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Date： 2024/04/25
Time： 10:00~12:00
Venue： Archives 2nd Conference Hall
Speaker：Prof. Jia-Chen Fu (Associate Research Fellow, IMH, AS)
Disscussant： Prof. Yu-chuan Wu (Associate Research Fellow, IHP, AS)
Organizer： IMH
Abstract: This paper explores one moment in the history of science and emotion in China. In 1922, an emotion test appeared for the first time in the pages of the newly established journal, Xinli (心理 Psychology), under the editorship of Zhang Yaoxiang. The source for Zhang’s emotion test was the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory, also sometimes referred to as the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, which was designed by the psychologist Robert Woodworth in 1918. Depending on which name one selects—the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory or the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet—one can draw different inferences about the test’s objective. Does it detail a list of psychoneurotic traits or tendencies? Does it present in list form objective details about a person? In contrast to the apparent ambiguity of the Woodworth test, Zhang’s translated title was rather more direct in its ambitions. He called it an “emotion test” (情緒試驗), which could be used to gauge emotional stability (情緒穩定). While there is nothing conceptually wrong with his title selection—the original Woodworth test did indeed concern itself with emotions and emotional stability—Zhang’s focus on emotion (情緒) deserves more attention, not only for its articulation as something measurable by way of a psychological test, but also for what translating the test might suggest about an ongoing process of scientific translation and world-making unfolding in the pages of Chinese popular and specialist journals.