Bluma Zeigarnik

Bluma Zeigarnik
Zeigarnik c. 1921
Born	Zhenya Bluma Geršteinaite (1900-11-09)9 November 1900 Prienai, Suwałki Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Lithuania)
Died	24 February 1988(1988-02-24) (aged 87) Moscow, Soviet Union
Known for	Zeigarnik effect Being a member of the Vygotsky Circle
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Berlin
Academic advisors	Kurt Lewin
Academic work
Discipline	Psychopathology

Bluma Zeigarnik (Template:Lang-ru; 9 November [O.S. 27 October] 1900 – 24 February 1988) was a Soviet psychologist of Lithuanian origin, a member of the Berlin School of experimental psychology and the so-called Vygotsky Circle. She contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period.

In the 1920s she conducted a study on memory, in which she compared memory in relation to interrupted and completed tasks. She had found that interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones; this is now known as the Zeigarnik effect. From 1931 she worked in the Soviet Union. She is considered one of the co-founders of the Department of Psychology at the Moscow State University. In 1983 she received the Lewin Memorial Award for her psychological research.

Early life and education

Zeigarnik was born as Zhenya Bluma Gerštein (or Geršteinaite) into a Jewish family in Prienai, Suwałki Governorate (now in Lithuania) to Wulf and Ronya Feiga Gerštein, as their only child. Her primary language was Russian, although it was normal to speak also Yiddish, Lithuanian, and Polish. Bluma's parents informally adopted her future husband, Albert Zeigarnik, and paid for education of both children abroad. In 1922, the future couple left for Berlin, where he studied at the Polytechnic Institute and she at the University of Berlin. They married in Kaunas on January 9, 1924. At at the University of Berlin, she met Kurt Lewin and upon graduation assisted him in his experimental work. She graduated in 1925 and received a Doctoral degree from the same university in 1927.

She described the Zeigarnik effect in a thesis prepared under the supervision of Kurt Lewin.

Later life

In 1931 Zeigarnik relocated from Berlin to Moscow, where she started to work closely with Lev Vygotsky at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity belonging to the Section of Natural Science of the Communist Academy, at the Psychoneurological Hospital of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (existed in Moscow in 1932–1944), and from the 1940s, at the Institute of Psychiatry in Moscow.

In 1940, a major event happened in Zeigarnik's life; her husband Albert was arrested and sentenced (on February 26, 1942) by the Special Council of the NKVD to 10 years in prison in a labor camp, which is often referred to as Gulag, “as an agent of foreign intelligence and for espionage activities" (rehabilitated on June 27, 1956). By this time, they had two children, one six years old (born in 1934) and the other less than a year old (born in 1939); she was left to take care of them by herself. Albert died in the camp in the 1940s.

During World War II, Zeigarnik and her children were evacuated from Moscow. At that period, she worked together with Alexander Luria and other psychologists in the Neurosurgical Hospital No. 3120 in Evacuation in the village of Kisegach, Chelyabinsk oblast, where she was engaged in the restoration of cognitive and mental functions after brain injuries and rehabilitation treatment of the wounded.

Zeigarnik during the 1980s

In 1983 Zeigarnik was awarded the Lewin Memorial Award for her psychological research. Zeigarnik died in Moscow on February 24, 1988.

Influences

One of Zeigarnik's first influences was Kurt Lewin. Zeigarnik met Lewin in 1924 at University of Berlin. During this time, Lewin was a teacher and a researcher. Zeigarnik liked his progressive views and started her scientific career within his research group. It was with Lewin that she developed her well-known theory: the Zeigarnik effect. Not only was Lewin the main influence in Zeigarnik life, but he was also a good friend. Another Influence of Zeigarnik was Lev Vygotsky. Zeigarnik met and started working with him, as well as with Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontyev in 1931. Together they studied topics involving mental structures and general psychology. Their research also allowed Zeigarnik to create and name her own field of psychology.

Research and contributions

In the 1920s, Zeigarnik continued her study under Lewin's supervision and was able to conduct a study on memory in which she compared memory in relation to interrupted and completed tasks and found that people tend to remember interrupted tasks better than those that are completed. This finding became known as Zeigarnik effect.      

In the 1930s, she began to work at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity, where she was influenced by Vygotsky. Being influenced by Vygotsky, she started to work on various problems related to pathologies of reasoning, psychotic and personality disorders, post-traumatic silliness, ect. Gita Birenbaum, another Lewin’s disciple and a graduate of the University of Berlin, was a close collaborator of her.

In the 1940s, Zeigarnik worked on the problems of brain injuries. This work continued in 1941–1943 in the Neurosurgical Hospital No. 3120 in Evacuation organized by Alexander Luria. Her primary interest was the loss of spontaneity upon military injuries of the frontal lobes of the brain. Another area of her research in the hospital was reactive post-concussion deaf-muteness.

Zeigarnik's work provided great service to her country and as a pathophysiology, she established the use of her work in medical care, specifically in clinical work. Zeigarnik's copious experience helped her present the stages of development of Russian Psychology. Her work had a clinical focus which helped psychiatric health professionals focus their attention on mental health issues. In addition, she continued to teach and concentrated on the importance of mental health and clinical practice. Later, Zeigarnik concluded that the importance of taking personality assessment of the patient's psychological state and general understanding of their defect structure was key. Zeigarnik stated that, "Any problem suggested by psychiatric practice, whether it concerns the examination of disability, or the study of the structure of remission, or the effectiveness of treatment - the data of psychological study comes useful only at once, when and where they suggest a qualification of the whole personality rather than a certain mental process".

Zeigarnik effect

Main article: Zeigarnik effect

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks (this effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect). In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.

Awards and honors

Zeigarnik received the Lewin Memorial Award in 1983. This award was named after her former professor Kurt Lewin, and is commonly rewarded to those who help to expand and develop psychological research. Despite strict policies Russia had at the time; especially regarding political bans between East and West, the receipt of this award had eventually been reviewed and approved, but Zeigarnik was not allowed to travel outside of the country.

Selected publications

• 1927: Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen. Psychologische Forschung 9, 1-85.
• 1965: The pathology of thinking. New York: Consultants Bureau Enterprises.
• 1972: Experimental Abnormal Psychology. New York: Plenum Press.
• 1984: Kurt Lewin and Soviet psychology. Journal of Social Issues 40, 193.

Sources

• Van Bergen, A. (1968) Task interruption. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.
• (in Russian) Biography of Zeigarnik on the website of the MSU Department of Psychology
• A.V. Zeigarnik, "Bluma Zeigarnik: A Memoir" in Gestalt Theory (2007), no 3, pp. 256–268.
• Yasnitsky, A. (2011). Vygotsky Circle as a Personal Network of Scholars: Restoring Connections Between People and Ideas. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, doi:10.1007/s12124-011-9168-5.

Sources

• Zeigarnik, B. (1938). On finished and unfinished tasks. A source book of Gestalt psychology, 1, 1-15
• Denmark, F. L. & Russo, N. F. (1987) Contributions of Women to Psychology Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 38: 279-298
• Baumeister, R.F., & Bushman, B.J., (2008). Social Psychology and Human Nature. United States: Thompson Wadsworth.
• Johnson, P.B., Mehrabian, A., Weiner, B. (1968). Achievement Motivation and the Recall of Incompleted and Completed Exam Questions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 59(3), 181–185.
• Burke, W. W. (2011). A perspective on the field of organization development and change: The Zeigarnik effect. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(2), 143–167.
• Nikolaeva, V. V. (2011). B.W. Zeigarnik and pathopsychology. Psychology In Russia: State Of The Art, 4176-192.

External links

• Bluma Zeigarnik: A Memoir by A.V. Zeigarnik