| Abstract: | Wes Bousfield died September 6, 1986, in Connecticut, where he had lived and worked for almost 50 years. Bousfield attended college in New England, earning a BME degree at Northeastern University in 1927, two master's degrees (Boston University, 1928, and Harvard University, 1932), and a PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1933. Bousfield's publication record began in 1930, and he published almost 40 articles alone or with collaborators at Tufts and Connecticut up to 1953. These studies concerned a number of topics: apparatus, fatigue and motor skills, hunger (in rats, rabbits, chickens, and cats), and affective processes (especially euphoria, primarily by means of written responses to instructions such as "name as many pleasant things as you can" and by rating scales). The next 25 years of Bousfield's career were essentially devoted to the study of organization in memory through category clustering in free recall. His numerous publications after 1953 involved this topic. Bousfield served in other ways. He was Treasurer of the Eastern Psychological Association (EPA) from 1948 to 1950, and he was the first archivist of the invisible college known as the Group for the Study of Verbal Behavior (GSVB). At the time of Wes's retirement from teaching in 1971, a symposium in his honor was held at the meeting in New York City of the EPA. The symposium concerned his contributions to the study of organization and memory and included papers by James Deese and James J. Jenkins, co-workers for many years, the late C. Richard Puff, a former student, and Max Allen, a Connecticut colleague. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
