One hundred years ago, in January 1922, the first issue of
Psychologische Forschung came out. It contained 14 articles, all in German, and with a remarkable breadth of topics. While most papers addressed human perception—a consistent feature of the first years of the journal (Ash,
1985; Prinz,
1985), the first article was Köhler’s “On the psychology of the chimpanzee” (all translations mine) and other articles addressed motivational (“The problem of measuring will and the basic law of association”) and cultural aspects of human cognition (“Death and life among the Kpelle in Liberia”). The articles tended to be rather lengthy (30, 50, or even more pages were frequent, only in part because of larger fonts and lower text density than nowadays) and elaborate, even though fewer references were given (and in fact available back then). Many of the authors were members of, or associated with the Psychological Institute of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin (now Humboldt University), and in the early years, the journal has often (but probably falsely: Scheerer,
1988) been considered the mouthpiece of this Institute and its theoretical preoccupations. These were clearly related to Gestalt psychology, and so many early papers developed Gestalt-psychological ideas and applied them to various domains of cognitive and to some degree motivational psychology (two areas that back then were much more integrated than nowadays). And yet, the original aim to create
Psychologische Forschung was to represent the psychological discipline in its full breadth and to publish papers in complete independence, both from particular schools of thought and from particular societies or interest groups. This is evident from the editorial appearing in the very first issue. …
