mainstream public. Prozac’s approval led to the cre-
ation of many other antidepressant drugs used for
the treatment of not only depression but also other
mental disorders, and SSRIs came to be considered
the number one treatment for depression.
Further Reading
Chambers, Tod, and Carl Elliot, eds.Prozac as a Way
of Life. North Carolina: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 2004.
Healy, David.Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Rela-
tionship Between the Pharmaceutical Industr y and De-
pression.New York: New York University Press,
2004.
Wurtzel, Elizabeth.Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed
in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Jean Prokott
See also Health care in the United States; Medi-
cine; Psychology; Slang and slogans.
Psychology
Definition The science of human behavior and
mental processes and the application of this
science
During this decade, advancing brain science, sophisticated
large-scale genetic research, and disappointments about
earlier social programs dampened overconfidence in the
transformative power of social environments and insti-
gated new respect for the role of individual people each with
a unique biological, social, and genetic past. With new re-
spect for the biology of behavior, clinical psychology moved
closer to becoming a medical field.
For the decades preceding the 1980’s, prevailing
models of psychology emphasized the control of
plastic, easily molded individuals by a powerful envi-
ronment. American behavioral psychologist B. F.
Skinner had long maintained that a proper rein-
forcement procedure could train obedient children
as well as obedient dogs. An earlier generation of
psychologists implicated the bad mothering of chil-
dren as a major cause of mental illness. Post-1965
psychologists participated in a movement to im-
prove society by designing “Great Society” social
programs expected to eliminate poverty and crime
through better socialization and educational prac-
tices.
Personal Traits and Genetic History Research dur-
ing the 1980’s supported the proposition that the
personal characteristics (traits) of individuals exert
a powerful influence. A major contribution of this
decade was the development of an agreed-upon ba-
sis for describing personality. Before 1980, each per-
sonality theory had its own list of trait descriptions.
During the 1980’s, massive studies measured and
compared traits and clustered similar traits into more
comprehensive factors. Evidence from these studies
suggested that personality could be approximated
best by locating a person on five summary dimen-
sions. These dimensions, referred to as “supertraits,”
were extraversion (assertive sociability), neuroticism,
conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness (cu-
riosity and tolerance). Paul Costa and Robert McRae
showed that most people in a variety of cultures
retained stable scores on these characteristics through-
out their adult lives. Individuals who showed differ-
ences on these trait characteristics both responded
differently in the same environment and, given the
freedom to do so, selected different environments.
Several lines of research converged in the 1980’s
to support the proposition that these supertraits had
genetic roots. Even six-month-old infants showed re-
liable differences in social smiling and babbling
(extraversion) and in fussiness (neuroticism). The
similarity between genetically identical twins reared
by different parents and between adopted children
and their absent natural parents was shown to be
substantial. Such similarities could be due only to
heredity. Evolutionary psychologists argued that
these supertraits became important over the centu-
ries because they were adaptive, providing useful in-
formation to people in a variety of cultures as they se-
lected allies and leaders.
During the decade, it became apparent that ma-
jor types of psychopathology were also linked to
genetic predispositions and mediated by brain con-
ditions. The brains of patients suffering the bizarre
thinking of schizophrenia differed from normal
brains in the concentration of chemical substances
on fibers transmitting nerve impulses. Twin and
adoption studies suggested, furthermore, that he-
reditary predispositions contributed heavily both to
schizophrenia and to those bipolar patients experi-
encing cycles of depression and elation. There also
appeared to be a genetic component predisposing
some individuals to alcoholism and others to delin-
quency.The Eighties in America Psychology 781