Two years ago, the Psychology and Social Relations Department decided that the "SR" part of its title was no longer relevant. But although the renamed Psychology Department has decided what it is not, students and professors say, it is less sure of what it is.

To most professors, the name change meant little, because it did not define a new direction. The department "tends to be drifting at the moment. It no longer has a strong identity," says one professor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It doesn't have a sense of its mission."

The essential split, department members say, lies between the "hard"--or more numerical--and the "soft" areas of the field. Professors say students are more inclined toward the latter, which includes the study of perception and personality.

However, the rising stars of the department's faculty tend to focus on the "hard" side of the field, which includes bio-psychology, cognitive psychology and animal behavior, professors say. These areas of psychology place a heavy emphasis on original experiments which produce empirical data.

Furthermore, the department is setting out to fill four senior posts and three junior positions by the fall of 1989, says department chairman Brendan A. Maher, Henderson Professor of the Psychology of Personality.

Two of the four open tenured slots are in the "softer" areas of personality and perception, and the field of personality has been without a senior scholar since the departure of former Professor of Psychology David C. McClelland in June 1986.

The continuing vacancy in this post has led some professors to question Harvard's commitment to the area. "They need to decide in their hiring practice whether they're going to go on with personality or not go on with personality," says one professor.

Data-Crunching

The split between student interest in "soft" psychology and faculty expertise in the more numerical side of the field has led many undergraduates to complain that the department is too empirically oriented. They say it is virtually impossible to write theses that are not based on original experiments.

"There's a lot of pressure for the undergraduate concentrators to do a thesis that is empirical, that deals a lot with data-crushing," says Mark E. Agronin '87, a first-year medical student at Yale. While at Harvard, Agronin concentrated in psychology and founded the William James Society for students interested in the field.

In particular, concentrators say they have trouble finding advisiors for non-empirical thesis topics. They add that "think pieces," which focus on theory, are less likely to be accepted as thesis material. As a result, some concentrators say, students find themselves having to put an empirical twist on a theoretical subject.

One student says he recently talked to a faculty member about writing a paper which would discuss the role of religion in psychoanalysis by comparing the writings of Sigmund Freud, an atheist, with the work of other psychoanalysts. The student says his professor told him the topic was just not empirical enough. Instead, "she suggested I send a questionnaire to psychoanalysts and just ask them about their beliefs," the students says.

Some graduate students and professors agree that the department is accepting fewer theses based on historical--rather than experimental--research. "It is kind of too bad that there are some kinds of theses that are too theoretical and wouldn't get through this department as a thesis. Once in a while they will let a theoretical one through," says Tamra J. Pearson, a fourth year graduate student and teaching fellow.

"We've had theses that have been pretty theoretical says Starch Professor of Psychology William K. Estes. "Far as I can see the department has been changing gradually over a long time."

However Maher disagrees, saying, the majority of honors theses have always focused on empirical data.