Advance in the Study of Mental Hygiene
NEWS AND COMMENT.
The Ninth Annual Meeting of The National Committee for Mental Hygiene, Inc., was held February 7th in New York City.
Mr. Otto T. Bannard, Treasurer, announced that gifts amounting to more than $30,000 for general expenses had been contributed during the past year by four donors, one of whom had pledged $100,000 toward an endowment fund that is being raised. The Rockefeller Foundation contributed $34,000 for special purposes, such as surveys of conditions among the insane and feebleminded. Short addresses were given by Dr Walter E. Fernald on “Supervision of the Feebleminded in the Community”; Dr William A. White, “Influence of Mental Hygiene upon Methods of Dealing with Crime and Criminals”; Dr. William L. Russell, “Some of the Indirect Results Which May Be Expected to Follow our Surveys of the Care and Treatment of Mental Diseases”; Professor William H. Burnham, “The Role of Mental Hygiene in Education”; Dr E. E. Southard, “The Community as a Unit for Mental Hygiene Work”; Dr Henry R. Stedman, “The Teaching of Mental Hygiene in Medical Schools.”
During the past year surveys have been completed in the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin, and are now in progress in the cities of Chicago and New York. State societies for mental hygiene are now organized in sixteen states.
During the coming year emphasis will be laid upon the educational work of the committee. A feature of this work will be the publication of a quarterly journal, “Mental Hygiene,” the first number of which was issued during January. It is a substantial magazine of 156 pages, containing articles on Unemployment and Personality,” by Prof. Herman M. Adler; “Provision for the Feebleminded in the United States,” by Dr Walter E. Fernald, with a table showing the existing institutions state by state; and “Mental Adaptation,” by Dr Frederick Lyman Wells, as well as six other papers of uncommon merit. The Journal is published at 50 Union Square, New York City.
W ith Regard to Psycho-Motor Norms.
To the Editor of the Psychological Clinic: On the basis of a diagram of the formboard in which the dimensions of the blocks had not been drawn in entirely correct proportions by the makers, A. 1., in reviewing our Psycho-Motor Norms in the Psychological Clinic, February, 1917, p. 270, draws certain erroneous inferences which require correction, in order that no one consulting the monograph may have any doubt as to the formboard used.
The formboard reproduced on page 1 of the monograph was printed from a cut which we assumed had been properly drawn because it was secured from C. H. Stoelting Co., who had used it to illustrate their formboard No. 78002 on page 1 of a circular entitled “Tests Used in the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey, by Dr Henry H. Goddard.” In this formboard which we used the square does not go into the circle, rectangle or hexagon, and the diamond will not go into the hexagon. In the preliminary exposition of our results we referred to the test as the modified Seguinian formboard,” and specified that it was “Number 18002 in Stoelting’s catalogue,”1 while in the reference given on p. 11 of the PsychoMotor Norms” which we made to our earlier use of the formboard (Experimental Studies of Mental Defectives) we stated that the “Vineland pattern was used. On the strength of a statement made by Goddard we named the board after Seguin, in recognition of his early work on formboards we had, moreover, Previously seen a formboard in an institution which was said to have been devised by Seguin and which we inferred was the original model of the board we used and also made due acknowledgments to Norsworthy and Goddard. Ihe Formboard is one of the many good things we have inherited from Seguin. Norsworthy … embodied it among her tests… . Our present board is a slight modification of the one used by her.”2 Since this statement was made in 1912 while Norsworthy wrote six years earlier our statement evidently could only have referred to Goddard’s adaptation of the board. Norsworthy does not tell us anything about the derivation of her board.3 Sylvester employed a formboard in which he used Goddard s arrangement and size of forms, but reversed their order, made the recesses shallower, used 1 Age Norms of Psycho-Motor Capacity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1916, p. 19. 2The Formboard as a Measure of Intellectual Development in Children, The Training School, June, 1912. 8 The Psychology of Mentally Deficient Children, 1906, pp. 25 and 26. hard wood, contrasted the colors of board, blocks and recesses and gave the whole a more attractive appearance.1 The essential difference between this board and the one we used is simply the reversal of the order of the blocks: the forms are absolutely the same.
Sylvester’s experimental data did not show in what respect or to what an extent the arrangement which he used represented an “improved type of board,” nor do they show that the results secured from this board are so different that they cannot be compared with the results obtained by the older arrangement. On the contrary, Sylvester found that even blocks of different sizes (but the same shapes) gave “practically the same” results (p. 6), while he considered that the study of the “re-arranging the forms” “would probably contribute little to the efficacy of the device” (p. 7). “Without a long and elaborate series of experiments (probably not worth while), one could not improve on the size, arrangement and choice of forms as they appear on the standard formboard” (p. 12). Both Goddard and Sylvester regard this as the “standard formboard,” and in this judgment we concur, after having used the board with many thousands of cases.
Wallin.
Summer Courses in Psychology at University of Pennsylvania. The illustrated announcement of Courses in Psychology at the Summer Session of the University of Pennsylvania is now ready and may be had for the asking. Address a postal card to Professor Edwin B. Twitmyer, College Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. ‘The Formboard Test, 1913, p. 3.
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