140 FARRERAS
person’s job and career is related to his or her values and emotional
and physical health.^9
Robert A. Cohen, the director of the clinical research program, was
interested in having a sociology section within the clinical program as
well and thus offered to fund and add clinical positions to the laboratory,
making it, in late 1955, the third joint basic-clinical laboratory in the
NIMH intramural program.^10 The resulting Section on Social Studies in
Therapeutic Settings, headed by Morris Rosenberg, was concerned with
the influence of social factors on the forms and effectiveness of treatments
provided in mental hospitals, including the patients’ adaptation to the
hospital world and of the consequences of this for rehabilitation. Spe
cifically, the section studied: 1) the interactions and relationships among
patients and between patients and staff in mental hospitals; 2) the adop
tions of, attitudes toward, and responses to traditional patient and nurs
ing roles; 3) the social life of the mental hospital patient; 4) the lines of
communication and patterns of decision-making in the hospital; 5) the
values, norms, and behaviors of administrators, physicians, nurses, attend
ants, and patients; 6) the relationship between various psychological and
social background factors and the chronic schizophrenic’s reluctance to
affiliate with others; and 7) birth order in schizophrenia.^11 Rosenberg
stepped down as section chief in 1959 to join Kohn’s Section on Com
munity and Population Studies and pursue research on adolescent self-
image and self-ideals and their relationship to tension, depression, and
neuroticism as well as values, attitudes, and interpersonal relationships.
Anthropologist William Caudill, who joined the laboratory in July 1960,
replaced him and studied cultural factors involved in the occurrence
and treatment of psychiatric illness in Japan.^12
The Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies was very involved
in collaborative research with other branches. In conjunction with the
Laboratories of Psychology and of Clinical Science, the section actively
studied the interrelationships between psychosocial and physiological
conditions in an elderly population. The section also collaborated with
four other laboratories and branches in the self-identification, social rela
tionships, and family-community influences in monozygotic quadruplets.
The section worked with the Child Research Branch observing and