Obituary: William Clark Trow (1894-1982).

Obituary [William Clark Trow; 1894-1982]. The professional career of William Clark Trow spans the development of educational psychology from the legacy of the two early giants, William James and Edward L. Thorndike, to the diversity of the field today. Trow was influential in this development through organizational leadership, extensive writing, and creative innovation. His energy was devoted to the application of psychology to the resolution of educational problems. Because he was concerned with philosophical issues as well as psychology, his interests ranged from specifics to broad educational concerns. A half-century of leadership ended with his death on March 14, 1982. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Physiology as the antechamber to metaphysics: The young William James's hope for a philosophical psychology.

In the 5 years before 1878, when his career in psychology was becoming established, William James wrote a series of notes and reviews assessing the work of many of the pioneers in the new field. Adopting a public and confident voice, even while he was privately still uncertain and searching, James criticized the dogmatism of positivist and idealist claims to the study of the human brain and mind. In his short writings of 1873–1877, James started to formulate his own middle path. His first steps on that path show that he did not reject either scientific or philosophic inquiry; instead, he viewed scientific knowledge as a way to understand philosophical questions more deeply. Saving his sharpest critiques for positivism, James endorsed scientific investigation without materialist assumptions. While his career in psychology was still only a hope, James treated science as a means toward humanist insight. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

William R. Safarjan: Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice.

Announces William R. Safarjan as the recipient of the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice for 2002. A biographical statement is included, along with major works and contributions for the field. Safarjan received this award for his dedication and strong commitment to advancing psychology as a vehicle for improving the quality of life. Through his legislative advocacy, he helped transform the practice of psychology in California by enabling psychologists in public service to join medical staffs and become principal providers of care. He also spearheaded legislation that stopped the proliferation of regionally unaccredited schools of psychology, thereby bringing California in line with model standards. He serves nationally as an expert witness in practice litigation and has advanced litigation against the egregious practices of managed care. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: William A. Owens (1914-2005).

Presents an obituary for William A. Owens (1914-2005). Bill received his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Winona State University in 1935. He started his graduate studies at the University of Chicago but switched to the University of Minnesota early on. Under the guidance of Paterson, he received his doctorate in differential psychology in 1940, with minors in statistics and counseling. Bill then took a position in the psychology department at Iowa State University in 1940, but he left to enlist in the U.S. Navy after Pearl Harbor was attacked. When the war ended, Bill returned to Iowa State University, where he rose to full professor and head of the psychology department. After 13 years at Iowa State University, he went to Purdue University and, in 1968, moved to the University of Georgia to start a program in measurement and human differences. He subsequently became director of the Institute for Behavioral Research and split his time between teaching, research, and administration. Bill took the post of acting provost in 1976-1977 and helped reorganize the higher levels of administration at the University of Georgia. During his teaching career, he supervised over 100 theses and dissertations. He retired in 1984 at age 70. Bill consulted extensively, frequently with the firm of Richardson, Bellows, and Henry. He published over 80 articles, books, and chapters, as well as seven tests, during his outstanding research career. Bill's most prominent work was on biodata, much of it supported over an 18-year period by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: William Kessen (1925–1999).

Memorializes William Kessen, whose career began at Yale by studying infant sucking and movement and asking fundamental questions about how the newborn approaches its new world. An early omen of his lasting influence on the state of developmental psychology was his guidance and publication of the proceedings of the Society for Research in Child Development's conference in Dedham, Massachusetts in 1960, which reintroduced J. Piaget to American psychology. In the interstices of his research with infants, Kessen published the widely successful The Child, which summarized the heritage of research and marked the state of the art at mid-century. The book was the early sign of and became the benchmark of his historical insights. In the 1970s, Kessen led one of the first American delegations to China after renewal of diplomatic relations. The visit resulted in 1975 in the widely translated and influential Childhood in China. By the 1980s Kessen became a commentator and critic—and primarily a historian—leading to the Heinz Werner lectures and his The Rise and Fall of Development, published in 1990. Kessen has been called a deconstructionist by some when he should be viewed as an incisive critic who saw in the atomization of his field the threat of triviality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: William Kessen (1925–1999).

Memorializes William Kessen, a psychologist who pursued at least three distinct careers in psychology, all of them pathbreaking. Moving from a more empirical approach which he espoused before the cognitive revolution, Kessen abandoned the study of rats for the study of children—first probing their earliest sensory and perceptual development, and later also their changing place in culture and history. From the 1950s to the 1970s, historical and philosophical publications appeared periodically in his burgeoning bibliography, including, from his positivistic era, the treatise The Language of Psychology (with G. Mandler, 1959). In 1965 Kessen published The Child, a documentary history of childhood that laid the groundwork for much of his later historical writings. In The Child he selected and commented on primary works representing many medical, religious, philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical roots of contemporary developmental psychology. Childhood in China (1975) captured Kessen's observations while leading a delegation from the US State Department to study early education in China. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

William A. Scott (1926–1991): Obituary.

Notes the death of William A. Scott, eulogized as a major contributor to social psychology in both the US and Australia. His experiments on verbal reinforcement and attitude change are recalled, as well as his work on propaganda, cognitive theory, group structure, and the adaptation of immigrants. In his final days he was working with his wife on a major comparative study of family relationships and children's personalities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

William A. Hunt (1903–1986).

William A. Hunt was one of our country's early scientist-clinicians. He began his career with study of a psychology that was a meld of Titchener's structuralism and Harvard's functionalism and completed it 50 years later in the field of health psychology. Hunt spent all but a few of those 50 years as a full-time teacher, at schools that included Dartmouth College, Connecticut College for Women, and Northwestern University. While doing his dissertation, he had mastered and used the structuralist's experimental method of introspection, applying it to the study of human emotion, specifically the James-Lange theory. In 1941, Hunt entered the Navy. He discerned that the screening for military duty of some 15 million women and men required an approach suited to the rapid, albeit individual, screening of large numbers of such personnel. His teaming up with a psychiatrist, Cecil Wittson, led to their joint development of a screening interview lasting one to two minutes that, with continued refinement, proved remarkably effective. Their goals as the mental health specialists participating in the medical examination conducted at this intake station were twofold: (a) to improve the efficiency of the Navy by removing those neuropsychiatric high-risk recruits who were potential psychiatric casualties if they continued in the Navy and (b) by such removal, to save these recruits the disastrous personal experience of subsequent breakdown during military duty. In his own still active research in the 1960s and 1970s Hunt continued to apply the same methods he earlier had used (in his Navy research) to the judgmental processes clinical psychologists used to identify psychological test responses that were pathognomonic of schizophrenia, mental retardation, and related forms of psychopathology. Hunt remained, until his death at age 82, an active scientist-clinician. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: William G. Chase (1940–1983).

Presents an obituary for William G. Chase, professor of psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he spent the last 15 years of his life in research and teaching. Chase made important contributions to a range of areas in cognition and left behind seminal publications on sentence comprehension, perception and chess, and memory span. He was especially concerned with discovering methods that cast light on the mental representations people use in performing cognitive tasks, and particularly with the representation of spatial knowledge, a concern central to the areas of research in which he was interested. Chase died in 1983. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Charles W. Bray II (1904–1982).

Presents an obituary for Charles William Bray, II. Bray received the master's degree in psychology in 1926, and the PhD in 1928; his doctoral thesis on "Vitamin A Deficiency and Its Relation to Hearing" was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1941. He was appointed instructor in psychology in the Princeton department in 1928, and then continued to rise through the academic ranks, becoming assistant professor in 1931, associate professor in 1941, and full professor in 1945. In his academic teaching, Bray was mainly concerned with experimental methodology, working with other members of the departmental staff in laboratory training courses for undergraduate students and was also deeply involved in the training of graduate students and especially their guidance in connection with their doctoral theses. He taught courses in differential psychology and educational psychology, as well as the laboratory training course in experimental psychology. Personally, Chuck was a man of warmth, grace, forthrightness, and sound judgment; he was the perfect friend to all who knew him well. As a scientist he was perceptive, painstaking, and thoroughgoing, with an unhurried objectivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ronald E. Fox.

While maintaining an active career as a scholar, teacher, and administrator, Ronald E. Fox has made important contributions to the field of education in professional psychology. Key among his contributions have been his work in establishing the Association of Psychology Internship Centers, organizing the National Council of Schools of Professional Psychology, and establishing a university-based school of professional psychology as a viable alternative to the graduate education models based in traditional departments of psychology. Fox is, perhaps, most noted for the various educational initiatives for which he has been responsible here at the American Psychological Association (APA). While he was recording secretary and member of the Board of Directors of APA, he was the key, central figure in the creation of the Education Directorate. This new directorate is now firmly established and will shape APA's actions regarding education and training for many years to come. For his commitment and dedication to the field of education in psychology, we honor Ronald E. Fox. He is this year's recipient of the award for Distinguished Education and Training Contributions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Julian C. Stanley Jr. (1918-2005).

Obituary [Julian C. Stanley Jr.; 1918-2005]. Julian Cecil Stanley Jr. earned his doctorate in education (1950) studying partial reinforcement with William O. Jenkins. Julian assumed his first academic position at George Peabody College for Teachers (1949), now Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. There he was an associate professor in educational psychology and became president of the Tennessee Psychological Association (1951). In 1965, Julian became a fellow of Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and edited Improving Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis (1966). Julian began his paradigm-shifting work on giftedness in 1971. From Stanford, Julian went to Johns Hopkins University and remained there, working until one week before his death at age 87. Over his professional career, Julian wrote or edited 13 books and produced over 500 professional articles. For his work, Julian received two honorary doctorates and numerous honors. Deep, profound, and visionary, Julian C. Stanley led the life of the mind in the best possible sense: He uncovered basic psychological phenomena, invented methods, counseled intellectually precocious youth, and mentored others in implementing his discoveries and revealing important psychological phenomena. He was a rare blend of scientist and practitioner. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

William L. Stern, 1871–1938: A neglected founder of developmental psychology.

William L. Stern was born in 1871 in Berlin, Germany, and died in 1938 in Durham, North Carolina. Educated at Berlin University, he developed very early a theoretical view to overcome the fundamental split in the academic psychology of his time, between elementarism and wholism on the one hand and environmentalism and nativism on the other. Besides inventing such well-known concepts as IQ, differential psychology, and the nomothetic–idiographic approach, Stern put much effort into developing a personalistic psychology that emphasized both the individual's active role and the importance of context in development. This article focuses on Stern's main contributions to developmental psychology: the activity–reactivity tension in the developing individual; the concept of proximal space, Stern's idea of the location of exchange between the person and the environment; and an alternative conception to children's egocentrism. Parallels to today's concepts are drawn. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The road not taken: A false start for cognitive psychology.

"Psychology and History" was H. Münsterberg's presidential address at the 1898 American Psychological Association conference (see also PA, Vol 81:27847). After a short academic career in Germany, Münsterberg had accepted a chair at Harvard University. In his address, he presented to his American colleagues his conception of psychology as unitary science of the individual human mind. However, this conception that endeavored to import idealistic philosophy from Germany was skeptically received in America where pragmatism prevailed. Münsterberg adapted to his new environment. During the following decade, he incorporated into his theory what he had objected to before: purposive, social, and applied psychology. Yet, Münsterberg's initial conception was a sophisticated design for psychology as a cognitive science. In retrospect, it can be evaluated as a road taken much later. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Contribution for Applications in Psychology Award for 1978: Alphonse Chapanis.

Alphonse Chapanis was presented the Distinguished Contribution for Applications in Psychology Award for his contribution as a founder of the field of engineering psychology and for his pioneering research and leadership in the field over a 35-year period. He was the senior author (with Wendell Garner and Clifford Morgan) of the first systematic book to cover the field of engineering psychology, and he wrote the first important methodology text in the field. The enormous range of his contributions includes his early studies on basic visual mechanisms, his research on workstation design and man-machine systems relations, and his more recent studies on information processing and telecommunications. He has provided numerous insights on ways to apply sound psychological research to societal problems in a technological age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: William James McGuire (1925-2007).

Obituary of William James McGuire (1925-2007). William James McGuire, considered by some to be the "father of social cognition" and a leading expert on attitude change and the self-concept, died in his home in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 21, 2007. McGuire was for several decades the field's premier researcher of the psychology of persuasion. His creative, groundbreaking experimental research in this area not only brought the study of attitudes and social influence to center stage in psychology but also shaped neighboring fields in sociology, political science, communication, and marketing. McGuire was a fellow of eight divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a past president of APA Division 8 (Personality and Social Psychology). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: Helmut E. Adler (1920-2001).

Memorializes Helmut E. Adler, known for his research on spatial orientation in birds and for his writings on the history of psychology. In the 1960s with the help of his son Barry, he used computer simulations to study bird migration patterns, a highly innovative technique for the time. His most notable work in the field of the history of psychology was his translation of Volume 1 of Fechner's Elemente der Psychophysik in 1966. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theodore M. Newcomb (1903–1984).

Presents an obituary for Theodore M. Newcomb. Newcomb died on December 28, 1984, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, his home base for 40 years. Born in Ohio in 1903, he graduated from Oberlin College and received his doctorate at Columbia University where he worked with Goodwin Watson and Gardner Murphy. In addition to his years at the University of Michigan, his teaching career included posts at Lehigh, Western Reserve, and Bennington. Newcomb was a major pioneer figure in social psychology and a principal force in the development of the social sciences at the University of Michigan. His death has left the field and the community poorer in intellectual and human quality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

APF Gold Medal Awards and Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award: William K. Estes.

Presents William K. Estes with the American Psychological Foundation's (APF's) Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science. Estes is recognized for developing formal models and empirical tests for those models in psychology and for his role in founding and shaping mathematical psychology and in guiding the field through cognitive and connectionist evolutions. He is also recognized for formulating mathematical models of learning, memory, perception, and categorization and for introducing widely used methods to study conditioning and information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)