Psychologists in Chicago

To watch Johnny, 17 mos. old. roller-skating through the corridors of Manhattan's Babies Hospital, dressed only in a diaper and shoes, is that institution's favorite daily diversion. Johnny has been roller-skating since last April, which was before his first birthday. He now boldly coasts down inclines, steers around corners. Skating is not Johnny's sole athletic accomplishment. At seven and one-half months he began to practice swimming. Now he can dive and swim under water. Other abilities: climbing up a steeply inclined plank, climbing from a 5-ft. pedestal. Johnny's trainer from the instant he was born, when she began taking a long series of moving pictures of his every activity, has been Dr. Myrtle B. McGraw, the pretty, energetic assistant director of Babies Hospital's Normal Child Development Clinic, affiliated with the Neurological Institute. Dr. Frederick Tilney, Neurological Institute chief, thinks that civilized parents coddle their infants too long, that a child should be taught initiative and self-confidence from his earliest weeks. Dr. McGraw began to teach Johnny exercises on his 20th day. She showed him how to sit up, walk, creep. For a while he did not learn very well, but when he reached the creeping stage he began to pick up his athletic tricks rapidly. To demonstrate the validity of this thesis Dr. McGraw let Johnny's twin develop like a traditional baby. Twin Jimmy cannot skate, refuses to climb down from any stand even two feet high. When in any predicament, he shows his sense of insecurity by turning to older people for help. Next step in Dr. Tilney's study of learning processes is to phonograph every sound a child makes from birth until it begins to talk coherently. That speech study waits on some interested philanthropist providing a few thousand dollars. A merry account of doughty Johnny and timid Jimmy Dr. McGraw took to Chicago last week for the 41st convention of the American Psychological Association. Her gayety was refreshing there. For the psychologists were squabbling about the Psychological Corporation. Dr. James McKeen Cattell, 73, pioneer U. S. psychologist, formed Psychological Corp. twelve years ago. This was one of several mixtures of scholarship and business which he developed after Columbia University forced his resignation from the faculty on account of his outspoken pacifism. Dr. Cattell is currently chairman of Psychological Corp.'s directors. Professor Edward Lee Thorndike, Columbia psychologist, is president. Many another academic psychologist belongs to Psychological Corp. and earns extra money from its activities. Significant among those activities are rating the abilities of important employes of corporations and evaluating advertising campaigns. All such studies are openly published for the psychological world. All net profits go for disinterested psychological research. Immediate cause of the squabble at Chicago last week was Psychological Corp.'s current observations on advertising. Professor Arthur William Kornhauser of the University of Chicago argued that Psychological Corp. was helping business houses to exploit the public. Cried he: "It all seems to me to be in the service of the businessman. Nothing we do is in the service of the consumer or in larger terms of social implications. . . . I cannot help but wonder at times whether there is not a certain amount of hypocrisy involved in our scientific pretenses. We are not studying what the consumers' wants are, but what the advertisers want to know."

Colleagues, including Yale's reclusive, ape-observing Professor Robert Mearns Yerkes, tried to placate Professor Kornhauser. Intruded Psychological Corp.'s Dr. Henry Charles Link, who has worked for Winchester Repeating Arms Co., U. S. Rubber Co., Lord & Taylor and Gimbel Bros.: "We first try to find out what the consumer wants and then give it to him." Concluded Professor Harold Ernest Burtt of Ohio State University: "When two brands of a certain product are equally good, I think we are justified in taking a fee for telling the sponsors of one of the two how to sell his product in larger volume than the other."

The scholarly contribution of Psychological Corp. to last week's psychological conference was the analysis of a two-year survey of advertising's value. Five hundred post-graduate students under general direction of Northwestern University's Professor Samuel Nowell Stevens questioned 10,000 U. S. housewives. Uniformly, from Portland, Ore. and Los Angeles to Miami and Boston, women were impressed and excited by advertising. The advertising message meant most to the women. The dress-up of type, illustration, color and paper, meant less. Nor did abstract ideas and symbols have much influence. The women reacted most effectively to sincerity and dramatic appeal, particularly when they could use the advertised goods in their regular, daily activities.

Besides advertising, many another practical psychological study was presented at Chicago, including these:

Nicotine, when a person first begins to smoke, makes his touch unsteady and inhibits the flow of saliva, observed Cornell University's Dr. Andrew Leon Winsor. But after the 25th cigaret the effects on saliva cease. But a smoker's hand is never so steady as a non-smoker's.

Homesickness is a condition which may become strong enough to cause physiological conditions, observed Professor Beardsley Ruml of the University of Chicago. An attack may come on suddenly, which explains why children, Negroes and other uninhibited individuals may pack up without warning and clear out of uncongenial surroundings. While analyzing the psychic components of homesickness Professor Ruml concluded that "nostalgic sentiments have a varied and important role in social institutions. They affect the distribution of population. They are the foundation of patriotism, nationality. They operate to increase vocational and class stability and tend to promote conservatism in all forms. The cohesive influence in the maintenance of the family is certainly more nostalgic than sexual and probably more nostalgic than egoic."

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