The child in psychology

John Sants

pp. 15-45

in: John Sants (ed), Developmental psychology and society, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1980

Abstract

The child got off to a good start in psychology. Stanley Hall, who founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in America in 1883, also launched the Child Study Movement at the Exposition at Chicago in 1893. In England, James Sully established the laboratory at University College, London in 1897 and also published Studies of Childhood in 1895. Both these pioneers had made tours of Germany in search of the "New Psychology" and had there encountered its two major influences: Wundtian experimental psychology and Darwinian evolutionary theory. The laboratory experiment and the biology of the developing child were of equal interest for Hall, Sully and other founding fathers, but few psychologists were ever able to pursue the two approaches together.

Cited authors

Darwin Charles