The (ab)normal-social-personality catena: Exploring The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology during the interwar years.

Abstract

This paper is a co-citation network analysis of The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (JASP) from 1925 to 1942. The analysis was conducted to help shed light on the historical roots of the intellectual and institutional relationships between social, personality, and abnormal psychology. JASP was a main venue for the boundary work of early-to-mid twentieth-century American psychologists. One of the main goals of these various research communities was to appropriate psychoanalytic and sociological concepts into preferred methods and approaches that favoured an individualistic, quantifiable, and normal subject. Five major research communities are identified and historically contextualized: Community #1: Measuring Social Aspects; Community #2: Psychometrics; Community #3: Operationalizing Psychoanalysis; Community #4: Introversion Studies; and Community #5: Experimental Social Psychology. This analysis demonstrates how disciplinary psychologists, at least within JASP, were united by the work of delimiting their work from closely aligned fields studying the same concepts--even if their methodological commitments to experimentalism or psychological testing might have ostensibly divided them. Possible future research incorporating post-WWII research and dynamic networking approaches is recommended.

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No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.