The reception of Experimental Psychology in Portugal in the early decades of the 20th century: The creation of the first Portuguese Laboratory of Experimental Psychology as a privileged analyzer

On the aftermath of the creation of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at Leipzig (1879), a wave of laboratory openings spread out across Europe and the United States, taking on different forms and enduring different fates in different countries. As much as the shared scientific ideal embodied in the Laboratory movement, these national/regional differences played a role in the dissemination of Psychology as a research field and as a profession worldwide. The present paper attempts to briefly outline the reception of experimental psychology in Portugal in the early decades of the 20th century. Although primarily addressing the creation of the first Portuguese Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the University of Coimbra around 1912, for the sake of perspective it calls on a broader time span, largely drawing on Silvio Lima's ( 1949) characterization of Portuguese Psychology from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.