too many interests

From Duke University’s Emergence of Advertising in America archive comes this beautiful advertisement for Diamond Dyes, published sometime between 1853 and 1920. The ad uses the negative afterimage optical illusion, which is a common sight in most first year psychology textbooks, although usually in a much more boring way. This image is actually kind of frightening.

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The Mysterious Diamond Eye Imp

Diamond Dyes

Google announced this week that they are partnering with Life Magazine to digitize the entire back catalog of Life’s images and are making them available through Google’s Image search platform. While looking through the archive I found a number of eclectic images from the history of psychology and decided to post some of the more interesting ones here. To be clear, I am not trying to tell a coherent history with this post; rather, I just selected the most iconic images I found that still illustrated some of the prominent trends in psychological research throughout the 20th century.

This first image depicts the Yale’s child psychology lab of Dr. Arnold Gesell in 1947 and is possibly my favorite for its surreal, B-movie, science fiction quality:

Child Psychology lab at Yale

According to Wikipedia:

Gesell made use of the latest technology in his research. He used the newest in video and photography advancements. He also made use of one-way mirrors when observing children, even inventing the Gesell dome, a one-way mirror shaped as a dome, under which children could be observed without being disturbed.

Here is a “The March of Time” video hosted on Google Video of a Gisell Dome in action.

Children have played an important role in the history of psychology and have an equally if not disproportionate place in Life’s images of psychology. In this picture a child navigates a glass obstacle in a box at Columbia University in 1940:

Child Navigating Glass Obstacles

Continuing the baby theme, this image from 1947 is described as showing “Baby John Gray Jr. happily playing in his Skinner box… [a] new-style crib which eliminates germs, drafts & constricting clothing because of temperature controls & slid-down glass.” Looks like a happy little tike to me:

Update: According to Dr. Christopher Green (of the wonderful and informative blog Advances in the History of Psychology) the “baby box” was not really a “Skinner box” (I had wondered about this) as it was not set up for conditioning. Instead, Skinner called it an “air crib” and it was also jokingly called a “Heir conditioner.”

Boxes for Babies

This image, from 1940, is of “a baby climbing pedestals which he has pushed together to reach the lollipop hanging from the ceiling at Normal Child Development Study at Columbia University.” I would like to see someone try to get this one past an ethics review board now:

A Baby Climbing Pedestals

This image is of Army recruits in Miami Beach, Florida taking aptitude tests in a movie theater in 1942. This is important because of the role of aptitude testing, especially in military and educational settings, to the growth of psychology in the United States in the early 20th century.

Army Recruits

Switching gears slightly as psychological research becomes more biologically oriented, this image from 1953 depicts a young girl whose “brain impulses are measured by an electroencephalograph, readings from electrodes cemented to the head may reveal tumor as cause of headache at the Headache Clinic, Montefiore Hospital.”

Girl with Electrodes

Here is an imaging technique I was not aware of from 1966, a “somersaulting x-ray machine being used to photograph the brain’s ventricles.” Looks kind of dangerous to me:

Somersaulting x-ray Machine

This image of a “patient resting on scales, showing a slight loss of skin moisture” is interesting and I would like to know more about what this research was trying to accomplish. Reminds me of a ancient (and possibly mythical) research technique I’ve heard about that balanced a subject like a teeter totter so carefully that blood flow changes during cognition would cause him to unbalance, kind of like an analogue fMRI.

Patient Resting On Scales

Kind of fancifully, this image labeled “studying mental disorders through laboratory research” from 1949 is a sign of things to come as well as a wonderful example of an almost purposely obtuse piece of scientific apparatus.

Studying mental disorders through laboratory research

Animal research has played a huge role in psychology, but more importantly, this image of a “cat pulling rat’s cart around floor as a relaxation from psychology experiments” is why the internets were invented:

Cat pulling rat's cart around floor

Note:

These images are copyrighted by Life Magazine (well.. so they claim, some of the images in the archive are definitely old enough to be in the public domain). I am assuming, however, that someone warned them that goggle-wearing, hot-air ballon flying bloggers are likely to both post and link to these images once they are in the wild, and that they are OKAY with this, at least for non-profit purposes. Clicking on any of the above images will bring you to Google Image’s page for the specific image.