Reprinted from Wedding, D., & Stevens, M. J. (Eds.). (2009). Psychology: IUPsyS Global Resource (Edition 2009) [CD-ROM]. International Journal of Psychology, 44(Suppl. 1), "Origins" section.

DOI: 10.1080/00207590143000180

Zeitgeist, Ortgeist, and personalities in the development of Scandinavian psychology

Ingvar Lundberg
Göteborg University

Although the Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden are most often perceived as a rather homogeneous set of nations there are interesting diversities in the paths and patterns of the development of psychology. The strong experimental, neurobiological, and cognitive orientation of psychology in Finland and Sweden is contrasted with the more phenomenologically and clinically oriented psychology in Norway and Denmark. The concepts of Zeitgeist, Ortgeist, and personalities are used to explain the different courses of development in the Scandinavian countries. In Denmark and Norway a few dominant personalities in a few dominant university departments seem to have shaped the formation of psychology to a greater extent than in Finland and Sweden. The relatively late start of psychology as an independent academic discipline has opened Sweden and Finland to impulses from the Anglo-American empirical tradition. Within-country differences are high-lighted with special reference to the Swedish development. Various local “schools” of psychology are characterized with Stockholm as the most notable example. Although psychophysics plays an insignificant role in Swedish psychology today, a pedigree with reference to Gösta Ekman demonstrates its critical and dominating role for the development of psychology in Sweden. Bien que les pays scandinaves, Danemark, Norvège, Finlande, et Suède, sont souvent perçus comme un ensemble homogène de nations, il y a des différences intéressantes dans le parcours et le développement de la psychologie. La forte orientation expérimentale, neurobiologique et cognitive de la psychologie en Finlande et en Suède contraste avec la psychologie plus phénoménologique et clinique de la Norvège et du Danemark. Les concepts de Zeitgeist, d’Ortgeist et de personnalité servent à expliquer les différents parcours du développement de la psychologie dans les pays scandinaves. Au Danemark et en Norvège, quelques personnalités dominantes dans quelques universités semblent avoir façonné la formation en psychologie davantage qu’en Finlande et en Suède. Le début relativement tardif de la psychologie en tant que discipline scientifique indépendante a ouvert la Suède et la Finlande aux influences de la tradition empirique anglo-américaine. Les différences à l’intérieur des pays sont mises en lumière en se référant plus particulièrement au cas de la Suède. Différentes écoles locales de pensée en psychologie sont apparues avec Stockholm comme exemple le plus marquant. Bien que la psychophysique joue maintenant un rôle mineur dans la psychologie suédoise, elle a eu, comme le montre la référence à Gösta Eckman, un rôle crucial et dominant dans le développement de la psychologie en Suède.

Scandinavia

The Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland¹, are often perceived as a homogeneous group of nations, unified not only by their geographical neighbourhood in the northern periphery of Europe but also by similar languages (except for Finnish), common historical and cultural traditions, similar political patterns, high priorities of social welfare systems, and high egalitarian ambitions.

However, there are interesting diversities in many fields, including the development of academic psychology, where strong personalities, subtle cultural differences, and academic traditions have influenced the courses of development. This paper will describe the cross-national differences with special reference to the Swedish situation, where also within-country differences will be analyzed.

A dramatically growing volume of research and a mounting differentiation of research have characterized the development in most countries and in most disciplines. However, the patterns and the paths of development have been rather different within Scandinavia. The strong experimental, neurobiological, and cognitive orientation of Swedish and Finnish psychology will be contrasted with the more phenomenologically and psychotherapeutically oriented psychology of Denmark and Norway. The growth of psychology in the Scandinavian countries will also be related to the demand of useful applications of psychology in rapidly changing societies.

Three themes will run through this brief sketch of the development of Scandinavian psychology: Zeitgeist, Ortgeist, and personalities. The first term refers to the spirit of the time, a specific atmosphere and stream of thinking that has emerged during a specific time in history, the habits of thought that pertain to the culture and period. For example, in the beginning of 1900 Gestalt psychology was not just the result of an accidental and fruitful meeting of three scientists but rather the convergence of several ideas that fitted well into the cultural, technical, and historic situation in central Europe during that period. The development in Scandinavia has not taken place outside the dominating Zeitgeist during various periods of the 20th century.

The term Ortgeist refers to the specific manifestations of the zeitgeist that happened to emerge in a specific place or region. Key persons often played a decisive role in shaping the ortgeist. But historical and geographical conditions could also have an effect. For example, experimental psychology was developed in Germany, but the German influence on the formation of psychology ceased with the rise of the Nazi State in 1934. France was primarily the country of abnormal psychology. England’s great scientific contribution was Darwin and his theory, which has had such a profound influence on thinking in psychology as well as in biology. The movement in America was away from mentalism to functionalism and behaviourism.

Kuhn (1962) suggested that social and cultural forces develop paradigms at various stages of the development of a science. Eventually an alternative model replaces a paradigm for scientific work accommodated by new findings. Although the development of psychology in Scandinavia might be explained and understood in such general terms as zeitgeist and paradigmatic shifts, it seems also quite relevant to point to the influences of leading personalities. As we will see, some individuals, more than others, have contributed considerably to shaping the specific paths psychology has taken in the different countries. My presentation will emphasize the importance of influential personalities without denying the impact of social and cultural factors over and beyond individual achievements.

DENMARK

It is quite natural to start with Denmark, since psychology had a particularly early start here with the establishment of a psychological laboratory in Copenhagen in 1886 by Alfred Lehmann. He had been inspired to this remarkable deed by a visit to Wundt in Leipzig. Lehmann’s laboratory, which was one of the earliest in the world, soon became the basis of academic teaching of psychology in Denmark. In 1919 he was appointed professor of psychology. He died 2 years later and was succeeded by Edgar Rubin, most known for his ambiguous pictures (e.g., the vase/opposed profiles) illustrating the figure-ground phenomenon. Both Rubin and Lehmann were very much influenced by Harald Höffding, the great and dominant Danish philosopher.

The fact that Copenhagen University was for a long time the only place in Denmark where psychology was taught and that only one professor represented the whole field has probably had profound consequences for the development of Danish psychology. The total dominance of Edgar Rubin is reflected by the fact that during his period as the chair of the psychology department in Copenhagen (1921–1951) no doctoral thesis in psychology was published. This tradition of low productivity of psychological research has, with few exceptions, continued to characterize Danish psychology. The establishment of a psychology department in Aarhus during the 1960s has to some extent changed this situation, although productivity is still far behind that of Sweden.

The psychological profession was also established earlier in Denmark than in Sweden. One consequence of that might have been a stronger focus on applied psychology, especially in the clinical field, and a stronger focus on the training of psychologists than on academic research and international publishing.

In a small country a new research field faces two serious risks. One is that some chance circumstance, sometimes in the guise of a towering figure, will impress a very special stamp on the course of events, giving it a skew that may bear fruit for a time but sooner or later may be doomed to stagnation. The other risk is that feelings of smallness and weakness may make researchers cling to one or another tendency in international research, and thereupon evolve an unreflecting dependence which effectively inhibits their own development.

It seems as if the first tendency permeated psychological research in Denmark and to some extent also Norway during a considerable part of the 20th century, whereas the Anglo-American influence was very clear in Sweden and possibly also in Finland.

NORWAY

The dominant figure in Norway was Harald Schjelderup. He spent some time in Vienna in the 1920s and got deeply involved in psychoanalysis. A few years later he became the first professor of psychology in Norway. He lectured on psychoanalysis and wrote a very influential textbook on psychology published in numerous editions over several decades. His professorship in Oslo lasted for 40 years. Through Schjelderup’s deep influence the Norwegian training of psychologists has had a strong psychodynamic and therapeutic direction. Even today, a majority of the 23 professors of psychology at Oslo University express interests in dynamically based psychotherapy.

However, the Norwegian situation became rather complex. Although Oslo and Schjelderup for a long time completely dominated the scene, important changes occurred during the later part of the century. The psychological department in Bergen was transformed into a full faculty with some 10 departments each chaired by a full professor. The prime initiator of this forceful marking of the importance of psychology in society and academic life was Björn Christiansen.

Bergen now became a powerful balance to Oslo. However, three of the most influential and productive researchers had a Swedish background: Dan Olweus in personality and development, and Arne Öhman and later Kenneth Hugdahl in conditioning, emotion, and neuropsychology. The establishment of a psychology department in Trondheim created another balance.

In Oslo, Schjelderup was succeeded by Per Saugstad, Ragnar Rommetveit, and Jan Smedslund. Saugstad had his main interests in philosophical issues and he significantly increased the awareness of the theoretical and historical basis of psychology among Norwegian psychologists––a remarkable contrast to the busy and empirical orientation of their Swedish colleagues. Rommetveit also had a philosophical orientation and focused on the psychology of communication and language. Smedslund was in contact with Piaget at an early stage and published a series of very influential studies on children’s concepts of objects. He has also shown the traditional Norwegian interest in basic theoretical assumptions in psychology.

Despite the geographically and personally more balanced situation in Norway, there are obvious similarities with the Danish conditions, partly due to the common history (Norway was actually a part of the Danish kingdom until the Napoleonic wars, when Sweden and Norway formed a union that was dissolved in 1905). The university systems in Norway and Denmark are very similar to models from central Europe. In both countries there is also a high priority given to the training of professional psychologists. This emphasis seems to have been made at the cost of academic research, which has a far lower level of productivity in terms of international publications than in Sweden and Finland. However, the Anglo-American influence on research has, for some reason, probably been much stronger in Norway than in Denmark, with its more continental orientation. Maybe the post-war orientation of Norway was more markedly directed towards the USA, at least as far as higher education was concerned.

FINLAND

Comparable to Höffding in Denmark, the great Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila exerted a strong influence on the early development of psychology in Finland. However, the capital of the country did not dominate the scene in the same way as in Denmark. Turku balanced Helsinki, both through the old Swedish Åbo Academy and the more recently established Finnish-speaking university of Turku. In 1922 a psychological laboratory was already established in Turku, and in 1955 a department of psychology was organized at the university. In the 1950s, psychological departments at the university of Jyväskylä and the university of Tampere further balanced the situation.

One of the most influential psychologists among the pioneers was A. Lehtovaara, especially through his textbook, which totally dominated the market. Kai von Fieandt was another distinguished professor in Helsinki, primarily a researcher in perception with good contacts with American as well as German psychology. In Turku, J.M. von Wright built a strong department profiting from his early British contacts established during postgraduate studies in Oxford. He was also Swedish speaking and, as the Finnish editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, he contributed to keep the Finnish window open towards the West. Many of his graduate students are now influential professors at various universities in Finland.

Among many important pioneers in Finnish psychology we should also recognize Kirsti Lagerspetz in Turku, who has studied aggression with animal models, Martti Takkala in Jyväskylä, with important contributions to personality research, and Tapio Nummenmaa in Tampere, with his main focus on development. Later the department in Jyväskylä has become an important centre of excellence in developmental psychology, with Lea Pulkkinen as the leading figure.

Neuropsychology has a long tradition in Finland. Risto Näätänen in Helsinki has done pioneering work on evoked potentials, and his group is now among the top in the world in this field. Another brilliant group is found in Jyväskylä under the leadership of Heikki Lyytinen. Pekka Niemi in Turku leads a notable group with their focus on reading research.

The overall impression of the current standard of Finnish psychology is that it has now reached a very high international level in several central fields, particularly in cognitive neuropsychology and developmental psychology. With regard to the size of the population (5 million) and the linguistic barriers to be overcome, the situation is indeed impressive. No single factor can explain this remarkably high achievement. The Ortgeist balance and the relatively late start of psychology might be relevant factors. The traditionally high level of need to achieve in the Finnish culture has yielded excellence in architecture, science, music, visual arts, design, sports, information technology, etc. The remarkable achievements in psychology fit well into this pattern. We should also recognize the Finnish system of financing research programmes with strong emphasis on excellence and basic and theoretically oriented research.

SWEDEN

The early formation of psychology in Sweden

Swedish psychology has a long past but a relatively brief history. In the 19th century, psychology in Sweden, as in most other countries, was an integrated part of philosophy. The first university chair in psychology was established at Uppsala University as late as in 1948. Within a few years psychology chairs were established in Stockholm, Göteborg, and Lund. The academic life of psychology had previously been embedded within the discipline of education, an examination subject at Swedish universities which had been created as the consequence of a major reform of the secondary school system in the beginning of the century. Psychology was then regarded as the core scientific basis for education. Its academic life under the wings of education, however, did not flourish.

Thus the real history of Swedish psychology begins sometime during the 1940s, which is a rather late date, seen internationally. However, a most remarkable person had already appeared on the Swedish scene in 1937. This was David Katz, who had escaped from persecution in Germany. He was a highly regarded and eminent experimental psychologist with a long academic career behind him before he came to Stockholm, where he stayed as professor in education until his retirement in 1951. Although Katz was the only exponent of Swedish psychology with a wide international reputation, he did not have any strong and long-lasting influence on the development of psychology in Sweden. Among his few students in Stockholm we can note Gunnar Johansson, who filled the chair in psychology in Uppsala in 1957.

The greatest impact on the formation of Swedish psychology into an independent empirical science was actually exerted by the military system during World War II. The Recruitment and Replacement Office of the Swedish Armed Forces needed different kinds of aptitude tests and more extensive psychological examinations of special personnel categories. Torsten Husén became the scientific director of this work, and soon after his appointment in 1942 Gösta Ekman was also involved. These two young men, still in their twenties, both had their basic academic education at the university of Lund, but their methodological skills were developed within the context of the military work.

The psychometric work became important in several ways over and above its primary concern with military psychology. It laid the foundation for all the further development of Swedish psychology. Husén studied twins and also published important research on the impact of schooling on IQ. Ekman did important work on test reliability. The large-scale studies in the military system generated new approaches to psychological field research as well as the use of technical aids, such as tabulating machines. The statistical sophistication also increased within this framework of enormous quantities of data.

The Uppsala school

In 1950 Gunnar Johansson published his pioneering doctoral dissertation on event perception. Rigorous control of the experimental situation, and the use of technical aids and measuring procedures that were virtually unknown in Swedish psychology in these times characterized th is admirable work. A few years later (in 1957) Gunnar Johansson filled the chair of psychology at the university of Uppsala. Here he founded one of the best-equipped laboratories in Europe and formed a research team of young, enthusiastic students of whom several later became influential professors (Sten Sture Bergström, Claes von Hofsten, Göte Hanson, Sverker Runesson, Erik Börjesson). Besides basic studies of perception of events, movements, and spatial configurations, the Uppsala group has also devoted much interest to research on traffic safety with night driving and brake reaction times as good examples of the issues addressed.

Independent of Johansson’s perception group, another influential group was established in Uppsala under the leadership of Ingmar Dureman. The main focus here was on psychopharmacology and conditioning. Among Dureman’s many students the most notable are Arne Öhman, Per Olof Sjödén, Lennart Melin, Kenneth Hugdahl, Mats Fredriksson, and Gunilla Bohlin, all now professors. Despite the strong dominance of Johansson and the psychology of perception in Uppsala during the initial period, it now seems that the Dureman tradition has became stronger. Today, Uppsala has about nine full professors, most involved in biological, cognitive, or developmental psychology.

The relative decline of perception research and the flourishing fields of psychophysiology and development is to some extent tied to the specific interests and training background of the key persons on the current scene, but to some extent it also reflects the international Zeitgeist. Advances in brain imaging techniques and other methods have opened up new and exciting possibilities. The pattern of contributions to this congress also reflects the current Zeitgeist, where perception is a category with a comparatively small number of contributions.

The Stockholm school

Ekman’s methodological and psychometric insights developed within the framework of differential psychology were applied to the new field of scaling and psychophysical measurement. S.S. Stevens at Harvard had initiated the interest of basic problems of measurement in psychology. He had also developed direct methods for measuring subjective quantities, which were related to the physical measures. L. Thurstone contributed to the scaling field and psychophysics by his indirect methods based on variability. These two eminent researchers had a profound influence on Swedish psychology during the formation period in the 1950s. Gösta Ekman was the one who could capture the new ideas and develop them further. His brilliant intellect and analytical attitude attracted good people who all saw a possibility of developing psychology into a basic, paradigmatic science modeled after more advanced disciplines.

The Stockholm group rapidly increased in size, partly due to the fact that psychology became the basis for a new profession of psychologists and partly because psychology obtained a very favourable and privileged financial situation as it was classified as an experimental subject with expensive laboratory equipment. This status also implied a very restricted admission policy due to limited laboratory space. The selection of students was based on their achievement at an introductory course. The competition became extremely hard, and the students selected were generally highly motivated and talented. This favourable status for psychology was to a large extent due to very successful lobbying by Gösta Ekman and his senior lecturer David Magnusson.

The financial and personnel basis thus gave the conditions for a rapid growth of research activities in Stockholm under Gösta Ekman’s inspiring leadership. In the initial phase the methods of magnitude estimation and ratio estimation were applied to determine the exponents of the psychophysical power functions of a large number of different sensory continua. Later the scaling techniques were extended to measurement of learning and memory, similarity, multidimensional measurement, and scaling of psychological attributes without any specific physical correspondence. The Stockholm laboratory attracted a number of foreign guests and developed into an international centre of high regard.

Many of Ekman’s students later occupied psychology chairs in Sweden. The Ekman pedigree is presented below.

Mats Björkman filled the chair at the new university of Umeå in northern Sweden;

Lennart Sjöberg moved to Göteborg;

David Magnusson succeeded Ekman on the Stockholm chair when Ekman was appointed research professor by the Swedish Council of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences;

Gunnar Goude filled a chair in Uppsala;

Marianne Frankenhaueser became the first professor of psychology at the Karolinska Institute;

Hannes Eisler and Teodor Kunnapas were both appointed personal professors;

Birgitta Berglund obtained a special chair in environmental psychology in Stockholm, and

Yvonne Waern received a professorship in Linköping.

After Ekman’s untimely death in 1970, and after the move of several of his co-workers, the interest in psychophysics and scaling declined. Instead, David Magnusson’s works on development and personality became the dominant and characteristic field in Stockholm. Magnusson’s longitudinal studies and his interactionistic theoretical position have given him well-deserved international fame. Under his leadership the Stockholm department has grown into one of the most comprehensive and impressive academic environments for research and teaching of psychology in Europe, where psychophysics and scaling is now a rather small branch in the broad tree of modern psychology.

Umeå

In 1966 a new psychology department was established at the new university of Umeå in northern Sweden. The first chair was filled by Mats Björkman, a former student of Ekman in Stockholm. Together with a group of young, enthusiastic people primarily recruited from Stockholm and Uppsala he created a very active team of researchers. Björkman’s primary interest was in the field of learning. He applied Thurstonian indirect scaling to measure the growth of the reaction potential during learning. In Umeå he became more influenced by Brunswik and used the lens model for studying how people utilize cues in social judgements and in predictive behaviour. The relatively small department had an impressive record of international publishing, which was further reinforced when Lars-Göran Nilsson from Uppsala succeeded Mats Björkman.

Nilsson’s interest was cognition and memory, and he inspired a large number of students to follow his path. Several of them have later become professors (Rönnberg in Linköping, Bäckman in Göteborg and later in Uppsala, Ohlsson in Luleå, and Mäntylä and Nyberg in Umeå). After more than a decade in Umeå Nilsson moved to Stockholm to succeed Magnusson. However, Nilsson still influences the activities in Umeå through his large longitudinal study of memory and ageing, the Betula study, which now gives an impressive yield of publications, also seen in the impressive number of contributions to this congress.

The Umeå department also exported a number of other researchers to southern Sweden. The most notable are perhaps Tommy Gärling, who now has a very strong group in Göteborg on decision making and environmental psychology, and Claes von Hofsten, who has returned to Uppsala after a long period in Umeå where he had established a well-equipped laboratory for studying perceptual and motor development in infants. Ingvar Lundberg went to Göteborg where he formed a new group concerned with reading research. Furthermore, a significant part of the staff at the psychology department at Linköping university had their graduate training in Umeå.

Göteborg

The first professor of psychology in Göteborg was John Elmgren. He had studied the psychology of memory with Pierre Janet in Paris. But his main achievement to benefit Swedish psychology was probably his introduction of factor analysis. Elmgren’s impact on the development of Swedish psychology through his students, however, has been rather limited. The professors of the Göteborg department were in most cases recruited from other departments or were students of another key person in Göteborg, Knut Larsson.

Larsson established an animal laboratory and has, since the late 1950s, and with impressive persistence and devotion, studied sexual behaviour in rats; its sensory, neural, hormonal, and social control. Among Larsson’s students who later became professors we can note Sven Carlsson, who left the animal laboratory and studied phobias and later chronic pain, tinnitus, and similar conditions. He has developed a more integrated, systems-oriented, or biopsychosocial perspective on health and coping. Another of Larsson’s students was Stefan Hansen, who stayed with the rats but has been concerned with more general issues in behaviour neuroscience. The third of Larsson’s students who became a professor was Philip Hwang. From the start he had studied infants and young children, especially issues related to parenting and socialization.

Another field in Göteborg was the psychology of work and organization. Sigvard Rubenowitz was the leader of an active group, which has done impressive applied studies in communities and large industries in the region. International publications and theory development, however, have had lower priorities than the ambition to demonstrate the practical usefulness of psychology.

Elmgren’s successor was recruited from Stockholm and the Ekman group in 1970. Lennart Sjöberg’s interests now changed from scaling and measurement to more general questions on human cognition and decision making. One of his students from Stockholm, Henry Montgomery, joined him in Göteborg. He later returned to Stockholm, now as full professor. Sjöberg also eventually returned to Stockholm but this time to the Stockholm Business School, where he filled a chair on risk analysis. The dominant fields in Göteborg today seem to be developmental psychology and clinical psychology, with Erland Hjelmquist and Philip Hwang as leading figures. However, Knut Larsson and some of his co-workers still run an animal laboratory, which is the only one remaining in Swedish psychology.

Lund

Gudmund Smith, who has given the dynamically or psychoanalytically oriented psychology of personality an experimental and perceptual basis, has heavily dominated psychology in Lund. His leading idea has been that the perception process over time successively reflects different layers of organization in the individual, first primitive and then increasingly turned towards the real world. Thus, the development of a percept in a sense reflects the development of an individual’s personality. A long series of empirical studies has been inspired by this hypothesis. By experimentally prolonging the perceptual process it has been considered possible to capture deeper layers of personality. More recently Smith has studied creativity, departing from the dynamic theory that also guided his earlier personality research.

Jarl Risberg, who worked together with neuroscientists and studied cerebral blood flow as a correlate to mental activities, represents another line of research in Lund. This research had pioneering quality, since the studies were performed long before the use of PET and fMRI with a technique first developed in Lund and Copenhagen.

Concluding comments on Swedish development

Compared to Denmark and Norway the development of psychology in Sweden has taken a different course. Geographically the situation has been more balanced in Sweden, with no single personality dominating the field. Psychology also had a relatively late start, which might have opened Sweden to impulses from the Anglo-American empirical tradition.

As a formal, independent discipline studied and taught in universities, psychology has existed in Sweden for only 50 years. The world congress of psychology arranged in Stockholm in 1951 had a few dozen Swedish participants. Today at this congress some 2000 Swedes are present, representing special fields or branches of psychology of which many were totally unknown or nonexistent half a century ago. It has indeed been a fantastic development.

It is not very easy to single out any feature that would essentially impart some kind of national uniqueness to Swedish psychology. Obviously, one can point to fields that could be better developed, and some areas are certainly at the forefront, but the general impression is that Swedish psychological research is successfully integrated into the mainstream scientific community dominated by the Anglo-American tradition.

Today a picture of Swedish psychology emerges characterized by diversity, expansive vitality, empiricism, and productive efficiency, almost unaffected by the reflective and critical European discussion on fundamental assumptions in science and on alternatives to the dominating positivistic tradition.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

The man is counted great whose insights are crucial and lead to long-continued important progress. “The progress of science is the work of creative minds” (Boring, 1950). It is not difficult to point out a number of great figures that have had a lasting impact on the development of psychology, e.g., Darwin, Freud, William James, Skinner, Vygotsky, and Piaget. No such dominant and influential person can be pointed out in Scandinavia. There is no doubt that some individuals have had a great impact on its development within Scandinavia, but their international status has not been comparable to some of the portal figures mentioned

From the rhapsodic review presented here it is, however, quite clear that the following persons have had the strongest influence on the development of psychology in Scandinavia:

Denmark: Höffding, Lehmann, Rubin

Norway: Schjelderup, Rommetveit, Smedslund, Christiansen

Finland: Kaila, Lehtovaara, Von Fiendt, Von Wright

Sweden: Ekman, Magnusson, Johansson, Dureman

NOTES

This review has primarily been based on the author’s personal experience over the past 40 years as a student, teacher, and researcher at three Swedish universities, as a professor II at the Bergen University, Norway, as a docent at Åbo Akademi, Finland and as a consultant for the Center of Reading Research and the Dyslexia Research Foundation in Stavanger, Norway. Furthermore, my experience as assistant editor and consultant of the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology as well as my involvement in National Research Councils have provided rich opportunities to be in touch with research activities in many fields in Scandinavia. Also my direct participation in joint Scandinavian research projects has been of value.

REFERENCES

Boring, E.G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

© 2001 International Union of Psychological Science
DOI: 10.1080/00207590143000180