The (Ab)Normal-Social-Personality Catena: Exploring The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology During the Interwar Years

This article is a cocitation network analysis of The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (JASP) from 1925 to 1942. The analysis was conducted to help shed light on the historical roots of the intellectual and institutional relationships among social, personality, and abnormal psychology. JASP was a main venue for the boundary work of early- to mid-twentieth-century American psychologists. One of the main goals of these various research communities was to appropriate psychoanalytic and sociological concepts into preferred methods and approaches that favored an individualistic, quantifiable, and ultimately normal subject. Five major research communities are identified using the citations, and historically contextualized: Community #1, Measuring Social Aspects; Community #2, Psychometrics; Community #3, Operationalizing Psychoanalysis; Community #4, Introversion Studies; and Community #5, Experimental Social Psychology. This analysis demonstrates how disciplinary psychologists, at least within JASP, were united by the work of delimiting their research from closely aligned fields studying the same concepts-even while psychologists' methodological commitments to experimentalism or psychological testing might have ostensibly divided them. Possible future research incorporating post-World War II research and dynamic networking approaches is recommended.