By the way, the unreliability of having the Association express its opinion by mail was comically shown at this meeting. A project for the certification of consulting psychologists which I reported as having been favored by a considerable majority of the Association when presented through the mails was turned down vociferously by the psychologists present in the flesh. The mail canvass is, however, valuable for the publicity it gives a project.
During the next five years I attempted, with the aid of my students, various small studies in the difficult field of emotions; also, with the help of a grant from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a questionary study on sources of pleasure, anger, and fear in groups of Italian and Russian Jewish women in New York and Chicago.
When the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council was constituted I was a member for the first year, but was not re-elected; in 1924, I was elected by the Psychological Association for a three-year period. While Dr. Stratton was chairman of our Division of the National Research Council, he established a committee on the experimental investigation of emotion, appointing me chairman and Drs. Dodge and Dunlap as the other members. I do not think my fellow-members were hopeful as to the prospects of this committee, whose object was to discover ways and means, including funds, for such investigation. In fact, when I arrived at our first committee meeting I found one of them on the point of resigning. He consented to remain, and we called a conference of experimental workers in the field of emotion at Columbia on October 15 and 16, 1926. It was attended by Messrs. F. H. Allport, Blatz, Brunswick, Dodge, Dunlap, Gesell, Landis, Moore, Nafe, Wells, and Woodworth, besides several others who came in for an hour or two. Our committee presented to the next meeting of the Council a report recommending the support of researches by Lashley and Landis. Unfortunately, at this time the Laura Spel-[p. 353]man Foundation, the chief source of funds for our Division of the National Research Council, announced its intention of supporting no more individual projects, so the pessimism of my fellow-members was justified.
In the autumn of 1925 Titchener resigned the editorship of theAmerican Journal of Psychologyon account of a difference of opinion with Dallenbach, its sole owner, with regard to the ultimate disposal of the property. Dr. Titchener was, I am convinced, in the wrong, and the breach was a grief to Dr. Dallenbach, who had felt for him a most loyal affection. At the Christmas meeting of the Association that year, Bentley, Boring, Dallenbach, and I discussed in the study on the top floor of the Dallenbach house until midnight the future of theJournal. When we descended to the wives of these gentlemen, patiently waiting before the living-room fire, we had agreed to edit theJournaljointly, and thus began an association which has been unclouded by a single disagreement or unpleasant feeling. Dr. Dallenbach bears with conspicuous ability the heaviest burden of the work.
A second edition ofThe Animal Mindhad appeared in 1917, nine years after the first, and a third one seemed to be due in 1926; this time the book was very considerably rewritten. Reviewing Woodworth'sDynamic Psychologyin 1918, I began to realize how completely my motor theory had ignored the explanatory function of the drive. Of course, one had taken for granted that an animal would not learn without a motive, but, as I analyzed in 1926 the recent literature on learning, especially the work of Szymanski, it became clear that the drive explains the formation of successive movement systems by being present throughout the series, and by setting in readiness its own consummatory movements. A paper on "Emotion and Thought," written for the Wittenberg Conference on Feelings and Emotions, discussed some relations between the passage of drive energy into visceral and non-adaptive muscular movements, as in emotion, and into tentative movements and the 'activity attitude,' as in thinking. In my address as retiring Chairman of Section I of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December, 1927, I used the passage of a drive into the activity attitude as a mechanistic explanation of purposive action, and urged that vitalism and emergent evolution, in general, are too ready to adopt the primitive mind's recourse to unknown forces. The address also suggested that a precursor of the activity attitude might [p. 354] be the 'orientation towards a goal' observed in animals learning a maze path; this idea was further developed and some experimental results, showing the influence on maze orientation of the presence of food during the running and of the initial run's direction, were presented at the meeting of the Ninth International Congress in September, 1929.
The enthusiasm with which theGestaltpsychology was being preached in America during these years by Köhler and Koffka was far from being unwelcome; it was a real pleasure to have the patterns of consciousness, surely among the most fascinating objects in the universe, made the subject of thorough study and experiment instead of being stupidly ignored after the behaviorist fashion. It did, however, appear that configurationism was inclined to take vocabulary for description and description for explanation, and might well be supplemented by motor principles. At the 1925 meeting of the Psychological Association I suggested how the nature of the motor response could be used to explain certain phenomena of perception which are fundamental in theGestaltdoctrine, and, in a round-table discussion at the International Congress meeting in 1929, I made a similar suggestion in regard to association. Köhler, in replying, said among other things, "Why should we be expected to explain? Why is it not enough for the present to describe" or words to that effect. This delighted me, for I had expected him to say, "We configurationists have a thoroughly adequate principle of explanation, but unfortunately Miss Washburn is unable to understand it!" Which would have been unanswerable, because, in its latter portion, quite true.
The results of experimental work, if it is successful at all, bring more lasting satisfaction than the development of theories. Some of the small studies from the Vassar laboratory which have covered a period of twenty-five years do give me a measure of such satisfaction, to wit: certain observations on the changes occurring in printed words under long fixation; the fact that the movements of the left hand are better recalled than those of the right, probably because they are less automatized; the fact that movement on the skin can be perceived when its direction cannot; observations on the perception of the direction in which sources of sound are moving; observations on retinal rivalry in after-images; a study of the trustworthiness of various complex indicators in the free association method; experiments on the affective value of articulate sounds and its sources; the [p. 355] concept of affective sensitiveness or the tendency to feel extreme degrees of pleasantness and unpleasantness, and the fact that it appears to be greater in poets than in scientific students; the first experiments on affective contrast; the fact that the law of distributed repetitions holds for the learning of series of hand-movements; the study of revived emotions. In 1912, Miss Abbott and I proved red color-blindness in the rabbit, and, incidentally, that the animal reacts to the relative rather than the absolute brightness of colors, a fact later exploited by the configurationists. A student, Edwina Kittredge, proved that a bull-calf also was red color-blind; this coincided in time with Stratton's disproof of the notion that red angers bulls. In 1926, I published a study on white mice, in which, measuring activity by the actual speed of motion in the maze, and hunger by the time spent in eating, the effects of hunger and those of the impulse to activity were separated; another feature of this study was that each mouse's results were treated individually.
The Wittenburg Conference on Feelings and Emotions, October 19-23, 1927, was a remarkable affair. The readers of this article all probably remember how the wonderful energy and efficiency of Dr. Martin Reymert, with the enlightened support of the college administration, made the opening of a psychological and chemical laboratory at a comparatively small Ohio college a truly international event. It is likely that other speakers beside myself arrived at Springfield wondering whether any one but ourselves would be present to hear us. Dr. Carr told me while we waited in the crowd outside the assembly room that he had telegraphed Dr. Yoakum not to make the long journey up from Texas, as the conference might not justify the trouble; the latter disregarded this advice and came. In fact, the conference was worth far more than any meeting of the Psychological Association, since many of the leading psychologists of Europe and America sent or presented papers, and the audiences must have averaged five hundred psychologists. I had an odd experience at the close of the discussion of my paper. A fiery black-haired member of Congress startled the audience by rising from the fronts seats and fiercely challenging something I had been quoted as saying in a newspaper interview the previous day about the superiority of education over legislation as a means of reform. He reminded one so vividly of a statesman out ofMartin Chuzzlewit, and the size of the disturbance he made was so comically out of proportion to the insignificance of its cause that one could not help enjoying the incident. Later I was [p. 356] told that he was seeking re-election. On the last day of the conference honorary degrees were conferred upon some of the chemists and psychologists; my being included was, I was sure, due to my having been the only woman speaker, but I liked being photographed standing between Dr. Cattell and Dr. Cannon.
The Christmas holidays of this same year were also full of excitement. A year previously Dr. Dallenbach had written me of theJournal'splan to publish a volume in my honor commemorating the end of a third of a century of psychological work. The project was to have been a secret until carried out, but "Boring's Quaker conscience" felt that I should be warned. I was quite overwhelmed at the prospect.
The Christmas meeting of the Association in 1927 was at Columbus, Ohio. As I was not well, and had to go to Memphis to give the address of the retiring Chairman of Section I of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, I decided to omit the Psychological Association meeting; but on learning that my Journal colleagues planned a dinner for me at Columbus, my duty and inclination were alike plain. On Wednesday evening I spoke at Memphis before a joint dinner for Sections H (education) and I; Dr. Haggerty, as the retiring Chairman of Section H making the other address. There were not more than forty persons at the dinner, and they were all educators, quite uninterested in what I had to say about purposive action; all the psychologists had left for Columbus except Mr. and Mrs. Gates, to whom I addressed myself with pleasure. The great advantage, however, which the section chairmen of the American Association for the Advancement of Science enjoy is that of having their addresses printed inScienceand thus reaching the finest scientific audience in the world: I had later several interesting letters from men in other fields who shared the mechanistic point of view of the paper. At the close of the dinner I betook myself to the railroad station to wait from 9:30 P. M. to 3:30 A. M. for the only train that would get me to Columbus in time for theJournaldinner. The train was good enough not to be late, and, by dressing for dinner before reaching Columbus, I, too, was on time to dine with a group of friends in whose company I seemed very small and unworthy: twenty of the contributors to the Commemorative Volume (a title that made me feel like a blessed shade). Most of those who contributed were asked to do so because I had been associated with them on one or another of the psychological journals. Dr. Bent-[p. 357]ley presided, Dr. Pillsbury spoke for theAmerican Journal, Dr. Yerkes for theJournal of Comparative Psychology, Dr. Langfeld for thePsychological Review, and my former colleague, Dr. Helen Mull, for Vassar, while Dr. Warren presented the volume in the wittiest speech of the evening. Dr. Dallenbach was the moving spirit of all.
A conference of experimental psychologists was called by Dr. Dunlap at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in March, 1928, to consider ways of advancing experimental research: I did some preparatory work for this in analyzing the results of a questionary on the equipment of the various psychological laboratories which Dr. Dunlap had sent out in order to get a basis for choice of the institutions to be represented at the conference; and also the latest reports of the various foundations to find what percentages of their gifts had gone to pure science. Needless to say, the percentages were very small indeed. Of the several suggestions adopted at this conference, that of the formation of a National Institute of Psychology, with headquarters at Washington, is now being carried out. It reminds some of us of the lapse of years; active members of the Institute will automatically become associate members of the age of sixty. Another recent conference called under Dunlap's direction was of editors and publishers of psychological journals. Various matters were profitably considered; for example, an excellent set of rules for the preparation of manuscripts by authors was formulated. Unfortunately, it takes more time to make an author follow rules than to correct his manuscript oneself.
In the spring of 1928, having developed some fatigue symptoms, I took the only leave of absence I have ever had and went on a Western Mediterranean cruise, my first trip abroad since my fourteenth summer. Appetite thus being whetted, in the summer of 1929 I spent a fortnight in England.
The Ninth International Congress of Psychology, September 1-8, 1929, is still fresh in our memories; in mine it lingers as a recollection of talks with old and new friends, whether sitting on benches in the beautiful Harkness Quadrangle or at tables where we enjoyed the super-excellent food of the Yale cafeteria. I am sure our foreign friends will never forget
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One of the difficulties in writing these recollections has been that the present is so much more interesting than the past. It is hard to keep one's attention on reminiscence. Scientific psychology in America -- though not, alas! in Germany, its birthplace -- seems fuller of promise than ever before. The behaviorists have stimulated the development of objective methods, while configurationism is reasserting the importance of introspection; and, best of all, pure psychology is enlisting young men of excellent ability and a far sounder general scientific training than that possessed by any but a few of their predecessors.