Science: Psychologists

Before James McKeen Cattell became a journalist* and a pundit honored among the cognoscenti, he was a teaching psychologist at Pennsylvania and Columbia universities. Apt was his presidency of the International Congress of Psychology at Yale last week and witty, despite length, his speech of welcome. Said he: “In so far as psychologists are concerned, America was [prior to the last 50 years] like Heaven, for there was not a damned soul there.” Another Cattell truism: ”The motions of the solar system since its beginning are less complicated than the play of a child for a day.” A Cattell social irritant, which excited dark newspaper head lines: “The objects of the sciences are more ideal than the objects of the churches; their practices are more Christian. When in the fullness of time there is a family of the nations, when each will give according to its ability and receive according to its needs, when war among them will be as absurd as it would now be for members of this congress to begin mur dering one another,— this will be due in no small measure to co-operation among scientific men of all nations in their com mon work.”

Yale’s President James Rowland Angell added amen to these idealistic sentiments, and the sessions went on.

Happy Folks. Peter Pan’s happy light flitted about Columbia’s Teachers’ College. Professor Goodwin Barbour Watson there trapped it under the lattice bushel of his studies. “In general.” said he, “the happy student is likely to be a healthy, popular, married man who thinks that he can tell a joke well, lead a discussion, act in a play, talk on sex, or lead a group. . . . He has had a harmonious home, enjoys his job, prefers adventure to peace, responsibility to direction. Not essential to happiness are intelligence, race, nationality, self-support, religious participation, ability in algebra, cleverness in writing poetry.”

Personality. Physique, dress, manners, quality of voice, choice of language and characteristic social relations all go to make your personality. But they are useful only to the extent to which they affect the people you come in touch with. Thus decided Yale’s Mark Arthur May, trying to develop a scale to measure personality. Zero would be a person who does not count for anything to anyone. High grade would be he whose presence or absence has the greatest influence on others.

Born Criminals do not exist, said George Washington University’s Fred August Moss. But many a person has tendencies which predispose him to crime, viz., epilepsy, paranoia, paresis, dementia praecox, senile dementia. Smalltown children are less apt to become criminals than children of large communities, added Columbia’s Hugh Hartshorne. A friendly classroom atmosphere is one of the most powerful influences on child character. “Moving pictures do not contribute to delinquency,” said Philadelphia’s Phyllis Blanchard. “I have sat in motion picture theatres and marveled. . . . When the villain is caught, as is always the case under the policy of those who make American motion pictures, the applause of the children is swiftest and most enthusiastic.”

Masculinity-Femininity. Men are not entirely masculine, nor women entirely feminine, proclaimed the late Otto Weininger, brilliant German who blew out his brains at 24, just after appointment to Harvard’s faculty. At Stanford University Lewis Madison Terman sought ways of measuring sex variations and found 908 points on which men and women differ according to their interests, trends, emotional reactions, preferences, aversions. One out of 100 men, he found, is more feminine than the average woman, one woman out of 100 more masculine than the average man. The sexes overlap in their traits. Living with a woman for a period of years accentuates a man’s feminine characteristics. Few men can resist the trend. Excessive “mothering” or “fathering” a child greatly influences adult sex expressions.

Racial Equalities. Although the U. S. immigration furor over better racial stocks has subsided, interest in racial superiorities continues. National Research Council’s Otto Klineberg found slight differences in the intelligence ratings of German, French and Italian children (Nordics, Alpines, Mediterraneans). City children of the three types were smarter than the corresponding country children. Nor did Vanderbilt University’s Lyle Hicks Lanier find sharp differences between Negro and white children, or New Zealand’s I. L. G. Suther-land between primitive (Maori) and civilized adults.

Genius. “Safe & Sane may also mean commonplace, unenterprising,” said New York’s Joseph Jastrow, speaking again. Few who lead significant lives are hopelessly sane. A genius is a deviate from the normal. In deviation there is hope, strength, unique value. Much of the most important work of the world has been done by men who have paid the penalty for their achievements in terms of their handicaps. Men are more susceptible to neurasthenia than women, women more prone to hysteria.

Cults. Belonging to a cult is an evidence of abnormal mentality, found Smith’s William Sentman Taylor. Belonging “reveals simplicity and mental inertia, the tendency to follow leaders and crowds, lack of critical faculty, especially experimental.”

Hallucinations and Religions. More women suffer from religious hallucinations than do men, at least in the Chicago experiences of George Washington University’s I. C. Sherman. As many institutionalized Jews as Roman Catholics have paranoidal trends. Protestants suffer less so. Every third Protestant, every fourth Catholic, every seventh Jew has hallucinations. Half of the Protestants, one-fourth of the Catholics, none of the Jews had religions hallucinations.

Smart Goldfish. Goldfish are smart enough to go to the nearest food supply, found Kansas University’s Raymond Holder Wheeler and T. J. Perkins, who tried to fool the fish.

Magazine Make-Up. Readers remember advertisements whether they are all bunched before and after editorial text or scattered through, reported Ohio State’s Harold Ernest Burtt.

Motion Pictures help children remember their lessons, help stupid ones get as good marks as those who ignore pictures. —Yale’s Daniel Chauncy Knowlton and J. W. Tilton.

Pavlov. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s ven-erable appearance at Yale’s International Psychological Congress was no anticlimax to his visit at Harvard’s International Physiological Congress (TIME, Sept. 2). The psychologists showed the old gentleman great respect. Though they knew of him only at second hand (through the Behaviorists), though he spoke in Russian and in highly technical terms on “A Brief Sketch of the Highest Nervous Activity,” they applauded him tremendously before and after he spoke. He said that he felt justified in separating certain reflexes, as food, sex, defense, from the rest of nervous activity.

Ape Colony. In New Haven’s Prospect Street, behind a high wall and adjoining the gardens of the learned community’s Victorian moguls, is a monkey house. No uncouth student ever annoys the beasts for they are the wards of Robert Mearns Yerkes. He, who made a Harvard reputation studying the behavior of the dancing mouse,* has for the past five years been discreetly studying anthropoid intelligence for God, for country and for Yale. No simple task has that been, especially since apes do not behave normally in captivity. To study them as best he could he once spent three weeks at Havana where a Seňora Rosalie and a Seňora Abreu havecolonies of simians. Professor Yerkes’ Almost Human (TIME, Dec. 14, 1925) reported his observations on ape intelligence. Chimpanzee Intelligence and Its Vocal Expressions is a related study. Last week he was in Africa collecting specimens for a purpose which Yale’s President James Rowland Angell reluctantly (for fear of meddlesome publicity) told the psychologists. That purpose is no less than to establish an anthropoid farm in Florida, where Professor Yerkes will spend most of his time comparing simian and human emotional and mental processes.â€

*Heedless reporters thought he referred to the U. S. Congress. The 1923 International Congress of Psychology was the first scientific congress after the War to which all nationals were invited on equal terms.

* In 1907, before the deaths of Harvard’s Eliot, James, Münsterberg, Royce and Palmer and the departure of George Santayana for his native Spain, ended Harvard’s primacy in philosophy and psychology.

†Unique only for the U. S. is the Yerkes plan. At Tenerife I., Canary Islands, the German Dr. Wolfgang Kohler conducted similar researches until the War disturbed him. At Kindia, Africa, the Pasteur Institute is directing very discreet efforts to cross apes and humans (TIME, April 8).