The general context of Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is a veritable melting pot of Middle-Eastern, Eastern, and Western influences and, during the 20th century, has gone through so many social and political convulsions that few other regions of the globe are even closely comparable. This region is where WWI started, where in the aftermath of WWI and the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire a plethora of new nation-states emerged and where in the aftermath of WWII at the Yalta convention, on the premise of ensuring a buffer zone that would prevent future Western aggression on Russia, communism was imposed in such countries as Albania, Bulgaria, the Czechoslovak Republic, Eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Several other countries were annexed by the USSR: Byelorussia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, and the Ukraine. This is the political, social, and economic setting under which psychology in general had a peculiar development, with ups and downs, and a yoyo-like evolution between thriving in an exceptionally manner, being then grafted on a state-sanctioned ideology, being prohibited and outlawed by a totalitarian state, and reforming again in a modern shape. This would also set the stage and provide the context for the development of psychological testing in particular.
Psychology in Eastern Europe: the early days
The first psychological association founded in this geographical space was the Moscow Psychological Society, founded in Russia in 1885opens in new window. Despite the less favorable social and political context, psychology departments and psychological laboratories emerged in most of the other East-European countries in the first 30-40 years of the 20th century. As in other areas of the globe, psychological assessment was focused in most of Eastern Europe on two areas: psycho-technics and vocational testing. In terms of sources of inspiration, research and practice of psychological assessment had in the early days two distinctive branches. First, testing thrived on a combination of strong Germany-derived experimental and psycho-technical approach that was used in a Munsterberg-inspired fashion, usually in applied, work-related settings. Second, testing was based on the translation and/or construction of measures tapping into intellectual and cognitive functioning, especially for the domain of child developmental. Psychological testing developed in all these countries as a backbone of applied psychology in industrial, educational and clinical settings. Tests were often indigenous translations of the Binet-Simon or other international scales, and champions of testing in those early days were mostly local psychologists who had been trained in Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory. International visible activity in testing was exhibited in Romania, Poland, The Former Kingdom of/Republic of Yugoslavia (especially Croatia and Serbia), Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
The dark days
Initially and unexpectedly, tests and testing in the Soviet Union were sanctioned and encouraged by the state. This initial positive situation changed in the late 1920s and early 1930s by the realization of the fundamental incompatibility between testing and the “New Man” framework proposed by Soviet ideologists. During the 1930s, as ideologically-based state censorship was imposed on all aspects of societal functioning, all the psycho-technical laboratories and institutes were shut down in the USSR, their staff being forced to specialize in other areas of face the purge of the Stalinistic regime (Salgado, Anderson, and Hulsheger, 2010). During the same period, the practice of psychological measurement was officially banned across the USSR, being largely regarded as incompatible with Soviet doctrine (Leopoldoff, 2014)—true to the principle that “if it cannot be measured, it does not exist,” state-level censorship had thus found a very effective manner in which to make sure that individual differences did not exist or at least were not talked about. Officially, the start of the Dark Days of Psychological Science in Eastern Europe started with an official prohibition of testing practices in the mid-1930s: On July 4, 1936, the entire science of “pedology” was officially forbidden by the decree issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). This is likely one of the major specific events in the history of Russian and East-European psychology: This single measure was the official signal announcing the demolition of psychology across the entire Eastern Block, i.e., the states that would become communist states less than 10 years later (Matesic, 2011). In most of the Eastern European countries the practice of psychological assessment was completely expelled from educational and clinical fields, surviving only in those areas where it was deemed as absolutely necessary, e.g., industry and transportation.
A rare glimpse into the (communist) state of affairs on psychological assessment from behind the Iron Curtain was authored by Landy (1986). In the attempt to appear as a flexible and liberal leader, Ceausescu (Romania’s then dictator) allowed Frank Landy to visit Romania and to discuss and start collaborations with a number of psychologists (Iliescu, Ispas, and Ilie, 2007). As reported by Landy (1986), the set of psychological measures available in the few industrial laboratories was in reality far wider than the authorities assumed to be the case or were aware of. Apart from a number of legacy measures from the “psychotechnical era,” psychologists kept on using translated versions of renowned measures of cognitive ability and personality, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices or the California Psychological Inventory. When not having access to the international “gold standards,” psychologists working in these laboratories used to devise their own tests, as replicas and copycats of internationally acclaimed measures.
The revival
After the fall of communism and the return of the Eastern European states to democracy, psychology was quickly reinstated as a stand-alone academic discipline across all these countries. During the same period, psychological testing assessment reemerged with a vengeance. Both indigenous test production and adaptations of established international “gold standards” boosted. Universities resumed the practice of teaching how to administer and interpret tests. New test publishing companies were established in all these countries. The entire test-related infrastructure was reassembled from scratch in a timespan of less than 20 years. To date, testing in all Eastern-European countries is a well-established professional practice, tied to both European and international practices.
Most of the test publisher from this part of the world have decided to join international organizations, such as European Test Publisher’s Group, a trade association that promotes ethical testing and strong standards of quality in test publishing, or the International Test Commission. Many of them affiliated members of the European chapter of the Association of Test Publishers. The ebullience surrounding psychological testing is visible in the relatively high attendance rates at conferences of the International Test Commission, the European Association for Psychological Assessment, and the Psychometric Society, where practitioners and researchers from the respective countries are regular attendees.
The reestablishment of psychological testing in these regions was not without challenges. First, in all these countries, testing survived in a “grey area”; being unregulated or plainly forbidden, low quality copies were sold “under the counter.” Intellectual property was consistently infringed during this period. Such practices expanded also into the academic environment, universities becoming centers of dissemination and often distribution of such illegal copies of otherwise reputed international tests. Second, more often than not the tests that were distributed “under the counter” were obsolete or plainly old forms of established measures. The process of replacing these measures was long and tedious, as both academics and practitioners had a strong attachment to using the measures that in the dark days represented almost a form of protest against an abusive system. Third, cultural test adaptation was almost inexistent for what were then replicas of obsolete measures. Gradually, most test publisher and researchers adopted the current scientific standards as recommended by current consensus (Iliescu, 2017). Contemporary psychometric practices in test adaptation and norming were only slowly adopted and accepted.
To date, the transition has finished. The repertoire of professionally published tests available in each of these countries is relatively wide, ranging from at least of few dozens to over one hundred individual measures. All the testing domains are properly represented across all these countries. Tests cover most of the relevant psychological practices, clinical, vocational, educational, and industrial-organizational. However, one limitation is that test adaptation and construction in many of these countries is significantly impacted by the high costs and low return that is typical for countries with smaller populations. It costs just as much to develop a measure in the U.S. as in Albania, their market size being incomparable.
Conclusions
In the years to come, the science and practice of psychological testing across these countries is expected to follow a similar trend as the one encountered in the U.S. and Western Europe. Psychological assessments powered by intelligent technologies (e.g., “artificial intelligence”) have started to emerge in this region, especially in personnel selection. Features like computer-generated reporting and synchronous/a-synchronous virtual assessments are also expected to be more and more popular in several areas of applied psychology. In the realm of clinical adopting such technologies has a somewhat slower pace compared to other areas of applied psychology, such as I-O Psychology. This is partly due to the dependence of psychological practice on the public healthcare systems which are in the process of becoming fully technologized.
About the authors
Dragos Iliescu (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Andrei Ion (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Krunoslav Matesic (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia)
References
Iliescu, D. (2017). Adapting Tests in Linguistic and Cultural Situations. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press
Iliescu, D., Ispas, A., and Ilie, A., (2007). Psychology in Romania, The Psychologist, 20 (1), 34-35
Landy, F. J. (1986). Psychology in Romania. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 24, 21-25
Leopoldoff, I. (2014). A psychology for pedagogy: Intelligence testing in USSR in the 1920s. History of Psychology, 17(3), 187-205. doi: 10.1037/a0035954
Matesic, K. (2011). 80 years of Lifelong Career Guidancc in the Republic of Croatia: New Challenges and Approaches. Zagreb: Hrvatski zavod za zaposljavanje (pp. 13-15). Available at: http:/Avww.hzz.hr/UserDocsImagcs/ Zbomik_radova_konferencije_80_god_CPU_u_RH.pdf. (DEAD URL)
Salgado, J. F., Anderson, N. R., and Hülsheger, U. R. (2010). Employee selection in Europe: Psychotechnics and the forgotten history of modern scientific employee selection. In J. L. Farr & N. T. Tippins (Eds.), Handbook of employee selection (p. 921-941). Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group
