Cheiron’s book prize committee unanimously recognizes as the 2025 joint winner, Michael Pettit’s book, Governed by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War Psychology, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press (OUP).

Michael Pettit is Professor in the Psychology Department of York University in Toronto. His scholarship and graduate teaching are aligned with the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical studies in Psychology graduate program there. Trained as an historian of science, his scholarly work has focused broadly on modern psychology from a critical viewpoint. He has organized a new series for OUP, New Histories of Psychology, and this monograph stands as that series’ first volume.

This book offers a sweeping overview of the changing understanding of the foundations and role of the discipline after the Second World War. Focusing primarily upon the United States, Pettit notes that the schools and systems approach which marked so much of the discipline during the first half of the 20th century had culminated by 1970 in what seemed to be “a triumphant cognitive revolution at mid-century” (p. 2). Yet that triumph was short-lived. Pettit proposes that, beginning in the early 1970s, the discipline underwent a broad realignment in its self-understanding through three major transformations: “(1) a change from being a social or natural science to a health one; (2) an increasing orientation of university-based psychological scientists and their organizations toward the realm of self-help and public policy; and (3) the overshadowing of cognitive science by theories of affect” (p. 3). He traces the rise (and fall) of particular themes and “hot” topics with a particular eye for multiple methodological fallacies and missteps which have often forced psychological researchers to question their own theories and experimental techniques. He offers sobering and challenging analyses of serious ethical lapses in both organizational activities and laboratory research in psychology’s recent history.

Long-term instructors of psychology will recognize in this narrative how the teaching of theories and “facts” in the field have required alteration or reconsideration as the overall discipline has evolved. Indeed, Pettit’s detailed and comprehensive mastery of the literature and the way he has woven together so many controversies struck one committee reviewer “as a powerful critique of the pretensions of psychology’s ‘scientific’ grounding that so dominated the field in the first 2/3rds of the 20th century.”

The review committee believes that Pettit offers a deeply-researched and significant re-evaluation of psychology’s history over the past half-century and will serve as a crucial resource for scholars and teachers in the decades ahead.