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AnamneseArchive of Psychology

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The Journal

Longer pieces beyond the case files: essays on the history and testing of psychology, with sources.

Lead story30 August 202613 min read

Eight hundred soldiers and a new disciplineHow Luria built neuropsychology out of war injuriesIn a hospital in the Urals, Alexander Luria saw some eight hundred men with head wounds. What he learned there about abilities falling apart became neuropsychology — and carried on the questions of a cultural psychology that had begun in Central Asia.
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All pieces

  1. 30 August 202621 min readA Prison That Calls Itself PeaceAn eagle leads the player through a tear in the Animus; behind it lies a captive in chains made of data. The short quest from Assassin’s Creed Shadows asks a serious question: may a system rewrite painful memories if it eases suffering — and who decides when safety becomes a chain?
  2. 30 August 202612 min readThe Measure of Culture Is Itself MeasuredIn 1987 the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology carried a paper with no individual author: 40 Chinese value terms, put to respondents in 22 countries. The project decentred Western psychology — and produced new templates of its own.
  3. 30 August 202613 min readOne Thousand and Thirty-Seven Children, Fifty YearsEvery child born in one New Zealand hospital between 1 April 1972 and 30 March 1973 has been examined again and again ever since. Their data speak of self-control, crime, mental health and ageing — and of the limits of every prediction.
  4. 30 August 202613 min readThe Group as a Tool, Not an AudienceIn June 1958 around a thousand people spent three days working on a shared task in some thirty groups. Out of those three days in Rosario came a method that no longer charged symptoms to one person alone — with every risk that carries.
  5. 30 August 202612 min readThe doctor who resigned from his own hospitalIn 1953 Frantz Fanon took charge of a ward of two hundred and twenty patients in a colonial asylum near Algiers. Three years later he resigned — with a letter that asked psychiatry whether it can heal at all inside such an order.
  6. 30 August 202611 min readShot for a SurveyIn 1986 a Jesuit in San Salvador founded the country's only independent polling institute and published, in the middle of a civil war, what the population actually thought. Three years later an elite battalion shot him, five of his brethren and two women.
  7. 29 August 202614 min readThe cure that never happenedIn Studies on Hysteria, “Anna O.” became the patient said to have been made well by talking. The asylum records tell a different story — and Bertha Pappenheim's later life a far larger one.
  8. 29 August 20266 min readThe suspect in position threeAnyone facing a lineup compares face with face, not face with memory. What follows: fair fillers, blind administration — and the first, unreinforced statement of confidence, which is worth more than the field long believed.
  9. 29 August 20267 min readThe victims were not the gullible onesWhen fraud victims were compared with non-victims, the expected difference failed to appear: no less education, no less prior knowledge. Fraud does not feed on stupidity but on the social rules without which cooperation would be impossible.
  10. 29 August 20267 min readWhy does red feel like red?We can trace ever more precisely how the brain processes information. Why processing is experienced at all remains open — and whether that question is scientific, philosophical, or both.
  11. 29 August 20266 min readFive Factors, Extracted from DictionariesPersonality is made of dials rather than types. The Big Five describe regular differences, but predict neither morality nor a person's next act with any certainty — and outside the usual samples they do not always appear at all.
  12. 29 August 20267 min readFour boxes from a newspaper questionnaireThe categories of adult attachment come from a love quiz in a Denver daily paper. They describe expectations about closeness usefully enough — but the three established measures do not capture the same thing, and they agree only weakly.
  13. 29 August 202612 min readBinet Wanted to Help, Not to SortA French commission set out in 1904 to find a way of assigning support to children with learning difficulties. Two decades later the same instrument helped justify immigration barriers and forced sterilisations in the United States.
  14. 29 August 202612 min readA man who could only say “Tan”In 1861 Paul Broca saw the brain of a patient who had barely been able to speak for over twenty years — and made of it the most famous address in brain research. Nothing discovered about it since still fits that single point.
  15. 29 August 202610 min readThe word “doll” does not appear in the rulingIn the 1954 ruling the word doll does not occur once; the name Clark occurs exactly once. What Mamie and Kenneth Clark's tests really showed, what they achieved in court — and why the legend of the experiment that toppled a law harms psychology.
  16. 29 August 20267 min readThree dimensions, not a secret type of personIn 2002 Paulhus and Williams put three separate research traditions side by side for the first time. Their verdict: overlapping, but distinct. The argument ever since has been about how much of that distinctness the questionnaires actually deliver.
  17. 29 August 20267 min readThirty seconds are enough — for some thingsTen seconds of silent film were enough to predict end-of-term teaching evaluations. One second of a face was enough to predict Senate elections. The difference between those two findings is the whole lesson of the first impression.
  18. 29 August 20267 min readWhy innocent people admit to crimesA confession counts as the queen of evidence. Yet isolation, sleep deprivation, false claims about the evidence and the promise of a way out can bring innocent people to sign as well.
  19. 29 August 202611 min readThe Child Who Was Made Into a QuestionOn 4 November 1970 a nearly blind woman in Temple City walked into the wrong office. With her was her thirteen-year-old daughter, who barely spoke. What followed was at once a rescue, a research project, and a lesson in what science owes a person.
  20. 29 August 20267 min readThe face was never a piece of evidenceFaces produce impressions of trust and competence in a flash. The same person looks different from one photograph to the next. AI can scale these prejudices, not turn them into truth.
  21. 29 August 202612 min readThe analyst who contradicted FreudGirindrasekhar Bose founded the Indian Psychoanalytical Society in 1922 and sustained a dialogue with Freud for years. He was not a disciple on the margins but a theorist who reread the Oedipus complex from India.
  22. 29 August 202613 min readA man in a permanent presentAn operation in 1953 took from Henry Molaison the ability to form durable new conscious memories. Half a century of research on him showed that memory is not a single system — and it still raises questions about consent and control of the data.
  23. 29 August 202613 min readThirty Men Nobody Could Tell ApartThree experienced judges were asked to pick the homosexual men out of anonymous test protocols. They did no better than chance. Evelyn Hooker had first changed the sample — and with it the burden of proof.
  24. 29 August 20267 min readThe Brave Officer Who Does Not RememberIn 1785 Thomas Reid produced an old general who has forgotten the flogging he took at school, and held Locke's theory of the person refuted by it. Whether Locke ever claimed what Reid refuted is disputed to this day.
  25. 29 August 20268 min readWith real decisions the signal is missing altogetherA brain signal began before the reported decision — and out of that came the headline about the powerless self. When the same measurement was repeated in 2019 on a decision with real consequences, the signal was strikingly absent.
  26. 29 August 202614 min readA Nobel Prize for an operation that cured nothingTwenty patients, no control group, less than five months to the announcement of success — and fourteen years later the Nobel Prize. Lobotomy was not a medieval error but modern medicine, with conferences, statistics and press coverage.
  27. 29 August 20268 min read54 percent — barely better than chanceNervousness is not a lie detector. Truth and deception produce no unambiguous faces; good inquiry looks for verifiable details, not a betraying muscle.
  28. 29 August 20268 min readThe child is not waiting on characterOne child, one treat, and the promise of a second: Walter Mischel studied how attention makes waiting easier. It became a forecast for an entire life — until larger samples showed how much of it was family background.
  29. 29 August 20267 min readWhen Bombing Becomes “Servicing the Target”Albert Bandura described eight routes by which people keep their moral standards and get around them all the same. The standard is not given up — only its link to the particular act is cut, often by nothing but language.
  30. 29 August 20267 min readThe diagnosis nobody may make from a distanceIn 1964 a magazine polled psychiatrists about a presidential candidate none of them had examined. Out of the lawsuit came a professional rule — and out of a research term the most popular label for bad behaviour.
  31. 29 August 202613 min readShe refused to give electroshocksIn 1946 Nise da Silveira took charge of a neglected occupational-therapy unit in Rio de Janeiro. Instead of breaking people she gave them paint, clay, animals and relationships — with great effect, and with open scientific questions.
  32. 29 August 202612 min readGage Drove a Coach, for YearsIn 1848 an iron bar shot through Phineas Gage's skull. He became the textbook proof of the disinhibited frontal-lobe patient — while the record reports a man who years later was driving mail coaches in Chile.
  33. 29 August 20267 min readCold, criminal, incurable?A single figure assembled from twenty items helps decide detention, treatment and release. In an experiment with 108 paid expert witnesses it shifted systematically toward whichever side appeared to have retained them.
  34. 29 August 20267 min readThe accuser under suspicionIn 1973 David Rosenhan reported that healthy people had been admitted to psychiatric hospitals and were not recognised there as sane. Half a century later his own admission record surfaced — and it said something else.
  35. 29 August 20267 min readA scan says nothing about this one personEvery act has a neural correlate. Neither guilt nor innocence follows from it. Law asks about capacities and actions; a scan can contribute, but it cannot take over the normative judgment.
  36. 29 August 20267 min readFewer Than One Per Cent of All MurdersIn 2008 the FBI wrote down what is wrong with the popular figure of the serial killer — beginning with its share of lethal violence. The cases in the files look nothing like the cases in the screenplay.
  37. 29 August 202613 min readThe War Ended, the Diagnosis Did NotIn the First World War soldiers trembled or fell silent without a visible wound. The changing names for their suffering say as much about the military and morality as they do about trauma.
  38. 29 August 202613 min readActing while the fear remainsMorita therapy does not promise to remove fear before action. It rearranges attention and activity: feelings may come and go while a person does what needs doing. That sounds modern — and it has a specifically Japanese history.
  39. 29 August 20267 min readIt Is Not Things That Disturb Us, but JudgementsIn 1962 Ellis called the Stoics the discoverers of his principle; in 1976 Beck traced cognitive therapy back to them. The ancestry is declared, then — which does not make it an inheritance. What travelled from Epictetus into the consulting room, and what was left behind.
  40. 29 August 20267 min readProfilers get the whole right, not the detailMeta-analyses find a slim advantage when profilers judge the overall picture of an offender — and none for age, appearance or offence behaviours. The assumption that similar offences point to similar offenders failed a test on 100 rapists.
  41. 29 August 202612 min readThe village instead of the asylumIn 1954 the new hospital at Abeokuta had neither beds nor money. Thomas Lambo turned neighbouring houses into places of treatment — and a makeshift into a famous question: can psychiatry be modern without colonising culture and community?
  42. 29 August 20267 min readThe effect twenty-one laboratories did not findIn 1989 twenty-two judges set bail more than nine times as high for the same defendant — after being reminded of their own death. Three decades later twenty-one laboratories looked for the same effect and did not find it.
  43. 24 August 20267 min readFive famous studies, five different endingsSince 2015 one number has hung over the field — roughly a third of the tested findings survived repetition. Five famous studies show what that number means and what it does not.
  44. 10 August 20267 min readTwo Candidates, One Day Apart, No CertaintyIn 1920 Watson and Rayner conditioned a fear into an infant and lost sight of him. Two research groups have identified him since — as two different children, born on consecutive days.
  45. 19 July 20267 min readSix Days of Experiment, Fifty Years of StoryThe world's most famous prison study was never an experiment in the strict sense. What lay in the Stanford holdings in 2018 took the legend apart — and left something smaller and harder behind.
  46. 28 June 20268 min readOne Verb Is Enough to Move a MemoryOne word in a question changes the speed a witness remembers; an invented shopping mall becomes a childhood memory. Elizabeth Loftus's research turned memory from an archive into a workshop report.
  47. 7 June 20268 min readThe Barnum effect: why horoscopes workIn 1948 a lecturer handed every student the same personality analysis — and nearly all of them felt precisely described. The effect still carries horoscopes, type tests and a fair share of consulting conversations.
  48. 17 May 20267 min readFood Was Never the AnswerThe doctrine said the child loves its mother because she feeds it. A wire frame with terry cloth, a WHO report and twenty minutes of laboratory buried that theory — and put something testable in its place.
  49. 26 April 20269 min readSeven thinking errors — and which of them passed the testAvailability, anchoring, confirmation, loss aversion — the error theory of judgement is well evidenced and still routinely told wrongly. A field guide with the state of the evidence attached.
  50. 5 April 20268 min readThe tablet works even when there is nothing in itSixty patients, twelve monthly packs, three kinds of contents — and almost the same complaints on the drug as on placebo. What the placebo effect can really do, where it ends, and why its dark sister is the practically more important half.
  51. 15 March 20268 min readThe Thirty-Eight Witnesses Never ExistedThe line experiments pass for proof of blind conformity, the murder of Kitty Genovese for proof of big-city indifference. Neither story survives the files — and what remains instead is better.
  52. 22 February 20268 min readThe Dream as Noise — or as WishFreud read dreams as disguised wishes, Hobson as brainstem noise, Solms found patients who complicated the picture again. The story of an argument in which both sides turned out to be right — just not where they wanted to be.
  53. 25 January 20267 min readThe Doll That Hit BackChildren struck a doll they had never seen before — with the movements of an adult nobody had rewarded. What the experiment carried, what was loaded onto it, and what is left of both.
  54. 11 January 20268 min readWhat Is Learned Is Not Helplessness but ControlDogs that stopped looking for the way out became the laboratory model of depression. In 2016 Maier and Seligman declared their own reading of it the wrong way round — a study in self-correction.
  55. 14 December 20259 min readWhat the IQ measures is not what it promisesIn 2022 four industrial psychologists recalculated the field's most famous validity figure and found it systematically too high. A history in five stations — from Binet's welfare mandate through the immigration laws to the curves that first rose and then fell.
  56. 23 November 20258 min readDoes a Face Mean the Same Everywhere?Six faces, readable everywhere in the world — so the textbooks said for decades. Then a construction theory took the evidence apart. The emotion quarrel is the field's liveliest foundational conflict.
  57. 2 November 20258 min readTherapy Works — The Quarrel Is About WhySince 1936 research has kept finding the same annoyance — properly conducted psychotherapies work about equally well, whatever the school. What the dodo finding means, what speaks against it, and why both camps have helped patients.