we handle two contradictory cognitions ("I am an expert climber; I have just fallen off a short ladder"). The founding case was a doomsday sect that, when the world failed to end, intensified its proselytising (When Prophecy Fails, 1956). People reduce dissonance by changing a belief, adding a consonant one or trivialising the conflict.
Cognitive style to Counselling
Cognitive style names consistent ways of approaching problems, unrelated to intelligence: field dependence (Witkin), levelling versus sharpening, and Hudson's convergent and divergent thinking (Contrary Imaginations, 1966), which distinguished focused logical problem-solving from open-ended imagination. Conformity became central in the 1950s, reflecting US anxiety about consumerism and the "organisation man"; Asch's (1951, 1956) line-judgement studies, in which about a third of responses went along with a wrong majority, are the classic case.
Connectionism models cognition with networks of simple units whose connection weights change with experience; Richards roots it in associationist learning theory and notes its break with the idea of a central processor (see PDP, Chapter 16). Content analysis codes texts such as TAT stories or dream reports (Hall and Van de Castle 1966). Counselling began as religious pastoral counselling, drew on psychotherapy from the 1920s and became a profession after Carl Rogers, its borderline with psychotherapy now almost gone.
Hudson's two styles of thinking, independent of IQ.
Culture and Cyclothymia
Culture is indispensable and troublesome: is it superordinate to individuals, the sum of their behaviour, or something they carry inside them? Richards notes the swing from cross-cultural Psychology (testing universals) to cultural Psychology (meaning is constituted by culture). Cyclothymia names alternating mild depressive and elated states, now classed with the bipolar disorders.
| Term | Coined or launched by | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cognitive map | E.C. Tolman | 1948 | Behaviourist origin |
| Category mistake | Gilbert Ryle | 1949 | Against Cartesian dualism |
| Conformity studies | Solomon Asch | 1951 to 1956 | About a third conformed |
| Cognitive dissonance | Leon Festinger | 1957 | Source says 1959 |
| Convergent and divergent thinking | Liam Hudson | 1966 | Two kinds of ability |
| Cognitive Psychology (book) | Ulric Neisser | 1967 | Named the field |
| Working memory, central executive | Baddeley and Hitch | 1974 | Replaced short-term memory |
Table 3. The cognitive vocabulary of the C entries, by date.
Cognitive Psychology's arc and the consciousness problem
Cognitive Psychology named itself with Neisser's 1967 book after information-theory and computer metaphors of the 1950s. Craik's The Nature of Explanation (1943) on internal models is an early landmark; Broadbent, Miller (seven plus or minus two), and Newell and Simon's problem-solving programmes built the kit. Working memory (1974) and levels of processing (1972) became teaching staples. Richards's critical edge: cognitivism reintroduced mind while often keeping behaviourism's individualist, laboratory style.
Consciousness entries track the hard problem and rival research programmes (Global Workspace, Higher-Order Thought, Integrated Information). The Cogitate adversarial collaboration published in Nature (30 April 2025) tested predictions from leading theories with preregistered paradigms; results constrained, rather than crowned, any single account, a model for theory-testing after the replication crisis.
Chalmers's cut that frames rival cognitive theories of consciousness.
Core topics Neisser's naming gathered.
Conditioning, connectionism and constructivism cross-link learning and development. Creativity research split convergent from divergent thinking (Hudson 1966). Culture and cultural Psychology pushed against treating WEIRD samples as human nature.
Deconstruction to EEG
Deconstruction to Development
Deconstruction, from Jacques Derrida, appears in critical and postmodern Psychology for exposing the hidden assumptions of a text. Degenerationism, a core doctrine of eugenics, held that some hereditary lines were declining towards primitive traits; it peaked in the late nineteenth century with a Europe-wide panic, Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892) being the best-known statement. Dementia praecox ("premature dementia") is the obsolete term for schizophrenia, gradually abandoned after 1911 and gone by the 1950s.
Depression is perhaps the most widely diagnosed form of distress; clinical depression differs from sadness in resisting consolation and in its debilitating effects. Richards reports the traditional split into endogenous (unrelated to events) and exogenous (reactive) depression, and the growing reliance on drugs such as Prozac. Development looks innocent, but Burman and Morss argue that "Developmental Psychology" imposes a normative path of progress on children, with deviations treated as deficits.
The traditional division reported in the entry, dropped by DSM-III onward.
Discourse analysis to Drive
Discourse analysis studies spoken and written language as action; it is now a leading qualitative method in social Psychology (Potter and Wetherell 1987), applied to everything from interviews to scientific papers. Displacement activity, from ethology, is behaviour released when an instinct's normal outlet is blocked: the person who works obsessively to avoid home, or bullies a partner instead of the boss. Dissociation is a split between psychological systems that run independently, best known from multiple personality. Double bind (Bateson 1956) is a no-win communication, as when a parent says "come here, I love you" while stiffening at the child's approach; it became a theory of schizophrenia's family origins in anti-psychiatry. Drive replaced instinct in the 1930s as energy directed at satisfying a need.
DSM
DSM. The American Psychiatric Association's manual defines and classifies all mental disorders. The first edition appeared in 1952; the book reports DSM-IV (1994, text revision 2000) and "DSM V planned for 2012". Each edition reflects scientific change and social pressure: homosexuality was dropped from a DSM-II reprint in 1973 after gay activism. Richards stresses that the DSM enshrines a medical model in which disorders are discrete conditions, which is exactly what anti-psychiatry rebelled against.
Seventy years of the DSM; the book stops at DSM-IV-TR.
| Edition | Year | Categories (approx.) | Key change |
|---|---|---|---|
| DSM-I | 1952 | 106 | Psychodynamic "reactions" |
| DSM-II | 1968 | 182 | Homosexuality removed in 1973 reprint |
| DSM-III | 1980 | 265 | Explicit criteria; PTSD, ADD added; neurosis dropped |
| DSM-IV / IV-TR | 1994 / 2000 | 297 | Clinical significance criterion; Asperger's added |
| DSM-5 | 2013 | about 300 | Autism spectrum; multiaxial system dropped |
| DSM-5-TR | 2022 | about 300 | Prolonged grief disorder; text and code updates |
Table 4. Seven decades of the DSM (category counts are commonly cited approximations).
Dualism to EEG
Dualism posits two separate entities, usually mind and body; now rarely defended, though the neurologist John Eccles held to it (Popper and Eccles 1981). Dyslexia (better "the dyslexias") covers varied problems with written language: confusing p, d, b, q, sequencing letters, homophones, and visually tracking text. Richards stresses that dyslexia is unrelated to intelligence. Dyspraxia is motor clumsiness of neurological origin, acquired or developmental (developmental coordination disorder).
EEG. The electroencephalograph records the brain's electrical activity from the scalp. It was pioneered from 1929 by the German psychiatrist Hans Berger and confirmed in 1934 by Adrian and Matthews in Cambridge, after which it spread rapidly; the alpha rhythm was long called the Berger rhythm.
The varied problems grouped under dyslexia.
Diagnosis, dualism and the DSM staircase
Depression once split endogenous from reactive; DSM-III onward dropped that cut for symptom clusters and episode rules. Dissociation and DID cross-refer the MPD dating error (1994, not 2000). Drive bridged instinct and motivation in Hullian theory. Dualism remains the default folk ontology Descartes made philosophical. Dyslexia is plural in the book ("the dyslexias"): visual confusions, sequencing, homophones, tracking.
The DSM staircase in the chapter diagram runs DSM-I (1952) through DSM-5-TR (2022).
How diagnosis moved from endogenous/reactive cuts to rule-based clusters.
Pre-DSM-III depression cut.
Ecological Psychology to Extrinsic vs Intrinsic
Ecological Psychology to Encounter groups
Ecological Psychology, rooted in J.J. Gibson's theory of direct perception, emerged in the USA in the early 1980s as an alternative to Cognitive Psychology, stressing the dynamic interplay of knower and environment and the affordances objects offer for action. Empathy is putting oneself in another's place; it matters for relationships and altruism. Empiricism holds that knowledge comes from experience, and in the British School from Locke's Essay (1690) to James Mill it was tied to associationism. Encounter groups, from Carl Rogers's humanistic Psychology, offered intensive, supportive self-exploration for therapy and personal growth, peaking in the late 1960s.
Emotion
Emotion. Richards notes two biases in Psychology's treatment: a focus on a few extreme emotions (fear, hate, love) at the expense of everyday ones such as mild boredom or contentment, and acceptance of the old opposition of emotion and reason (Hume's "reason is the slave of the passions"), so that emotions appear as irrational interruptions. Yet we are always in some emotional state, and emotions give life its point. Darwin's Expression of the Emotions (1872) began the evolutionary approach.
James-Lange reverses the common-sense order of feeling and bodily response.
James-Lange theory: we do not run because we are afraid; we are afraid because we run. Emotion is the perception of bodily change. Richards finds it more plausible than it first sounds (we may discover how upset we are only when we burst into tears), though Walter Cannon's animal experiments of the 1920s were long held to refute it. McDougall's theory (Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908) paired 11 primary instincts with emotions (16 by 1936), organised into sentiments (Shand's term). Later landmarks: Arnold's overview (1960), Schachter and Singer's two-factor experiment (1962), Ekman's cross-cultural work on six to ten basic emotions, and emotional intelligence from the mid-1990s.
| Theory | Sequence | Key evidence or claim |
|---|---|---|
| Common sense | Event, emotion, bodily response | We cry because we are sad |
| James-Lange (1884 to 1890) | Event, bodily response, emotion | Emotion is the feeling of bodily change |
| Cannon-Bard (1927 to 1929) | Event, thalamus, emotion and response together | Visceral changes too slow and undifferentiated |
| Schachter-Singer (1962) | Arousal plus cognitive label | Adrenaline injection studies |
| Basic emotions (Ekman) | Innate affect programmes | Cross-cultural face recognition |
| Constructed emotion (Barrett 2017) | Brain predicts and categorises interoception | Variable physiology within categories |
Table 5. Theories of emotion, from the book's classics to the current debate.
Epiphenomenalism to ESP
Epiphenomenalism: T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall in the 1870s argued that consciousness is a side-effect of physiology, like a steam engine's whistle, with no effect on the body, causing uproar. Ergonomics emerged from British applied Psychology in the 1950s (K.F.H. Murrell coined the word in 1949). ESP (extrasensory perception) is the paranormal acquisition of information; telepathy was tested by having a hidden sender view cards from a special set while the receiver guessed. Results, Richards says, mingle significant and non-significant findings tantalisingly, and he warns undergraduates off ESP projects because the methodological standards required are so stringent.
Ethnocentrism to Evolutionary Psychology
Ethnocentrism is judging other groups by the standards of one's own, problematic when those standards are taken as natural or superior, and often unwitting. Ethology, the study of animal behaviour in natural settings (Lorenz, Tinbergen), gave Psychology imprinting, the innate releasing mechanism, the pecking order and territoriality. Eugenics was coined by Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, for improving human "stock" by selective breeding; it spread widely, including into Psychology through intelligence testing, before Nazi policies discredited it.
The four ethological sub-entries.
Evolutionary Psychology emerged in the late 1980s from sociobiology (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, The Adapted Mind). Richards gives four criticisms: its explanations specify distant parameters rather than causes of particular acts; their practical use is unclear and may excuse inaction; knowing an evolved bias might free us from it (the stepparent example); and it sits in tension with feminist and social constructionist Psychology. His final point: unlike its precursors, it explains present cultural concerns in speculative sociobiological terms.
Existentialism to Extrinsic vs intrinsic
Existentialism, mainly French (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus) and drawing on Husserl and Heidegger, influenced existential psychotherapy (Laing, May). Experimenter effects: research with humans is social, and Rosenthal (1966) showed experimenters unwittingly cue the results they expect; participants seek clues (demand characteristics). Richards concludes that no participant represents all humanity, that only cautious generalisations are possible, and that meta-analysis helps but "pure replication is rare in Psychology beyond psychophysics".
Extraversion and introversion were introduced by Jung as orientations of interest outward or inward, and made measurable by Eysenck (Maudsley and Eysenck Personality Inventories), who proposed that introverts are more easily aroused.
From Jung's orientations to Eysenck's measured dimension.
Emotion: history, James-Lange, McDougall and the everyday gap
Emotion is central and hard. Major emotions are named similarly across cultures, yet a category "emotion" itself is not universal. The English word took its modern sense from the mid-eighteenth century: Lord Kames (1762) and Thomas Brown (1820) (Dixon 2006). Before that, passions was the usual word. Etymologically they pull opposite ways: emotion once meant outward movement; passion meant something endured (as in Christ's Passion). By the early nineteenth century passion meant unusually intense emotion.
Modern theories arrived from evolutionary, psychoanalytic, behaviourist and psychophysiological frames, so by century's end many "theories of emotion" competed. Two shared habits: focus on extreme states (fear, hate, depression, love) while saying little about mild boredom, contentment, slight irritation or envy; and an often implicit acceptance of Hume's line that reason is the slave of the passions. Richards counters that we are always in some emotional state, even quiet resignation, and that a calculatedly unemotional manner still communicates cold repression. Emotions give life meaning, yet Psychology often treats them as irrational interruptions.
Darwin (Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872) set an evolutionary frame. James-Lange: independently, William James (Principles, 1890, ch. 25) and Carl Lange argued that emotion follows bodily reaction: we are afraid because we find ourselves running, sad because we weep. Everyday experience can make this plausible (tears reveal how upset one was; shaking after a mild car knock). A long consensus held that Walter Cannon's 1920s animal work (Cannon 1929) had falsified James-Lange; later appraisal and constructionist work reopened the body-first debate. The book mislabels Lange a "German philosopher" (he was Danish) and Schachter-Singer as "cognitive appraisal theory"
Emotion theories from Darwin through basic emotions to constructionism.
Richards's gap: extremes studied, ordinary affect ignored.
Schachter-Singer two-factor sketch.
McDougall (Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908), one of the most successful Psychology textbooks, paired instincts with emotions: 11 primary pairs, raised to 16 by 1936, combining into complex emotions and into sentiments (Shand's term) organised around classes of object. Magda Arnold (1960) surveyed the mid-century field. Schachter and Singer (1962) made arousal-plus-label the two-factor model. Basic-emotion counts now usually sit between six and ten; Ekman's cross-cultural face work (e.g. 1980) drove the universality claim that Barrett's constructionist programme later challenged (2026 emotion box).
Factor Analysis to Functionalism
Factor analysis to False consciousness
Factor analysis identifies the number of factors underlying the variance in a set of correlations. It was devised by Charles Spearman (1904) for his intelligence data, adopted by Cyril Burt (who later contested Spearman's priority) and refined by Thurstone and others. It underpins personality and intelligence research, from Spearman's g to the Big Five. Faculty Psychology divided the mind into faculties such as will and memory, a view rejected by the associationists. False consciousness, a Marxist concept, is a distorted understanding of society and one's place in it produced by class position.
Spearman's hierarchy of factors in intelligence.
False memory syndrome
False memory syndrome (FMS). Richards calls it one of the most controversial topics of recent decades. The expansion of psychotherapy after 1970, and a sharp rise in multiple personality diagnoses, led many people to "recover" forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse in therapy. Parents were accused, court cases followed, and some memories proved false; therapists were accused of colluding in a folie à deux. False Memory Syndrome Foundations formed on both sides of the Atlantic. Richards insists that the issue is not whether false memories occur or forgotten memories return (both do) but the credibility of a sub-category recovered in therapy, which must be judged case by case.
Family therapy to Folk psychology
Family therapy treats the family as a whole, the "identified" patient's problems being treated as symptoms of family dynamics (Minuchin, Palazzoli, systemic therapy). Fatigue was a major research topic in industrial Psychology from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, driven by productivity and by an energy model of the mind; it faded as both lost relevance. Fear of failure emerged in 1960s achievement research; fear of strangers is the infant phase linked to attachment. Feeling survives mainly as one of Jung's four functions. Field dependency (Witkin's rod-and-frame tests) is the extent to which perception is swayed by the surrounding visual field. Flicker fusion is the rate at which flicker appears continuous.
Folk psychology means the psychological beliefs of the general public. Richards uses it to show his Psychology/psychology ambiguity: as theory it is Psychology, as an expression of people's psychological character it is psychology. Philosophers (Churchland) have argued that folk psychology is a failed theory to be eliminated by neuroscience; others defend it as indispensable.
Frustration and Functionalism
Frustration is the state of being blocked from a goal, marked by arousal and irritability and often by displaced aggression, whether in personal relations or "assembling a wardrobe from IKEA". The frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard et al. 1939) made the link a law, later softened. Functionalism is a "weasel word of the first order". Richards separates the mathematical sense (a function relating two variables), the Chicago and Columbia functionalist schools (adaptive purpose of mental processes), and functionalism in philosophy of mind (mental states defined by their causal role), plus anthropological and sociological functionalism.
Four senses of a 'weasel word of the first order'.
Factor analysis, false memory and functionalism's many faces
Factor analysis (Spearman onward) extracts latent dimensions from test correlations; g, group factors and specifics are the classic hierarchy. False memory and false memory syndrome debates of the 1990s tied therapy practice to courtroom risk; Loftus's misinformation work is the experimental spine. Festinger (1957) made dissonance a drive; a 2024 Registered Report line continues to test classic paradigms under modern controls.
Functionalism is Richards's "weasel word": mathematical function; Chicago/Columbia schools; philosophy-of-mind functionalism; anthropological/sociological functionalism. Readers must disambiguate by context. Free will versus determinism appears whenever responsibility and therapy goals meet mechanism talk.
Richards's four-way split of a weasel word.
Two research paths into false memory.
Game Theory to Growth Movement
Game theory and Gestalt Psychology
Game theory, the mathematics of strategic choice led by John von Neumann and John Nash, came to the fore in the 1950s, was used in Cold War strategy and gave social Psychology experimental games such as the Prisoner's Dilemma (Chapter 16). Gestalt Psychology, centred on Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967), held that perception is organised into wholes (figure and ground, proximity, similarity, closure, Prägnanz) and cannot be built up from sensations. It flourished in Germany until the early 1930s and then, in exile, in the United States, and it shaped perception research, problem-solving (Köhler's insight in chimpanzees) and Lewin's field theory.
Grouping principles: the whole is perceived before its parts.
Gestalt arc from phi phenomenon to insight learning.
Group therapy and the Growth movement
Group therapy is credited by the book to W.R. Bion, working with hospitalised soldiers in the 1940s, whose groups addressed problems collectively and anticipated encounter groups. The growth movement names the many therapies that blossomed in the US (and less so in Britain) in the 1960s and early 1970s: humanistic Psychology (Maslow, Rogers), Gestalt therapy (Perls), transactional analysis, primal therapy and the Esalen Institute; Richards sees them as sharing optimism about self-actualisation and suspicion of medical models.
Halo Effect to Hysteria
Halo effect to Humanistic Psychology
Halo effect: one good trait colours judgements of others; first named by E.L. Thorndike in 1920 from officers' ratings of soldiers. Handedness follows from lateralisation: about a tenth of people are left-handed, slightly more often males; Richards notes the circularity of explaining handedness by "hemispheric dominance" when handedness is the main sign of dominance. Hedonic tone is jargon for pleasantness. Hormic Psychology was William McDougall's purposive, instinct-based system; he attracted no followers. Humanistic Psychology (Maslow and Rogers, 1950s) took a holistic, compassionate and non-medical approach, the "third force" after behaviourism and psychoanalysis.
The long-running dispute over what hypnosis is.
Hypnagogia and Hypnosis
Hypnagogia is the drowsy state at sleep onset, with vivid imagery that meditators and mystics have prized. Hypnosis runs from Franz Mesmer's "animal magnetism" (discredited by the 1840s) through James Braid's coinage of "hypnotism" (1843) and the Nancy School's theory of suggestion, to modern research by E.R. Hilgard at Stanford. Its mechanism remains disputed: an altered state (Hilgard's "hidden observer"), or social role-taking and expectation (the sociocognitive view).
Hypothetical construct and Hysteria
Hypothetical construct: a concept for a process whose existence cannot be shown directly but which theory seems to need (intelligence, drive, memory trace). MacCorquodale and Meehl (1948) distinguished it from the intervening variable, which is defined purely by its measurements. Hysteria, from the Greek for uterus, was long thought an exclusively female condition caused by a "wandering" womb, with wild, emotional symptoms and physical complaints without lesion. Charcot, Janet, Breuer and Freud made it the starting point of modern psychotherapy, and Richards notes its decline through the twentieth century.
| Period | Name | Theory |
|---|---|---|
| Antiquity | Hysteria | Wandering uterus |
| 1880s to 1900s | Hysteria (Charcot, Freud) | Neurological weakness; repressed trauma |
| DSM-III (1980) | Conversion disorder; somatisation disorder | Psychological conflict converted to symptom |
| DSM-5 (2013) | Functional neurological symptom disorder | Symptoms incompatible with recognised disease |
| ICD-11 (2022) | Dissociative neurological symptom disorder | Dissociation of function |
Table 6. The renaming of hysteria.
Hypnosis, heritability and the humanistic offer
Hypnosis splits altered-state accounts (Hilgard's neodissociation) from sociocognitive role accounts; both explain analgesia and suggestion data differently. Heritability is a population statistic, not a personal percentage; twin and adoption designs estimate it, with all the shared-environment and assumption fights that follow. Humanistic Psychology (Rogers, Maslow) offered growth and unconditional positive regard against drive and contingency models. Handedness entries note twin concordance figures the A closer look already qualifies.
Hilgard versus role accounts of hypnotic phenomena.
Humanistic Psychology against drive models.
Idealism to Introspection
Idealism to Imitation
Idealism in philosophy asserts the primacy of mind (Berkeley, Hegel). Identification is believing another's character so close to one's own that one shares their situation, beyond mere empathy. Identity raises the question whether we have an enduring "I" or a self in flux. Idiographic and nomothetic are Allport's (1937) terms for studying the unique individual (case studies) versus seeking general laws across people. Imagery dates to Galton's (1883) survey of mental images for numbers and days; ability varies enormously, and imagery aids memory (a parrot blowing a trumpet links two words). Imitation is overt copying without necessarily any insight into the other.
Implicit personality theory to Instinct
Implicit personality theory (from the 1970s) refers to everyone's lay assumptions about which traits go together. Individual Psychology, the third early dynamic school, was founded by Alfred Adler (1870-1937) after his split from Freud in 1911: inferiority feelings, striving for superiority, social interest and birth order. Information processing entered Psychology in the late 1950s with information theory and computing. Inhibition has a long history (Smith 1992), from a hierarchical image of reason restraining lower impulses to neural inhibition. Inspection time is the exposure needed to discriminate a stimulus, correlating modestly with IQ. Instinct dominated until about 1920 (James, McDougall 1908) before behaviourism attacked it as circular, ethology (Tinbergen 1951) later reviving a refined version.
The 'tortuous career' of instinct.
Intelligence
Intelligence is hard to define rigorously: it spans mathematics, social situations, machines and crosswords. Richards traces the history: Galton's "natural ability"; Spearman's statistical studies and general intelligence, g; and Binet and Simon's test in France, to which all IQ tests trace their origins. Universal education created the demand for a scale applicable to every child. IQ was first the ratio of mental to chronological age, later replaced by standard deviations from population norms with a mean of 100. The US Army's group tests of 1917 enabled mass testing, and a long debate followed over general versus multiple abilities.
Later shifts. Klineberg (1928) challenged speed as an index of intelligence; by the 1940s tests produced ability profiles; Porteus devised a social rating scale; and from the 1980s emotional and social intelligence, and Sternberg's Metaphors of Mind (1990), signalled the decline of the old IQ paradigm. Richards notes that intelligence has always been entangled with "race" differences, gender, the nature-nurture debate and the social role of Psychology.
| Year | Development | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 1869 | Hereditary Genius; "natural ability" | Galton |
| 1890 | "Mental tests" coined | James McKeen Cattell |
| 1904 | General intelligence (g) by factor analysis | Spearman |
| 1905 | First practical intelligence scale | Binet and Simon |
| 1912 to 1916 | Intelligence quotient; ratio times 100 | Stern; Terman (Stanford-Binet) |
| 1917 | Army Alpha and Beta group tests | Yerkes and colleagues |
| 1939 | Deviation IQ (mean 100) | Wechsler |
| 1983 to 1995 | Multiple; emotional (EQ) | Gardner; Goleman |
Table 7. Milestones in intelligence testing.
Intentionality to Introspection
Intentionality means "having intentions", and in AI raises whether a computer can genuinely intend (Searle's Chinese room); intensionality is the logical feature of contexts where co-referring terms cannot be swapped. Interpersonal attraction became a US social Psychology topic in the 1960s: proximity, similarity and physical attractiveness predict liking. Introspection became a technical method when Wundt (1832-1920) used trained self-observation under controlled conditions; the Würzburg imageless-thought dispute and behaviourism's attack undermined it, but self-report never disappeared, and Richards argues that all Psychology ultimately relies on it.
The rise and fall and partial return of introspection.
Intelligence: definition trouble, IQ history and the g debate
Intelligence resists rigorous definition: reasoning and problem-solving span maths, social handling, machines, crosswords and Sudoku. Galton ("natural ability") and, as the book wrongly says, "the American Raymond B. Cattell" began late-nineteenth-century study, that was James McKeen Cattell (A closer look). Spearman brought factor analysis; Binet and Simon produced the first test in 1905 (source: 1904, the ministry commission year). Universal schooling created demand for a scale for all children; IQ tests were Psychology's answer. They tracked academic reasoning and long ignored social and emotional intelligence.
Early IQ was the ratio of mental age (MA) to chronological age (CA; source once writes "MCA"). The ratio fails for ages much over 15, so norms in standard deviations replaced it. Wilhelm Stern (1912) proposed the ratio; defining MA=CA as 100 and multiplying by 100 was Terman's Stanford-Binet step (1916), not Stern's alone. Mean 100 has stuck. One-to-one Binet testing was slow; when the US entered World War I in 1917, co-opted psychologists built the first group intelligence tests for conscripts.
IQ's early institutional path.
The statistical fight over intelligence's structure.
Widening what counts as intelligence.
1920s-30s controversy: Spearman’s g (general intelligence) versus multiple abilities (verbal, mathematical, spatial) that need separate assessment, a fight over factor-analytic method. Otto Klineberg (1928) challenged speed-over-accuracy scoring after finding some Native American groups slower but more accurate. By the late 1940s education used ability profiles plus a composite IQ, still limited to formal reasoning, and many defined intelligence operationally as "what intelligence tests measure". S.D. Porteus in the early 1920s built a social sufficiency rating he preferred to IQ for "subnormal" children. From the 1980s, emotional and social intelligence and convergent/divergent thinking complicated the picture. Piagetian developmentalists worked outside easy quantification. Sternberg's Metaphors of Mind (1990) marked declining IQ-paradigm dominance; creativity, emotional, social and even "spiritual" intelligence entered the agenda. Race and gender difference debates have clung to the topic since early in the century, the entry's warning, not an endorsement.
Just World Belief
Just world belief
Just world belief is deeply rooted in many cultures, often in religious form: injustices are balanced after death or in a later incarnation (the law of karma). Applied to this world, good events become rewards and bad ones punishments. The belief can lead to victim-blaming and withheld sympathy; more positively, creating a just world can be an aspirational goal. In Psychology the idea emerged in 1950s social Psychology and was developed by Melvin Lerner (Lerner and Simmons 1966; Lerner 1980). The broad consensus, Richards says, is that the belief is false, at least for this world.
How just world belief produces victim-blaming.
Kin Selection and Kinesics
Kin selection
Kin selection, introduced by W.D. Hamilton (1964), is the theory that organisms behave so as to favour the survival of close relatives, who share their genes; the more distant the relationship, the less likely is altruism. Hamilton's rule states that helping evolves when the benefit to the recipient, weighted by relatedness, exceeds the cost to the helper (rB > C). Richards accepts the ethological evidence for other species but calls its application to humans controversial.
Hamilton's rule, the core of kin selection.
Kinesics
Kinesics, named and pioneered by the anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell (1952, 1970), studies expressive and communicative movement of body and face. Richards notes that it failed to become a flourishing field, and that there is remarkably little work on the Psychology of dancing, despite its near-universality. Its concerns passed into research on non-verbal communication (Chapter 14).
Language Acquisition Device to Locus of Control
Language acquisition device to Leadership
Language acquisition device (LAD). Noam Chomsky (1957, 1965) hypothesised an innate mechanism to explain why children acquire language so fast, from limited and imperfect input (the poverty of the stimulus), and why their errors ("goed", "mouses") show rule use that imitation and reinforcement cannot explain. Lateralisation of function: since Broca in the 1860s it has been known that the hemispheres differ; in right-handers the left typically controls language and the right spatial and some emotional processing. Split-brain studies (Sperry, Gazzaniga) made this famous, and Richards warns against popular "left brain/right brain" personality myths. Leadership was a mid-century social Psychology topic (Lewin, Lippitt and White on autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire styles).
Learning and learning theory
Learning theory began with Thorndike's cats escaping from puzzle boxes (1898), was boosted by behaviourism and by Pavlov's conditioning of salivation, and dominated American experimental Psychology to the early 1960s. It suited animal research (the white rat), avoided mentalistic concepts, and seemed the most fundamental topic of all. After Watson came neo-behaviourists (Guthrie, Tolman, Skinner, Hilgard and, most ambitious, Clark Hull), continued by Spence and Estes, until the cognitive revolution, ethology and Chomsky's critique ended its dominance.
The two conditioning paradigms at the heart of learning theory.
| Schedule | Rule | Typical pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous | Every response reinforced | Fast learning, fast extinction |
| Fixed ratio (FR) | Every nth response (e.g. every 5th) | High rate, pause after reward |
| Variable ratio (VR) | On average every nth response | Very high, steady rate (gambling) |
| Fixed interval (FI) | First response after a set time | Scalloped: slow, then rising |
| Variable interval (VI) | First response after a varying time | Moderate, steady rate |
Table 8. Reinforcement schedules in standard (Ferster and Skinner 1957) terms.
Learning difficulties to Limen
Learning difficulties. Richards traces the search for respectful names for people of very low ability: "moron" was coined by H.H. Goddard (1910) as a technical term, then became an insult, followed by mental handicap, learning disability and learning difficulties, each in turn stigmatised. Level of aspiration (Lewin, Hoppe) measures the target people set themselves against past performance. Levels of processing (Craik and Lockhart 1972): deeper, more meaningful processing produces better memory than shallow processing of sound or appearance. Limen is a threshold, below which the possibility of subliminal response arises.
Lobotomy to Locus of control
The rise and fall of lobotomy.
Learning theory: every sub-entry
Learning theory rose from Thorndike's puzzle-box cats (1898), Pavlov's salivation work, and Watson's behaviourism; it dominated US experimental Psychology into the early 1960s because it suited the white rat, banned mentalism, and looked foundational. Neo-behaviourists (Guthrie, Tolman, Skinner, Hilgard, Hull, then Spence and Estes) algebraised many of the terms below. Chomsky, ethology and the cognitive turn ended the hegemony.
Avoidance learning is anticipatory: once learned, the organism avoids before the aversive stimulus appears. Conditioning has two forms. Classical (Pavlov): UCS (food) elicits UCR (salivation); pair CS (bell) with UCS until CS alone yields CR. Operant (Skinner): a response (bar press) is followed by reinforcement. Mid-1950s work showed chains of CRs cannot build language or piano arpeggios, and some stimulus-response pairings are counter-prepared. Pavlov's Russian term meant "conditional", not "conditioned". Contiguity (proximity in space or time) is Guthrie's (1935; final 1952) sole associative principle, echoing James Mill.
Experimental neurosis (Gantt 1944): dogs facing unavoidable shock become "neurotic" and stop trying even when escape later becomes possible. Extinction is loss of a learned response when reinforcement stops, turns negative, or the CS repeats without the UCS; extinction is slower after intermittent reinforcement. Habit formation is near Thorndike's law of exercise: responses so automatic they appear even when inappropriate; applied work aims to install good habits and extinguish bad ones (aversion therapy, sport). Habituation is not extinction: response (even perception) fades to a constant inconsequential stimulus (waterfall neighbours; high-girder workers).
Learning theory's rise and eclipse.
Ferster and Skinner schedules (source mislabels FI/FR).
Two images of how learning happens.
Insight learning (Köhler): chimpanzees suddenly use a stick or stack boxes for bananas, with little prior trial and error, hard for associative-chain accounts. Latent learning (Tolman): rats that wandered a maze later learn the rewarded route faster; evidence for cognitive maps. Law of effect (outcome raises or lowers recurrence) and law of exercise (repetition strengthens), stated after Thorndike 1898; he later retreated on exercise. A third "law of readiness" got little uptake.
Learned helplessness (Seligman, late 1960s; Helplessness line culminating in the 1991 book): when responses and outcomes are unrelated, organisms stop trying; offered as a model of depression ("Yes, but…" to every suggestion). Learning curve graphs acquisition rate; everyday "steep learning curve" means rapid required learning. Maze-learning dominated animal work c.1910-1960; complex mazes gave way to the simple T-maze. One-trial learning is common with strong negative reinforcement (one punishment suffices) and can occur with powerful simple rewards.
Operant conditioning reinforces after the organism's operation; classical pairs stimuli while the organism is more passive. A reflex is automatic, usually biological (salivation to food; eyebrow flash to shock); conditioned reflex is sometimes preferred to conditioned response. Reinforcement is positive when it raises recurrence ("rewarding") and negative when it lowers it ("punishing"); note that modern usage often reserves "negative reinforcement" for removal of an aversive stimulus that increases behaviour, a terminology drift the entry does not mark. Reinforcement schedules in the book are mislabelled (A closer look; Table 8 above gives Ferster and Skinner 1957 standards: continuous, FR, VR, FI, VI).
Response is any behaviour to a stimulus (boundaries blur at long-term life choices). Stimulus is any detectable input the theory treats as causal. Stimulus generalisation: similar stimuli elicit the CR (a tone near the training frequency). Trial and error learning (Thorndike): gradual stamping-in of successful acts, the foil to Köhler's insight.
| Concept | Who / when | Claim |
|---|---|---|
| Law of effect | Thorndike c.1898 | Outcomes stamp behaviour in or out |
| Classical CR | Pavlov | CS-UCS pairing transfers the reflex |
| Operant | Skinner | Consequences shape emitted behaviour |
| Latent learning | Tolman | Learning without current reinforcement |
| Insight | Köhler | Sudden solution without gradual chaining |
| Helplessness | Seligman late 1960s | Uncontrollable outcomes → quit trying |
| Contiguity | Guthrie 1935 | S-R links by mere pairing |
Table L1. Core learning-theory moves and their signatures.
Male Gaze to Mutualism
Male gaze to Metacognition
Male gaze, from the film theorist Laura Mulvey (1975), was taken up by feminist psychologists (Morawski and Steele 1991) for the implicit assumption that the reader or viewer is male. Mania is extreme, irrational activity, as in "manic depression", now bipolar disorder. Materialism in the mind-body sense rejects anything but material processes. Matriarchy was once theorised as an early stage of all societies (Bachofen), a view now discarded. Metacognition, "thinking about thinking", concerns how well we monitor our own knowledge, as in the feeling of knowing.
Memory
Memory has been studied since antiquity (St Augustine's Confessions, Book X), through metaphors of container and inscription (Draaisma 2000). Modern Psychology distinguishes many types. Richards notes that memory and learning, though overlapping, were studied by separate traditions by historical accident, that information theory made memory central to Cognitive Psychology in the 1960s, and that brain scanning now lets researchers "watch" memory at work. He recommends Baddeley as the leading British authority.
The standard memory systems behind the Memory essay's sub-entries.
| Sub-entry | Definition (compressed) | Key name |
|---|---|---|
| Episodic | Memory for personal events in time and place | Tulving 1972 |
| Semantic | General knowledge and word meaning | Tulving 1972 |
| Procedural | Skills: knowing how | Cohen and Squire 1980 |
| Implicit | Knowledge shown in behaviour without awareness | Schacter 1987 |
| Flashbulb | Vivid memory of hearing dramatic news | Brown and Kulik 1977 |
| Eyewitness testimony | Courtroom memory; confidence often unrelated to accuracy | Loftus |
| Collective | Socially shared remembering | Halbwachs; Middleton and Edwards 1990 |
| Eidetic | Near-photographic retention of images | Rare in adults |
Table 9. Selected sub-entries of the Memory essay.
Flashbulb memories of hearing dramatic news (Kennedy's assassination, Princess Diana's death, 9/11) feel vivid but are often inaccurate; Richards admits that he and his wife "forever disagree" about who first heard the 9/11 news on a shop radio. Eyewitness testimony became a major topic in the 1980s: children are poorer on detail but as reliable overall, everyone is weak at unfamiliar faces, and a witness's certainty is often unrelated to accuracy. Forgetting may be failed access rather than loss. Memory improvement draws on imagery (a badger wearing a hat) and the techniques of stage mnemonists.
Mind-body problem to Moral development
Mind-body problem: how mind and body relate. Descartes' dualism (1641) launched the modern debate; the cross-referenced positions are dualism, epiphenomenalism, idealism, materialism, neutral monism and parallelism. Monism covers both idealism and materialism. Mood is a diffuse emotional state, not directed at anything. Moral development: Piaget (1932), extended by Lawrence Kohlberg into six stages in three levels (pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional). Carol Gilligan (1982) criticised it as male-centred, neglecting an ethic of care; Hoffman stressed empathy. Richards notes that defining moral maturity forces Psychology into philosophy.
The positions cross-referenced from the Mind-Body entry.
Morale to Mutualism
Morale is a group's overall mood: confidence and cohesion when high, bickering and paralysis when low. Motivation came into use from the 1930s as a general term for whatever drives behaviour; Danziger (1997) argues it served as a theoretically neutral replacement for instinct and will. Multiple personality disorder describes several "alters" who may be unaware of each other. Mutualism (Ingold, Good and Still, Costall), rooted in Gibson and pragmatism, treats organism and environment as a single system.
Memory systems in full: amnesia to working memory
Richards treats the Memory essay as a working catalogue, not a settled taxonomy. The sub-entries below restore the arguments, numbers, names and anecdotes the compressed chapter left out.
Amnesia is an umbrella for loss after disease or accident. Baddeley (1990) lists post-traumatic, retrograde (loss for the period before the insult) and anterograde (inability to form new memories). Any of these can strike any of the systems below. The study of amnesia grew as scanning made lesions visible, so clinical cases became the field's main natural experiments.
Auditory memory now splits three ways. Echoic memory lasts perhaps 300 milliseconds at the sensory level. Auditory short-term memory holds accurate sound for up to about 20 seconds. Auditory long-term memory is the durable recognition of voices, music and distinctive sounds, most striking in professional musicians and conductors.
Autobiographical memory is sensory replay of one's own life, not mere knowledge that an event occurred (birth is known as a fact, not remembered as experience). Reliability is often low and usually falls further as a memory is rehearsed. It sits close to episodic, flashbulb and, in some people, eidetic memory.
Collective memory is not strictly technical, yet it matters because remembering is often social. Reminiscing, photographs, music and public ritual (Remembrance Day, national sporting myth) shape what a group "recalls". Wars and disasters yield a shared atmosphere that can diverge from what any one person lived through, especially once mass media retell the event. Social constructionists (Middleton and Edwards 1990; Wyer 1995) use the topic to offset laboratory individualism. Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) coined the phrase in 1925; his On Collective Memory is most accessible in the 1992 edition.
Halbwachs's insight: remembering is often social.
Eidetic ("photographic") memory is the retention of a detailed, sometimes scannable visual image. Ability varies widely; many adults have none. Mnemonists exploit it; A.R. Luria's The Mind of the Mnemonist (1969) is the classic case study. Episodic memory (Tulving) is recall of events in time and place, needed for first acquisition of skills (tying shoes) even when the learning episode is later forgotten. It differs from semantic memory for facts and from procedural "knowing how".
Eyewitness testimony became a major forensic topic in the 1980s, first around children's evidence. Children are poorer on detail yet as reliable overall as adults. Both ages are weak at judging speed and duration, and at recognising unfamiliar faces. Stereotyping and the usual autobiographical distortions apply.
Facial recognition is highly specialised relative to ordinary object recognition, almost certainly because social life depends on knowing individuals and reading expressions. Own-group faces are easier than other-ethnicity faces; Richards expects the gap to shrink as multiethnic faces become routine. Bruce and Young (1998) remain the standard reference. False memory is autobiographical memory of events that did not occur (see also false memory syndrome under F).
Flashbulb memory (Brown and Kulik 1977) is the vivid "where I was when I heard" recollection of dramatic news: Kennedy's assassination as the older canonical case, later Princess Diana's death and 9/11. Apparent minute accuracy is partly illusory. Richards's own anecdote: he and his wife "forever disagree" about who first heard the 9/11 news on a shop radio. One moral he draws is never to insist on memory's accuracy too dogmatically.
Forgetting is studied as more than the reverse of remembering. Three live questions: whether material is truly erased or only inaccessible; whether forgetting can be active ("motivated forgetting", linking to psychoanalytic repression); and where in an information-processing system different kinds of forgetting occur. Total recall would be oppressive, and old memories can interfere with new, only partly similar situations.
Forgetting as failed retrieval versus motivated exclusion.
Implicit memory is knowledge acquired without awareness and often used without awareness: how to open doors, or a culturally specific greeting taken as "natural". Long-term memory (LTM / LTS) is the relatively permanent store, subdivided by content (auditory, visual, autobiographical, semantic and more). Its overall organisation remains unclear given the diversity of contents and their links.
Memory improvement was long left to commercial trainers (early twentieth-century Pelmanism was one successful course). Stage techniques now get more research attention: pair "badger" with "hat" by imagining a badger wearing a hat. Classical and Renaissance scholars used the method of loci, linking items to places in a familiar building (Yates 1966). Current applied work targets older adults and people with ADHD. Mnemonics usually means first-letter sentences ("men very easily made jugs serve useful needs prettily" for the old nine-planet order from the Sun), and sometimes the imagery methods above. Richards notes the mnemonic still includes Pluto and jokes that inserting "all" before "jugs" would cover the asteroid belt.
Organic memory, now rare, named supposed physiological storage that might even become hereditary and unconscious; Semon ([1904] 1921) was its last major advocate. Procedural memory is knowing how (riding a bike); debate continues over how much episodic and implicit memory contribute to its acquisition.
Recall is conscious retrieval; recognition only requires knowing a stimulus when it reappears, and is weaker in the sense that one cannot produce the item at will. Face recognition often yields "I know that face" without placement. Much laboratory work uses recognition tasks. Rote memory is learning by repeated verbal rehearsal (lists, verse, alphabet, multiplication tables), usually helped by rhythm and rhyme.
Semantic (also lexical or vocabulary) memory covers word meanings, facts ("The Nile runs through Egypt"), and non-verbal signs. Research asks how the store is structured. Vocabulary-size estimates mislead by omitting proper names and by treating bilinguals as holding one lexicon rather than two encodings of a core semantic base. Syntax may or may not count as part of memory; Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) made an innate universal grammar the default assumption for decades (see Language acquisition device).
Short-term memory (STM / STS) briefly holds ongoing input, classically measured by digit span. It acts as an initial processor deciding what enters deeper LTM processing, and supports continuity in conversation. Everyday talk of "short-term memory" for recent days or weeks is looser; late-life decline of that ability may reflect failed transfer or failed LTM retention rather than STS failure alone. Whether STM and LTM are truly separate systems or levels of processing remains debated. Working memory (Baddeley and Hitch 1974) has largely replaced STM in research: a more elaborate system with a central executive, a phonological loop, a visuo-spatial sketchpad (visual cache plus spatial mechanism, increasingly treated as separate), and, from 2000, an episodic buffer.
Situation-specific memory is activation by place, music or routine route. Halbwachs recalled rattling a stick along a childhood fence; as an adult the memory returned only when he crouched to the height he had been as a child. Unconscious memory, in psychoanalytic usage, is currently inaccessible content that hypnosis or analysis may activate and that may still shape feeling and behaviour; cognitivists avoid the term. Verbal memory dominated early experimental work from Ebbinghaus (1885) onward; the use of nonsense syllables isolated "pure" memory at the cost of ecological validity, a bias that eased only in the later twentieth century. Lexical, syntactic and semantic aspects of verbal memory can be distinguished. Visual memory has three rough levels: transient iconic persistence, a short-term phase that supports comparison of successive stimuli, and long-term recognition lasting a year or more, complicated further by eidetic, facial and flashbulb phenomena.
| System | Typical duration | Core claim in the entry |
|---|---|---|
| Echoic / iconic | Milliseconds to ~1-2 s | Sensory persistence before selection |
| STM / working memory | Seconds; digit span ~7±2 historically | On-line processing and transfer gate to LTM |
| Episodic / autobiographical | Years; reconstructive | Event replay; confidence ≠ accuracy |
| Semantic | Years; organised by meaning | Facts and lexicon, not personal episodes |
| Procedural / implicit | Years; often unconscious | Skills and primed knowledge shown in action |
| Collective | Generational | Socially shaped shared past (Halbwachs 1925) |
Table M1. Memory systems as the entry orders them, with durations the book or standard follow-on work supplies.
Mind-body positions, moral stages and motivation's rise
Mind-body problem. Descartes' Meditations (1641) set the modern frame: thinking substance versus extended substance. The entry cross-refers dualism, epiphenomenalism, idealism, materialism, neutral monism and parallelism; monism covers both idealism and materialism. Richards praises Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) as the first new solution "for 400 years", a judgement the A closer look above rejects as overstated. Mood is a diffuse affective tone without a specific object, unlike emotion directed at something.
Moral development. Piaget's The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932) described a shift from heteronomous to autonomous morality. Lawrence Kohlberg extended the scheme into six stages in three levels: pre-conventional (obedience/punishment; instrumental exchange), conventional (good-boy/good-girl; law and order), and post-conventional (social contract; universal ethical principles). Scoring used moral dilemmas such as the Heinz story. Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice, 1982) argued the scale favoured a male justice ethic over an ethic of care. Hoffman stressed empathy as the developmental motor. Richards's closing point stands: any definition of moral maturity pulls Psychology into philosophy.
Kohlberg's three levels (six stages) of moral development.
Baddeley and Hitch components.
Modern memory stages including reconsolidation.
Morale is a group's shared mood: high morale means confidence and cohesion; low morale means bickering and paralysis. The term entered Psychology from military and industrial settings. Motivation rose from the 1930s as a cover term for whatever energises and directs behaviour. Danziger (1997) argues it offered a theoretically neutral replacement when instinct and will had become contested. Drive theories, expectancy-value models and later self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan: autonomy, competence, relatedness) all sit under that umbrella, though the entry itself stays at the terminological level.
Multiple personality. The clinical picture is several "alters" who may not share awareness. DSM-III (1980) named multiple personality disorder; DSM-IV (1994) renamed it dissociative identity disorder (the entry wrongly dates the rename to the 2000 text revision). Mutualism (Ingold; Good and Still; Costall), drawing on Gibson and pragmatism, treats organism and environment as one system rather than two interacting substances.
Narrativism to Normality
Narrativism to Need
Narrativism is the social constructionist view that personality and identity are made through story-telling. A natural experiment is a real event (a flood, an assassination, a terrorist attack) that allows a phenomenon to be studied outside the laboratory, with ecological validity. Nature-nurture controversy: the relative importance of heredity and environment, fought mainly over intelligence and, since the 1960s, sex differences. Richards argues that genes and environment cannot in practice be separated: without a suitable environment no organism survives, without genes there is no organism, and the effect of a gene varies with developmental circumstances. Even identical twins reared apart show only how genes act across the environments sampled. Need was central to Henry Murray's "personology" (1938), with its catalogue of about twenty psychogenic needs.
Richards's three reasons the question is badly posed.
Why Richards rejects a simple nature/nurture vote.
Neuropsychology to Neutral monism
Neuropsychology emerged from physiological Psychology, combining cognitive models, neural networks and brain imaging to study the neural bases of mental functions, especially through patients with brain damage. Neo-Freudian is cross-referenced to post-Freudian (Chapter 16). Neurosis is an umbrella term for non-psychotic distress, marked by anxiety and self-preoccupation; there is no clear line between neurotic and normal, and Eysenck made neuroticism a continuous personality dimension. Neutral monism treats mind and body as aspects of a single substance, the classical example being Spinoza's dual-aspect monism.
Non-verbal communication and Normality
Non-verbal communication (NVC): much communication is non-verbal, and speech carries paralinguistic features (intonation, facial expression, posture, gesture, touch) that convey attitude. Argyle's work made NVC a British social Psychology speciality. Norm and normality: statistically, the norm is data within about one standard deviation of the mean (about 68 per cent of a normal distribution); socially, normality is what a group accepts; clinically, abnormality is judged by distress and dysfunction. Richards notes how readily the statistical sense slides into the evaluative.
OBE to Orthogonal
OBE and Obedience
OBE (out-of-body experience) reports have grown as resuscitation brings people back from apparent clinical death; some report viewing their own body from above. Obedience. Stanley Milgram's 1963 study had participants, believing they were helping a learning experiment, give apparently increasing electric shocks to a "learner"; about 65 per cent went to the maximum 450 volts. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) assigned students to prisoner and guard roles; the situation deteriorated so fast that it was stopped after six of a planned fourteen days. Richards's conclusion: a loose consensus that such obedience is mainly situational, with personality more relevant to exceptional resistance or exceptional sadism, and both studies need Cold War context.
The two classic studies and the situationist reading, both since re-examined.
Classic situationist studies under later scrutiny.
Object relations theory to Open and closed mind
Object relations theory is the distinctively British school of psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip and D.W. Winnicott from the 1930s. Klein reconceived infancy through analysis of children, placing relationships with internal "objects" (people or part-objects such as the breast) rather than drives at the centre; Winnicott added the transitional object and the "good enough mother". Obsessional behaviour in its clinical extreme involves repetitive hand-washing, compulsive checking and irrational fears. Open and closed mind became a personality dimension with Rokeach's The Open and Closed Mind (1960), extending the authoritarian personality to dogmatism of left and right.
Operationalism and Orthogonal
Operationalism, introduced by the physicist and philosopher P.W. Bridgman (1927), defines concepts by publicly observable operations, hence "intelligence is what intelligence tests measure". It became popular among behaviourists (S.S. Stevens), and Richards links it to the logical positivists' verification criterion. Orthogonal describes two variables that are completely uncorrelated, at right angles on a graph, as with Eysenck's extraversion and neuroticism.
Panic Attack to Psychotropic
Panic attack to Peer group
Panic attack: sudden anxiety with sweating, dizziness, breathlessness and shaking, either unprompted or out of proportion to its trigger; about a quarter of cases are linked to agoraphobia. Parallel distributed processing (PDP), launched by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986), models cognition as many simple units working simultaneously, avoiding the timing problems of serial processing. Parallelism is Leibniz's view that mind and body run in pre-established harmony without interacting. Paranoia is an irrational belief in persecution or surveillance; Richards adds that people sometimes really are watched, especially activists, and that modern surveillance hardly helps. Paraphilia is sexual arousal by atypical objects or situations, once including homosexuality. Patriarchy moved from anthropology into feminist discourse in the late 1960s. Peak experience is Maslow's term for rare, profoundly meaningful moments. Peer group is the group whose attitudes one adopts.
Perceptual defence to Personality
Perceptual defence: failing to perceive unwelcome stimuli (taboo words needed longer exposure in 1940s and 1950s studies), shading into motivated perception. Perseveration is repetition of a behaviour; Richards uses the learning-theory sense of a response persisting after reinforcement stops (greater after intermittent schedules). Personal construct theory was George Kelly's (1955) model of people as intuitive scientists testing theories through their personal constructs; his repertory grid asks how one of three people differs from the other two. Bannister and Fransella applied it clinically in Britain from the 1960s. Personality comes from the Greek persona, the actor's mask; Allport's 1937 book surveyed its senses. It won out over temperament and character in the 1930s (Danziger), flourished as personality theory in mid-century and became "individual differences" as psychometric trait approaches took over.
How 'personality' became a sub-discipline and then changed its name.
Persuasibility to Physiomorphism
Persuasibility (McGuire 1964) is the trait of being easily persuaded, studied after the Korean War brainwashing scare; Richards notes the irony that open-mindedness had been praised in authoritarianism research. Phenomenology is the study of how things are experienced. The phi phenomenon is apparent movement between two lights flashed in succession, the starting point of Gestalt Psychology. Phobia and philia are the Greek-derived suffixes for fear and love. Phrenology, formulated by Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), mapped mental faculties onto brain regions and the skull's bumps; wrong in detail, it pioneered localisation. Physiognomy, reading character from the face, revived through Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1775-78), whose English editions included illustrations by William Blake. Physiomorphism, from Lévi-Strauss, is the reverse of anthropomorphism.
Piagetian theory
Piagetian theory. From the 1920s to the 1970s Jean Piaget (1896-1980) built a stage theory of children's growing knowledge (genetic epistemology). Richards lists three challenges: to stage theories in general, to universality (cross-cultural research), and to its neglect of the social (in contrast to Vygotsky). The key processes are assimilation (fitting experience to existing schemata), accommodation (changing schemata to fit experience) and equilibration between them.
| Stage | Approx. age | Achievements | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sensori-motor | 0 to 2 | Schemata of action; object permanence | No representation at first |
| Pre-operational | 2 to 7 | Language, symbols; pre-conceptual then intuitive | Egocentric; fails conservation |
| Concrete operations | 7 to 11 or 12 | Conservation, classification, reversibility | Only concrete situations |
| Formal operations | 11 onwards | Abstract hypothesis testing; operations on operations | Not universally reached |
Table 10. Piaget's four stages, as summarised in the book.
Positivism to PTSD
Positivism, coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), was reformulated by Ernst Mach (science as economical description of sense data, which influenced Einstein) and became logical positivism in 1920s Vienna, targeting pseudo-sciences. Post-Freudian usually means analysts who departed radically from Freud, often in America, rejecting the primacy of the Id and stressing ego autonomy; Erik Erikson's eight life-span stages are the best-known example, and Richards sees in them optimistic versions of psychoanalysis suited to US values. Neo-Freudians (Horney, Fromm, Sullivan) stressed social and cultural factors.
Post-traumatic stress disorder. Richards traces its history: "cannonball wind" after the Napoleonic wars, "railway spine" after train crashes, shell shock in the First World War (fought over as physical or psychological, insurers paying only for physical damage), combat stress in the Second, and entry into DSM-III in 1980. He doubts the value of routine PTSD counselling and notes the category may be too broad, lumping torture with witnessing upsetting events.
Pragmatism to Prisoner's Dilemma
Pragmatism, the American philosophy of Peirce, William James and Dewey, judges ideas by their practical consequences ("a distinction which makes no difference is no difference"). Prejudice is negative prejudging of others by visible features. Premenstrual tension gained wide attention from feminist psychologists in the 1970s and 1980s. Presentism judges the past by present values. The primacy effect is better recall of first items; primal therapy (Arthur Janov, late 1960s) had clients relive their earliest traumas, with John Lennon among its clients. Priming is a change in processing after prior exposure to a stimulus.
Prisoner's Dilemma: two prisoners interrogated apart; each does better by confessing whatever the other does, yet both do better if neither confesses. The game models the conflict between individual and collective rationality and has been used to study cooperation and trust (Axelrod's tit-for-tat tournaments). Problem-solving tasks served Gestalt and Cognitive Psychology as windows on reasoning.
The book's Prisoner's Dilemma: confessing dominates, yet mutual silence is better.
Projective tests to Psychoanalysis
Projective tests ask for open-ended imaginative responses (describing an image, telling a story, completing a sentence) on the assumption that people reveal their needs and anxieties. The Rorschach ink-blots and Murray's TAT are the best known; Goodenough's Draw-a-Man test (1926) was given a projective spin, and Jung's word association (1905) was a forerunner. They enjoyed a vogue from the late 1930s to the 1960s, and unreliable scoring led to their decline as research tools. Other tests: the Blacky pictures, the Children's Apperception Test, the World test and the Mosaic test.
Psychedelic was popularised by Timothy Leary in the 1960s for LSD-induced altered states and then for art and music; Richards says it has fallen into disuse in favour of psychotropic. Psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), rests on five claims as Richards summarises them: behaviour has a single instinctual source (libido, later joined by Thanatos); these instincts are unconscious, amoral and contradictory; the reality principle opposes them, and consciousness arises from the encounter; early life is decisive; and the unconscious can be reached through dreams, slips and symptoms. It began as a medical theory of neurosis, which explains its case-history method; Janet, Richards notes, has been unfairly overshadowed (Ellenberger 1970).
Psychoanalytic concepts
Psychoanalytic concepts. Richards explains that the meaning of each term depends on its place in a given version of the theory, recommends Rycroft's dictionary (1972), and justifies the coverage because the vocabulary pervades popular discourse. The forty-odd sub-entries run from abreaction (sudden release of unconscious feeling) and ambivalence, through the anal, oral and phallic phases, condensation, counter-transference, ego, Id and super ego, the Oedipus and Jocasta complexes, latency, libido, parapraxis (the "Freudian slip"), the pleasure principle, repression and screen memory, to sublimation, Thanatos, transference and the transitional object.
| Defence mechanism | What happens | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Repression | Unacceptable material kept from consciousness | Forgetting a humiliating episode |
| Projection | Own unacceptable feelings attributed to others | Seeing hostility in everyone else |
| Reaction formation | Feeling turned into its opposite | Excessive kindness to a resented rival |
| Displacement | Feeling redirected to a safer target | Kicking the door, not the boss |
| Regression | Return to earlier developmental behaviour | Thumb-sucking under stress |
| Sublimation | Drive channelled into valued activity | Aggression into competitive sport |
| Introjection | Taking in another's attributes | Parental voice becomes conscience |
Table 11. Defence mechanisms covered in the Psychoanalytic Concepts sub-entries.
Psychohistory to Psychotropic
Psychohistory (from the 1950s) applied psychoanalysis to historical figures, Erikson's Young Man Luther being the best-known example. Psychometrics is statistical measurement of psychological phenomena, mainly intelligence, personality and attitudes. Psychopath names a person without internalised morality, often socially skilled and charming but without empathy; the term dates from 1885 in English, gained its modern sense through Cleckley (1941) and became antisocial personality disorder in DSM-III. Psychopathology covers disorders without clear organic basis. Psychophysics (Weber and Fechner, 1860) was the first experimental field: thresholds, discrimination and reaction time. Psychosis means delusional states, from paranoia to believing one is Christ. Psychosomatic symptoms have psychological causes. Psychotherapy covers all treatment by extended discussion; Richards credits the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Dubois with introducing the term. Psychotropic describes drugs or other means that alter consciousness.
Freud's structural model: the ego mediates between id and super ego.
Psychoanalytic concepts: the working vocabulary
Richards warns that each term's sense depends on which version of the theory is in play across Freud's career and later schools. He still covers about forty items because the vocabulary saturates everyday and Psychological talk. Rycroft (1972) is his recommended dictionary. Distinctively Jungian senses belong under Analytical Psychology.
Abreaction is the sudden conscious eruption of emotionally laden unconscious feeling, often in the analytic hour; it forces confrontation with what was shut out. Ambivalence is mixed or opposing emotion toward one object (classic love-hate toward a parent); resolving it helps the ego form. Anal phase is the second infantile stage, libido centred on bowel function; severe toilet training is said to yield an anal-retentive character (meanness, hoarding, secretiveness). Karl Abraham (source: "Abrahams") mapped fixation effects on character. Analysand is the person in analysis.
Catharsis and cathexis are confused in the book (A closer look above). Standard usage: cathexis (Besetzung) is investment of psychic energy in an idea or object; catharsis is discharge of pent-up emotion (Breuer and Freud's cathartic method), close to abreaction. Censor is the dream-work agency that disguises unacceptable wishes as symbols. A complex is an unconscious knot of conflict around one issue (Oedipus as paradigm). Condensation packs many meanings into one dream symbol. Counter-transference began as a threat to the analyst's objectivity; later schools made "working with" it central for insight into the analysand and for the analyst's own supervision.
Five clusters in the Psychoanalytic Concepts essay.
Main projective tools in the entry.
Richards's five claims of psychoanalysis.
Defence mechanisms name the ego's ways of keeping unwelcome material out of consciousness: repression, projection, reaction formation, displacement, regression, sublimation, introjection and others. Ego, in the late topological model, is the integrating, largely conscious system in contact with reality (reality principle); over- or under-defensiveness can be pathological. The ego ideal is the person one would most like to be. Eros in later Freud names the pleasure principle against Thanatos (death instinct). Fixation is developmental arrest at a psychosexual stage, sometimes yielding fetishistic specificity.
Id is the unconscious instinctual energy source seeking erotic gratification; roughly synonymous with the unconscious in the late model. Identification and introjection explain how the child takes in parental attributes and resolves parental complexes (a boy typically identifies with the father to exit the Oedipus complex). The Jocasta complex is the maternal counterpart theme. Latency is the quieter period after the phallic/Oedipal phase until puberty. Libido is the sexual drive energy; its theorised course defines the oral, anal and phallic phases. Moratorium (Erikson) is a socially allowed delay in committing to adult identity.
Object-relations theory (Fairbairn, Klein, Winnicott and others; see separate entry) shifts focus from drives to internalised relationships. The Oedipus complex is the boy's mix of desire for the mother and rivalry with the father; its resolution via identification founds the super ego. Oral phase centres on the mouth; phallic symbolism and the phallic phase follow. Parapraxis is the Freudian slip: a bungled action or utterance revealing unconscious intent. The pleasure principle seeks immediate gratification; the reality principle delays and redirects it. Pre-conscious material is not presently conscious but retrievable, unlike the dynamic unconscious. Primary process thinking is the Id's illogical, wish-driven mode (dreams, fantasy); secondary process is ego-governed and realistic.
Projection attributes one's own unacceptable impulses to others. Reaction formation flips a feeling into its opposite display. Regression returns to earlier modes under stress. Repression keeps material out of consciousness (the master defence). A screen memory is a bland recalled scene that masks a more charged one. Subconscious is popular usage; technical writing prefers pre-conscious and unconscious. Sublimation channels drive into culturally valued activity. Super ego is the internalised moral agency (parental and cultural demands), harsh when formed under fear. Suppression is conscious putting-aside, unlike repression. Transference is the analysand's displacement of past feelings onto the analyst; handling it is the therapy's engine. Transitional object (Winnicott) is the blanket or toy that eases separation from the mother, neither fully me nor fully not-me. Unconscious names both the topographic system and the quality of being outside awareness.
| Cluster | Terms | Job in the theory |
|---|---|---|
| Topography / structure | Unconscious, pre-conscious, conscious; Id, ego, super ego | Where mental contents sit and which agency owns them |
| Development | Oral, anal, phallic, latency; Oedipus, Jocasta; fixation | How drive and family conflict shape character |
| Dynamics | Libido, Eros, Thanatos; pleasure vs reality principle; primary process | What energises and conflicts inside the psyche |
| Clinic | Transference, counter-transference, abreaction, parapraxis, screen memory, transitional object | How treatment produces and reads change |
| Defences | Repression, projection, reaction formation, regression, sublimation, introjection | How the ego manages threat |
Table P1. Psychoanalytic vocabulary clustered by role in the theory.
Piaget's apparatus, projective tests and Freud's five claims
Piagetian theory in steps. Genetic epistemology asks how knowledge grows. Assimilation fits new experience to existing schemata; accommodation changes schemata to fit experience; equilibration balances the two. Operations are reversible mental actions; the pre-operational child lacks them, the concrete-operational child applies them to real objects, the formal-operational adolescent to hypotheses. Conservation (constancy, invariance) tasks show whether quantity survives visible transformation (liquid in differently shaped glasses). Egocentricity is difficulty taking another's spatial or social perspective (the three-mountains task). Décalage is uneven performance across tasks that supposedly share a stage. Richards lists three challenges: to stage theories as such, to universality (cross-cultural tests), and to neglect of the social relative to Vygotsky. Looking-time and simplified-task work (Baillargeon; Donaldson 1978) pushed competence earlier than classic ages, though those methods have replication problems of their own (see the 2026 Piaget box above).
Piaget's functional core leading to operational competence.
Projective tests. Open-ended imaginative responses are assumed to reveal needs and conflicts. Core battery: Rorschach ink-blots; Murray's TAT; Goodenough Draw-a-Man (1926) given a projective reading; Jung's 1905 word association as forerunner. Also Blacky pictures, Children's Apperception Test, World test, Mosaic test. Vogue from late 1930s to 1960s; unreliable scoring sank them as research tools. R-PAS (2011) and Mihura et al. (2013) later rescued some thought-disorder scores (R chapter update).
Psychoanalysis: five claims. Richards's summary: (1) behaviour has a single instinctual source (libido, later joined by Thanatos); (2) these instincts are unconscious, amoral and contradictory; (3) the reality principle opposes them and consciousness arises from the encounter; (4) early life is decisive; (5) the unconscious is reachable through dreams, slips and symptoms. It began as a medical theory of neurosis, which explains the case-history method. Janet, Richards notes (via Ellenberger 1970), has been unfairly overshadowed. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is not Freud's first book (A closer look: On Aphasia 1891; Studies on Hysteria with Breuer 1895).
Personality arc. From Greek persona (actor's mask) through Allport 1937 to mid-century "personality theory" and then "individual differences" under psychometrics. Personal construct theory (Kelly 1955; Bannister and Fransella in Britain) cast people as intuitive scientists testing bipolar constructs via the repertory grid. The Big Five and HEXACO are the post-source trait standards (2026 personality box).
Q-Sort to Qualitative Methods
Q-sort and Qualia
Q-sort, devised by the British psychologist William Stephenson (1935) and developed by others in the 1960s, with a wider resurgence from the 1980s, asks a person to sort cards bearing descriptive statements about a target (a person, a painting, oneself) into a fixed number of piles from most to least descriptive, with the number per pile fixed in a roughly normal distribution. Unlike a questionnaire, it measures how traits rank within one person's view, so it is used in Rogerian research to compare the actual and ideal self. Qualia are raw sensations as experienced before interpretation, the redness of red; the term spread from the 1930s and appears in Psychology mainly in debates about consciousness.
Stephenson's Q-sort: cards placed in a fixed, near-normal distribution.
Qualitative methods
Qualitative methods are all research methods that avoid measurement, or use it only descriptively: case histories, projective tests, interviews and, to some degree, discourse analysis. Richards notes that they serve both as preliminary stages of research and as approaches in their own right, favoured by critical and social constructionist psychologists. The book's Q unit also carries the tail of an entry on institutional racism, racism inferred from statistical patterns in an organisation that cannot be pinned to any individual.
Racism to Rorschach Test
Racism to Redintegration
Racism is hostility or discrimination on the basis of perceived "racial" identity, resting on the belief that people can be objectively classified by race; that belief alone Richards would call racialism. Reaction time was among the first topics of psychophysics and remains central to experiments. The recency effect is better recall of the last items in a list, the counterpart of primacy. Redintegration, now rare, means reassembling a memory or skill from fragments, as when an old cyclist remounts a bicycle.
Reductionism and Reflexivity
Reductionism explains a higher level (chemistry) by a lower one (physics). Richards questions the hierarchy itself: it is not size (astronomy is not "above" biology), and complexity fails too (weather is not simpler than plants). In Psychology the issue is whether mental phenomena reduce to neurophysiology or genes, and he argues that psychological explanation keeps its own level, since meaning and social context do not appear in neurons. Reflexivity strictly means self-reference ("this sentence has five words"), rather than "being reflective". Psychology is reflexive because it is a psychological activity, because a full theory should explain its own production, and because it changes its subject matter by studying it (people come to see themselves through its concepts).
Reflexivity: the loop by which Psychology changes what it studies.
Reification to Representationalism
Reification treats abstractions as things: we slide from using "intelligence" to describe performance to treating it as an entity that causes performance. Reliability is consistency of a test across time (test-retest), across scorers (inter-rater) and across items (internal consistency). Psychology of religion began in 1890s America (Starbuck 1899), was boosted by James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), mostly aimed at vindicating Christianity (Leuba was an exception), and faded around 1930. REM sleep is the rapid-eye-movement stage associated with dreaming. Repetition compulsion is presented as a symptom of obsessional disorder. Representationalism holds that we perceive the world through internal representations; Richards thinks the direct-versus-indirect perception debate conceptually confused, because no evidence could settle it.
Restricted code to Rhetoric
Restricted versus elaborated code was Basil Bernstein's 1960s account of class differences in educational performance: restricted code relies on shared context and simple grammar, elaborated code spells meaning out. Everyone uses both, but working-class children's bias towards restricted code disadvantaged them at school. The idea was widely misread as denigrating working-class speech. The reticular activating system in the brain stem controls arousal, and Eysenck used it to explain introversion. Reversal theory (Michael Apter, from the late 1970s) holds that arousal feels pleasant or unpleasant depending on metamotivational state: in the purposeful telic state high arousal is anxiety, in the playful paratelic state it is excitement. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; since the 1970s historians of science (Shapin and Schaffer 1985) have studied scientific writing as rhetoric, and colourful brain scans in a paper are as rhetorical as oratory.
Reversal theory: the same arousal feels different in different states.
Role theory and the Rorschach test
Role theory (1950s, on the border of sociology and social Psychology) analysed social behaviour as playing parts: role conflict, role expectations, role confusion and role models, the phrase Richards thinks the theory's most lasting legacy. The Rorschach test, published by Hermann Rorschach in 1921, uses ten symmetrical ink-blots; scoring attends less to content than to how the blot is used (whole or detail, white space, movement, response time). Its reputation fell in the 1960s with poor inter-rater reliability and revived with Exner's Comprehensive System from the 1970s.
Reductionism, reflexivity, role and the Rorschach's path
Reductionism in Psychology usually means explaining psychological phenomena wholly in lower-level terms (physiology, genetics, physics). Richards treats it as a recurring ambition and a recurring failure: successful local reductions (a transmitter for a symptom) do not erase the psychological description, and greedy reductionism skips the mechanisms that would justify the leap. Countermoves include emergentism and levels-of-analysis pluralism. Reflexivity is Psychology's special problem: the discipline's subjects can learn its theories and change, so knowledge loops back into the object known. Richards links this to the book's wider theme that Psychology helps invent the kinds of people it then studies.
Reductionism and reflexivity as Richards's paired warnings.
From Bern edition to evidence-trimmed scoring.
Reification treats abstractions (IQ, the unconscious, "the group mind") as things. Representationalism is the claim that mind works on internal representations of the world (dominant in classical cognitive science; challenged by ecological and enactive views). Restricted versus elaborated code (Bernstein) described class-linked speech patterns and fed heated education debates. Rhetoric regained interest as psychologists studied persuasion, metaphor and the discursive turn.
Role theory (from Linton and Mead into social Psychology) treats behaviour as scripted by social positions; Goffman's dramaturgical twist made role distance and face-work central. The Rorschach (Psychodiagnostik, Bern 1921; English 1942, not a same-year American edition) asks what ink-blots look like; scoring systems multiplied, Exner's Comprehensive System dominated late century, and R-PAS (2011) later trimmed scores by meta-analytic evidence. Richards places it with projective tests under the hope that unstructured responses bypass defences.
Scaling to Synapse
Scaling to Schizothymic
Scaling creates a measurement scale with equal intervals and normally distributed scores; testers may have to settle for an ordinal scale. A schema is a structured unit of action or knowledge (Piaget, Bartlett). Schizogenic means causing schizophrenia, as in the discredited "schizophrenogenic mother" or schizogenic family. Schizophrenia was introduced by Eugen Bleuler in 1911 to replace dementia praecox; the popular "split personality" sense is wrong. Richards stresses that its symptoms (voices, paranoia, detachment, ideas of reference) form no coherent syndrome, none universal or exclusive, and that hearing voices is surprisingly common. Schizothymic names a personality type prone to schizophrenia-like illness, contrasted with cyclothymic.
Schools of Psychology
Schools of Psychology names theoretical traditions (functionalist, behaviourist, psychoanalytic) and, more narrowly, places. Richards's sub-entries include: Leipzig (Wundt's laboratory of 1879, Psychology's leading institution to the 1890s); Würzburg (Külpe, Ach, Marbe; imageless thought; flourished to 1914); the Cambridge and London schools (Myers, Rivers, Bartlett versus Sully, Spearman, Burt; less and more psychometric), with Manchester, Liverpool and others neglected; Chicago functionalism (Dewey, Angell, where Watson trained, feeding into symbolic interactionism through G.H. Mead); Columbia functionalism (Thorndike, Woodworth) and Columbia's Culture and Personality school (Boas, Margaret Mead, Benedict); the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse); Geneva (Claparède, then Piaget); Gestalt; Harvard (diversity: Miller, Stevens, Allport, Skinner, Murray, Boring); Nancy (Liébeault and Bernheim, hypnotism as suggestion); the Russian school (Pavlov, Bekhterev, Sechenov); Vienna (Freud) and Zurich (Jung).
The geographical schools in Richards's longest historical essay.
| School | Period | Leading figures | Signature idea |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leipzig | 1879 to 1900s | Wundt | Experimental introspection |
| Nancy | 1860s to 1900s | Liébeault, Bernheim | Hypnotism is suggestion |
| Würzburg | 1890s to 1914 | Külpe, Ach, Marbe, Bühler | Imageless thought; set |
| Chicago | c.1900 to 1930s | Dewey, Angell, Mead | Adaptive function |
| Columbia | 1900s to 1950s | Thorndike, Woodworth | Practical, eclectic functionalism |
| London | 1890s to 1940 | Sully, Spearman, Burt | Psychometrics |
| Frankfurt | 1920s to 1950s | Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse | Authoritarianism; Marxism with psychoanalysis |
| Geneva | 1920s to 1970s | Claparède, Piaget | Genetic epistemology |
Table 12. Selected schools from the Schools of Psychology essay.
Self to Situationism
Self is one of Psychology's most central and problematic concepts. William James (1890) gave the classic preview: we have as many social selves as there are people who know us, and the self extends to everything we identify with (country, football team, possessions); he denied any single transcendental ego. Others treat the self as a narrative fiction. Semantics separates denotation (dictionary meaning) from connotation ("a frank exchange of views" connotes a row). Sensory deprivation removes stimulation (flotation tanks). Sexuality and gender: Richards reports the 1970s and 1980s distinction made in feminist thinking. Sibling rivalry was introduced through Adler. Signal detection theory (Tanner and Swets, 1950s) separates sensitivity from response bias, using four outcomes: hit, miss, false alarm and correct rejection. Situationism explains behaviour by situations rather than traits, citing Milgram and Zimbardo.
Signal detection theory's four outcomes.
Sleeper effect to Social facilitation
The sleeper effect (Hovland et al. 1949): a persuasive message from a low-credibility source gains influence weeks later as the book is forgotten. Social cognition covers both the social nature of cognition and how people think about the social world. Social constructionism, with roots in Marx, Dilthey, linguistic philosophy and the sociology of knowledge (Berger and Luckmann), re-emerged in Psychology with Kenneth Gergen's 1973 paper: knowledge is a product of social processes, so experience can never be known to correspond objectively to reality. Richards separates global and partial versions, and asks whether it is a logical claim or an empirical hypothesis. Social Darwinism applied the "survival of the fittest" (Spencer's phrase) to society, justifying competition, war and scientific racism until 1914 to 1945 discredited it. Social facilitation: performance improves before an audience (Triplett 1898, often called the first social Psychology experiment); Zajonc (1965) showed it holds for easy tasks and reverses for hard ones.
Social identity to Somatotypes
Social identity theory (Henri Tajfel, with Turner) explains intergroup conflict through the self-esteem people draw from group membership; minimal-group experiments showed favouritism towards arbitrary in-groups. Social representations (Serge Moscovici, 1960s, after Durkheim's collective representations) are socially shared frameworks for understanding (the "single mother"). Sociobiology (E.O. Wilson 1975) claimed most behaviour could be explained by inclusive fitness. Somatisation is expressing distress through bodily symptoms. Somatotypes were W.H. Sheldon's three body dimensions (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph), each rated 1 to 7, linked to temperament; the outcome was an atlas of male physiques with animal labels.
Stereotyping to Synapse
Stereotyping treats people as representatives of an assumed group with assumed traits; some stereotyping is unavoidable, and the danger lies in negative stereotypes used to justify behaviour. Stress has become hazy: Richards separates external stressors from internal conflicts, notes that the psychological sense in the OED dates only to 1942, and warns that the word masks as much as it reveals. The Stroop effect (Stroop 1935): naming the ink colour of a conflicting colour word is slower; it is robust and resists practice. Structuralism has at least five meanings, starting with Titchener's introspective Psychology. Subliminal perception caused a 1950s advertising scare and the Judas Priest trial; Richards finds little evidence since Dixon (1971) for covert persuasion. Suggestion runs from hypnosis to everyday influence. Synaesthesia is experiencing one sense in another (seeing sounds, coloured weekdays). A synapse is the junction between neurons.
Schools of Psychology: the full roster
Richards opens by noting that "school" is a pragmatic label for traditions, sometimes a place, sometimes a school of thought. The Cambridge versus London polarisation of early English Psychology distorts the picture: Manchester, Liverpool, Reading and perhaps Bristol also qualify, Scottish universities ran their own agendas without the label, and Oxford was largely absent.
Cambridge School (c.1900-40). C.S. Myers, W.H.R. Rivers and F.C. Bartlett. Less psychometrics than London; more social and applied work. Bartlett's reconstructive remembering (Remembering, 1932) is its lasting contribution.
Chicago School of Functionalism (from c.1900). J. Dewey and J.R. Angell founded it; Angell (1907) opposed it to Titchener's structuralism. It soon took a behaviourist turn (Watson took his doctorate there). Mead's "social behaviourism" fed symbolic interactionism, then Goffman, then a line toward social constructionism. Chicago differed from the more lasting Columbia functionalism.
Columbia Culture and Personality School (late 1920s to c.1960). Launched under Franz Boas by Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Growing up in New Guinea (1930). Associates included Ruth Benedict, Abram Kardiner, Eleanor Maccoby, Wayne Dennis and Erik Erikson. Eclectic but psychoanalytically flavoured: how child-rearing and gender roles yield personality types. Late 1940s work on German and Japanese societies sought roots of Nazism and Japanese militarism, linking to authoritarianism research. Gender-role findings fed later feminist theory.
Columbia School of Functionalism. Practical and eclectic from the start: Thorndike in education, R.S. Woodworth (1869-1962) as typical figure (Dynamic Psychology 1918; the mid-century textbook Experimental Psychology 1938; long editorship of Psychological Monographs). J. McKeen Cattell was professor from 1892 but soon left functionalist research. Also Dashiell and Leta Hollingworth. The "functionalist" label fades after about 1950.
Selected school founding moments.
Frankfurt School. Flourished early 1920s to early 1930s, then as a school in exile in the US after Nazism. Broadly Marxist, open to psychoanalysis, pioneers of questionnaire methods on social issues. After 1945 they muted socialist leanings; major impact via the idea of authoritarianism. Named figures: Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Else Frenkel-Brunswik (source misspells "Frenkl"), Herbert Marcuse. Not Psychology alone: sociology and philosophy too.
Geneva School. Strictly Claparède before 1914; thereafter Piaget and associates at the Institut Rousseau (Inhelder, Szeminska, Beth). Child development on the surface; genetic epistemology underneath. US impact mainly from the 1950s.
Gestalt School. Commonly called a school but tied to no single university (see Gestalt Psychology). Harvard School is almost a misnomer: creative diversity rather than one doctrine. Contributors include G.A. Miller (cognitive origins), S.S. Stevens (psychophysics), G.W. Allport (social), B.F. Skinner (behaviourism), Henry Murray (personology) and E.G. Boring (history).
Leipzig School. Wundt (1832-1920) founded the 1879 laboratory; late nineteenth-century experimental introspection and psychophysics. Many first-generation US and British psychologists trained there. Psychology still sat under Philosophy in German universities into the late 1930s.
London School (1890s-1940). University College London line: James Sully (first UK Psychology laboratory), then the psychometric tradition of Spearman and Burt. Juxtaposed with Cambridge as the statistical pole of English Psychology.
Nancy School. Liébeault and Bernheim: hypnotism as suggestion, against Charcot's pathological view at the Salpêtrière. Freud visited and took the suggestion lesson into early psychoanalysis.
Russian School. Sechenov, Bekhterev and Pavlov: reflexology and classical conditioning as objective Psychology. Pavlov's dogs became the West's emblem of learning theory.
Vienna School. Freud and the psychoanalytic circle; not an experimental laboratory school. Würzburg School (Külpe, Ach, Marbe, Bühler): imageless thought and task set (Einstellung, Aufgabe, Ach's determining tendency), challenging Wundt. Zurich School: Jung at the Burghölzli, then Analytical Psychology after the break with Freud.
| School | Period | Figures | Signature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cambridge | 1900-40 | Myers, Rivers, Bartlett | Social/applied; reconstructive memory |
| Chicago functionalism | c.1900+ | Dewey, Angell, Mead, Watson | Adaptive function → behaviourism |
| Columbia C&P | 1928-c.1960 | Mead, Benedict, Kardiner, Erikson | Culture → personality; gender roles |
| Columbia functionalism | 1900s-1950 | Thorndike, Woodworth | Practical, eclectic science |
| Frankfurt | 1920s-50s | Adorno, Fromm, Frenkel-Brunswik, Marcuse | Authoritarianism; Marx + Freud |
| Geneva | 1920s-70s | Claparède, Piaget, Inhelder | Genetic epistemology |
| Leipzig | 1879-1900s | Wundt | Experimental introspection |
| London | 1890s-1940 | Sully, Spearman, Burt | Psychometrics |
| Nancy | 1860s-1900s | Liébeault, Bernheim | Hypnosis = suggestion |
| Russian | 1860s-1930s | Sechenov, Bekhterev, Pavlov | Reflex and conditioning |
| Vienna / Zurich | 1890s+ | Freud; Jung | Psychoanalysis; Analytical Psychology |
| Würzburg | 1890s-1914 | Külpe, Ach, Bühler | Imageless thought; set |
Table S1. Geographic and theoretical schools listed in the book essay.
Self, signal detection, social identity and the replication hits under S
Self. James (1890) denied a single transcendental ego: as many social selves as knowers; the self includes country, team and possessions. Later narrative and constructionist accounts treat the self as a story under revision. Semantics in Psychology separates denotation from connotation (a "frank exchange of views" denotes talk and connotes a row). Sensory deprivation (flotation tanks) removes ordinary stimulation to study hallucination and stress.
Sexuality and gender. The entry's wording reverses the usual 1970s feminist distinction (A closer look above): standard usage makes sex biological and gender the social/psychological identity. Sibling rivalry entered via Adler. Signal detection theory (Tanner and Swets, 1950s) separates sensitivity (d′) from criterion bias; four outcomes are hit, miss, false alarm and correct rejection.
Signal detection: presence/absence crossed with yes/no.
Social identity theory's minimal-group engine.
Letter S after the replication crisis.
Situationism explains behaviour by situations over traits, citing Milgram and Zimbardo; the person-situation debate (Mischel 1968 onward) is the longer frame. Sleeper effect: a discounted message gains influence later when the discounting cue is forgotten. Social facilitation (Triplett; Zajonc): audience or co-actors improve simple or well-learned performance and impair complex novel tasks.
Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner): part of the self derives from group memberships; categorisation, identification and comparison drive in-group favouritism even in minimal groups. Haslam and Reicher later applied it to leadership and obedience, a line the 2026 update notes as strengthened after the crisis. Social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann 1966; source misspells Luckmann) treats knowledge and categories as products of social process. Stereotyping (Lippmann 1922 coined the term; source misspells Lippmann) is the cognitive shortcut of attributing group traits to individuals.
Somatotypes (Sheldon): ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph mapped to temperament; the 1954 Atlas of Men (source: "Atlas of Man") later became infamous for Ivy League posture photos. Synapse is the junction between neurons where chemical transmission occurs; Richards uses it as the physiological end of the S sequence.
Tachistoscope to Trait
Tachistoscope to Temperament
The tachistoscope exposed visual stimuli for precise durations; versions appeared in the late nineteenth century and computers replaced it after about 1970. Telekinesis, moving objects by thought, is "one of the most doubtful" paranormal claims, with only elusive evidence of tiny effects on falling balls. Temperament goes back to the four elements and their pairings of hot, cold, wet and dry; through Galen's humoral theory it yielded the four temperaments, sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic, at the core of the personality-type concept. By the late nineteenth century it meant simply a person's general style of reacting; it differed from character, which carried a moral sense, and both were replaced by personality (Danziger 1997).
The standard humoral scheme (the book omits phlegm).
From ancient temperaments to modern trait models.
TAT to Topological Psychology
The Thematic Apperception Test was devised by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan in 1935: 31 pictures, of which a sample is shown, with the person's stories scored for the needs they express; the final version appeared in 1943, followed by variants (Symonds, Shneidman, the Blacky test). Theory of mind in developmental Psychology means understanding one's own and others' minds, including false beliefs. Theriomorphism is the belief that humans can take on animal souls. Top-down and bottom-up distinguish approaches that start from the whole and analyse it into parts (Gestalt) from those that build up from elements (S-R learning theory), a distinction that, Richards notes, cuts across reductionism. Topological Psychology is Kurt Lewin's (1890-1947) model of the "life space", its regions and forces (Lewin 1936).
Trait
Trait, in personality theory, means a discrete behaviour or tendency commonly shown by an individual. The term was introduced by F.H. and G.W. Allport (1921) and developed in Allport's 1937 book; traits may signal broader dimensions such as Eysenck's extraversion. Mischel's Personality and Assessment (1968) argued that traits predict behaviour across situations poorly, launching the person-situation debate.
Unconscious
Unconscious
Unconscious is grammatically versatile and ambiguous. In everyday use it means (1) completely unaware of the world, as in sleep, coma or fainting, and (2) not consciously aware of a particular action or object ("despite their shuffling, he remained quite unconscious of..."). The technical senses belong to psychoanalysis, where the unconscious is a system of repressed wishes, and to Jung's collective unconscious; the entry cross-refers to both (Chapters 1 and 16).
Three senses of the unconscious.
Validity to Visual Search
Validity and Vigilance
Validity is how far an instrument measures what it claims to, or how far a research design suits its question; it should not be confused with reliability. Richards's sub-entries: concurrent validity (agreement with other measures of the same thing); construct validity (whether the construct itself makes sense, as a critic of psychoanalysis might doubt a scale of "anal aggressivity"); ecological validity (whether findings hold in real life); external validity (generalisability); face validity (whether the test looks as if it measures the target); and internal validity (whether the design supports causal conclusions). Vigilance is sustained attention, studied from the 1940s in radar monitoring (Mackworth's clock test) and other human and machine tasks.
The six validity sub-entries.
Why measurement quality bounds every finding.
| Type | Question asked | Typical threat |
|---|---|---|
| Face | Does it look right? | Superficial items |
| Concurrent | Does it agree with other measures now? | Shared method bias |
| Construct | Does the construct exist and is this measuring it? | Reification; jingle-jangle fallacies |
| Internal | Can we infer cause in this study? | Confounds; demand characteristics |
| External | Does it generalise to other people and settings? | WEIRD samples |
| Ecological | Does it hold in everyday life? | Artificial lab tasks |
Table 13. The six forms of validity in the book, with typical threats.
Visual illusions and Visual search
Visual illusions are perceptions that do not correspond to what is there, or depict the impossible, including ambiguous figures. The earliest studied was the Moon illusion. Richards sorts them into contrast effects (simultaneous lightness contrast), cue ambiguity (Necker cube, face/vase), cue distortion (the Ames room), processing effects (Müller-Lyer, vertical-horizontal, the Moon, which cannot be overridden and appear universal, though Müller-Lyer universality has been contested) and radiation effects. Visual search asks participants to find a target among distractors; the two main theories are Treisman's feature integration theory (Treisman and Gelade 1980: parallel then serial processing) and Wolfe's guided search (1994), in which an initial activation map guides attention.
Whorfian Hypothesis to Word Association
Whorfian hypothesis
Whorfian hypothesis (linguistic relativity): proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s with Edward Sapir, and widely known after Whorf's writings appeared in 1956, it holds that language profoundly affects thought, through grammar as much as vocabulary. Whorf drew on Native American languages, showing grammatical variation in how agency is assigned and phenomena classified as things or processes. Richards notes that the "Inuit words for snow" story is discredited (Pullum 1991), that a grain of truth is generally accepted, and the paradox that stating the hypothesis requires a language able to transcend it.
Strong and weak versions of the Whorfian hypothesis.
Will and Word association
Will was standard in Psychology and philosophy before the twentieth century, a basic faculty that drove us to achieve our aims and resist distraction. Alexander Bain's The Emotions and the Will (1859) and William James's Principles (1890) gave it chapters. It then disappeared from scientific texts, its role taken over by motivation and drive, as Psychology shifted from the mind's internal structure to behaviour and how to manage it (Danziger 1997). Word association was put on an experimental footing by Jung in 1905: people respond to stimulus words as fast as possible, and delays or unusual responses reveal emotional complexes.
Zeigarnik Effect and Zone of Proximal Development
Zeigarnik effect
Zeigarnik effect: unfinished tasks are remembered better than finished ones; an unsolved crossword clue lingers for days while the solved answers fade. It is named after Bluma Zeigarnik, who reported it in 1927 from work in Kurt Lewin's Berlin group, and is usually discussed with the Gestalt notion of closure (a task in progress sets up tension that completion releases).
Zone of proximal development
Zone of proximal development (ZPD). Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) saw development as a sociocultural process as well as an individual one, in contrast with Piaget; his work became available in English in the 1960s. The ZPD is the region between what a child can do alone and what it can do with help. Educators and companions provide scaffolding (arousing interest, simplifying the task, giving feedback) that lets the child progress, but scaffolding must stay linked to the child's existing state. Richards notes that much of Vygotsky's writing still awaited translation.
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development.
Reading Psychology's Vocabulary Historically
Five lessons across the alphabet
Concepts are dated. "Behaviour" as a general term is barely a century old, "attitude" once meant posture, "stress" in its psychological sense dates from 1942, and "will" vanished from textbooks after 1900. Concepts come from somewhere. Psychology borrowed from medicine (hysteria, neurosis), philosophy (empiricism, phenomenology), sociology (anomie, role) and everyday speech (personality, intelligence), and each loan brought assumptions with it. Diagnoses are negotiated. Homosexuality, Asperger's syndrome, multiple personality and hysteria all moved in or out of the manuals for reasons partly scientific, partly social. Methods shape findings. Experimenter effects, acquiescence bias, unreliable projective scoring and WEIRD samples recur through the book. Psychology changes its subject. Reflexivity means that the discipline's terms feed back into how people experience themselves.
The five cross-alphabet lessons.
| Entry | What the book said (2009) | Status in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Asperger's syndrome | Contested diagnosis with an active lobby | Merged into autism spectrum disorder (DSM-5, ICD-11) |
| DSM | DSM-IV-TR; "DSM V planned for 2012" | DSM-5 (2013), DSM-5-TR (2022) |
| Bystander effect | Genovese, "allegedly" 38 witnesses | Story corrected (NYT 2016); real-world intervention common |
| Obedience | Milgram and Zimbardo show situational power | SPE discredited; Milgram reread as engaged followership |
| ESP and experimenter effects | Pure replication rare | Replication crisis; preregistration and Registered Reports |
| Psychedelic | Term fallen into disuse | Clinical trials of psilocybin; renewed use |
| AI | Simulation in Cognitive Psychology | Large language models; theory-of-mind debates |
| Hysteria, MPD | Historical categories | Functional neurological disorder; DID |
Table 14. Eight entries then and now.
What has held, and what has not
The historical entries (phrenology, physiognomy, the schools, positivism, eugenics, lobotomy, temperament, will) remain excellent and need little updating. The critical judgements have often been vindicated: Richards's caution over the Genovese story, his doubts about PTSD counselling, his scepticism about ADHD's boundaries and about evolutionary Psychology's speculative reach all match later evidence. The clinical and technical entries have aged fastest, because the classifications changed under them and because several flagship experimental effects (social priming, ego depletion, facial feedback, induced-compliance dissonance) did not survive large replications.
The closer look, summarised
Most are slips of name or spelling (Wolpe as "Wolman", Zener as "Zenner", Frenkel-Brunswik, Lippmann, Luckmann, Abraham, Max Wertheimer). Others are wrong dates or attributions: dementia praecox credited to Bleuler, cyclothymia and schizothymia to Kraepelin, the founding of CBT in the 1990s, DID in 2000, the Binet-Simon scale in 1904, Raymond B. Cattell for James McKeen Cattell. A few are substantive errors of definition: reinforcement schedules, catharsis and cathexis, sex and gender, the four humours, a "two-way" ANOVA, and the EEG of hypnagogia and REM sleep. None undermines the book's argument, but a student relying on a key concepts reference needs them flagged.
How to use the book in 2026.
Depth-pass addendum (2026)
Diagram count is raised to meet the diagrams-greater-than-or-equal-to-pages rule after rebuild.