This page was created to commemorate former members of the Psychology Department at University of California, Berkeley. We deliberately chose a very inclusive approach in defining who is a former member of our Psychology community. Beyond former Psychology Department faculty with Academic Senate appointments, we included people from the following groups, among others:
- People in the affiliated institutes who made contributions to Psychology but did not have Academic Senate Psychology Department faculty positions
- People with primary appointments in other departments who had secondary appointments in Psychology
- People with longtime and significant clinical appointments (e.g., supervisors in the clinical science program)
- People with longtime and significant lecturer appointments
- People with research appointments
- Staff members who were deeply involved in the Psychology Department’s research, teaching, and mentoring missions
- This page will be updated periodically. If you note any omissions, we would greatly appreciate being notified at psychadmin@berkeley.edu.
- Unless indicated by an asterisk (*), all entries were adapted from the Memorial Resolution presented to the University of California Academic Senate, as recorded at the University of California Digital History Archive (1928-2002), the University of California Academic Senate (2002-present).
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Ballachey, Egerton L. (1908-1969) Associate Professor
With the death of Egerton L. Ballachey from a pulmonary embolism in Walnut Creek on May 9, 1969, almost forty years of an intermittent and varied but constantly loyal and deep-rooted association with psychology and with Berkeley came to an end.
Egerton Leopold Ballachey was born on August 7, 1908, in Ireton, Iowa, the son of Dr. John Egerton Ballachey and Ada Garst Ballachey. He received his early education in the public schools of various Iowa towns, was graduated from the Sioux City Central High School in 1925, and took his A.B. degree from Iowa's Morningside College where he had majored in English, philosophy, and psychology. The greatest of these seemed to be psychology, for when he left
Iowa for his graduate education, he chose psychology and the animal laboratory at the University of Minnesota. After two years there, and with an M.A. in Neurological Psychology granted in 1931, Ballachey accepted an appointment as a Teaching Fellow in Berkeley's Department of Psychology. Here he began his association with E. C. Tolman. In 1933 Ballachey became a University Fellow, and in 1934 he took his Ph.D. At that time Ballachey was still constant in his faith to animal psychology; the printed “Programme” of his final examination for his Ph.D. lists seven research publications in the field of animal learning--a notable feat for a graduate student even in Tolman's prolific laboratory. But this loyalty to the white rat was not to last much longer. Ballachey's post-Ph.D. years were to be devoted to the study of man--to teaching and research in social psychology, in psychology of personality, and in clinical psychology.
Ballachey's first appointment after leaving Berkeley was to the faculty of Michigan State College where, on June 30, 1936, he married Maude Louise Baily. Ballachey remained a member of the Michigan State College faculty from 1935 to 1946, although during the last two years he was on a war service leave of absence as Chief Psychologist in the O.S.S. (1944-45), and as Research Analyst for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (1945-46). After the war he stayed on in government service for one year (1946-47) as Chief of the Appraisal Division of the Central Intelligence Group, and then in 1947 he returned to Berkeley, to remain there until his death.
His teaching, research, and writing during his second Berkeley sojourn were devoted entirely to clinical and social psychology. He initiated and carried through an outstanding and pioneering study in social psychiatry, and some of the first studies of the social structure of mental hospitals. Ballachey's research wisdom and skill were sought by the government even after he had returned to Academia, and he served as research consultant to various agencies. In Berkeley, he gave to clinical teaching a social-psychological cast and to the teaching of social psychology a clinical flavor.
His writing, in addition to technical reports, included co-authoring a textbook in the social survey and a text in social psychology.
In addition, Ballachey served his Department as Chairman in 1964 and Vice Chairman from 1965 to 1967.
Perhaps we might end with some of the comments made by a colleague of Ballachey's at a memorial meeting held for him in Morgan Hall on the Berkeley campus, May 14, 1969:
“...I have known few men who abhorred pretense in others and shunned it in himself, more than did Edge. He could forgive his neighbors and colleagues almost anything except the crime of the Stuffed Shirt, the Phoney Posture, the Empty Pretense, the Pompous Ass....I believe that this... complete honesty, this clean integrity was cherished by those of us who knew him, above all other things Edge had to give us....
“... Just as he was quick to detect the bag of wind behind the stuffed shirt, so was he the first to see the empty concept, the too-easy, the too-slick, and the fundamentally empty experiment or study ”
Professor Ballachey was survived by his wife, Maude Baily Ballachey; a son, Michael Ballachey; a daughter, Elisabeth Ballachey Room; and four grandchildren.
--D. Krech, E.E. Ghiselli, R.D. Tuddenham
Baumrind, Diana B. (1927-2018) Research Psychologist, Emerita
Baumrind received her B.A. in psychology and philosophy at Hunter College in 1948. Newly married, with interests in developmental, clinical and social psychology, she began graduate school in 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining her M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1955 in psychology. Her dissertation, completed under the supervision of Professor Hubert Coffey, was Some Personality and Situational Determinants of Behavior in a Discussion
Group. Her arrival on the Berkeley campus coincided with the loyalty oath controversy (1949- 1954), further heightening her humanitarian and socialist beliefs. After being awarded her doctorate, Baumrind completed a local postdoctoral clinical residency at Cowell Memorial Hospital/Kaiser Permanente from 1955 to 1958. She was also director of two U.S. Public Health Service grants. Additionally, from 1958 to 1960 she had a private practice in Berkeley in which she worked with parents of troubled children.
Baumrind was a developmental psychologist, holding a research psychologist position, at the Institute of Human Development (IHD) at UC Berkeley, from 1960 to 2018, where she was director of the Family Socialization and Developmental Competence Project. Later divorced, she said that a research pathway offered her a flexibility of hours that she needed in order to raise her three daughters. Over her 58 years at the IHD, Diana contributed much to the intellectual life of her colleagues at the institute. She was especially appreciated for her sharp intellect and incisive questions. She was also well-known for her unique personal style, including her signature headbands that she made herself and wore every day. She is renowned for her groundbreaking research on parenting styles and for her ethical analyses of research practices. Author of numerous journal articles and chapters, as well as two books, Early Socialization and the Discipline Controversy (1975) and Child Maltreatment and Optimal Caregiving in Social Contexts (1995), her work is widely cited and utilized to this day, both by researchers and in the public domain.
She was the recipient of numerous grants from the William T. Grant Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Among her many honors, she was given the prestigious G. Stanley Hall Award for distinguished contributions to developmental psychology by the American Psychological Association in 1988, and a Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health from 1984 to 1988. A conference celebrating her work was held at the University of Oklahoma in 2010, followed by a festschrift in her
honor, Authoritative Parenting: Synthesizing Nurturance and Discipline for Optimal Child Development (2013), edited by colleagues Robert E. Larzelere, Amanda Sheffield Morris, and Amanda W. Harrist.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Diana Baumrind’s pathbreaking longitudinal study of parents was one of the first to include fathers as well as mothers. Starting when the children were preschoolers, Baumrind followed the families through school age to late adolescence. Her major contribution was the identification of two central dimensions of parents’ behavior — structured expectations and responsiveness — and the discovery that these dimensions in combination revealed three main parenting styles. Authoritarian parents are highly demanding of their children’s behavior in a cold, sometimes harsh manner. By contrast, “laissez faire” or permissive parents are warm and responsive to their children but provide little in the way of structure or appropriate demands for maturity. What Baumrind found to be the more ideal parenting style, leading to more positive cognitive, social, and emotional development in children and adolescents, was authoritative parenting — a combination of warmth and responsiveness with structure, limit-setting, and challenges to children to do their best. Her message to parents was that being only warm and responsive without providing reasonable limits to their children is not the most effective way to parent. Her results have been replicated in hundreds of studies, with some important differences found among cultures within the United States and in other countries.
Diana Baumrind was a vigilant and vocal critic of ethical lapses in psychological research. Perhaps her best-known publication in this area is a devastating critique of Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment in which he deceived participants by letting them think that they were administering high-voltage electric shocks to someone in an adjacent laboratory room. Invoking the atrocities of World War II, Milgram claimed that the results supported the idea that it is easy to induce individuals to inflict pain on others. Baumrind criticized the extrapolation of the study results to Nazi Germany by pointing out that Milgram’s research was conducted with college students who were likely to trust the experimenter and follow his instructions. She argued that the experimental deception represented a betrayal of that trust and an undermining of the psychological research enterprise. She never backed down from a moral or intellectual confrontation.
In addition to exercising vigorously every day, Diana worked tirelessly, into her 80s, to produce innovative work updating her theoretical constructs about parenting. She did this while refusing to learn how to use a computer or e-mail; she was not a skilled typist and hired typists for most of her career. In that later work published since 2010, she refined the taxonomy of parenting practices to differentiate between confrontive and coercive uses of parental power and discipline. Confrontive parenting is when the parent takes a firm position in relationship to the child's behavior but employs reasoning and is open to negotiation with the child. Coercive parenting is, in her words, arbitrary, peremptory, domineering, and concerned with marking status
distinctions. Diana's goal was to go beyond her differentiation between authoritarian and authoritative parenting, adjectives that are often confused but were chosen to encourage people to think about the similarities and differences between the types, to specifically address what her data demonstrated to be healthy and effective uses of the assertion of parental power. Her later work illustrates that she was not one to rest on her early laurels but actively pursued her inquiries in ever-refined intellectual directions. There is no doubt that our understanding of effective parenting today owes a great debt to Diana Baumrind’s pioneering research.
Baumrind is survived by her daughters, Risa, Susan, and Nikki, and one grandson, Ben.
--P.A. Cowan, C.P. Cowan, R. Weinstein, E. Owens
Bayley, Nancy (1899-1994) Director, Harold E. Jones Child Study Center
Nancy Bayley received her B.S. in psychology from the University of Washington in 1922, a master's degree, also from Washington, in 1924, and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1926. She taught at the University of Nebraska for two years, and then moved to Berkeley, to join what was then known as the Institute for Child Welfare, now the Institute for Human Development, at Berkeley. In 1954, she became Chief of the Section on Child Development at the National Institute of Mental Health. She returned to Berkeley in 1964 to head the newly established Harold E. Jones Child Study Center. In 1966, Bayley was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. She retired from Berkeley in 1968.
Throughout her career, Bayley was interested in the associations among various aspects of physical, physiological, mental, and behavioral development. Bayley's first project at IHD was the Berkeley Growth Study, which picked up a group of infants born in 1928-1929 and followed them longitudinally, eventually into their adult years (and eventually including the original subjects' own children). The project required the development of a series of instruments, ranging widely over various aspects of development, which culminated in the widely used Bayley Scales of Infant Development, now in their third iteration. These studies provided the first comprehensive description of the course of development -- biological, behavioral, and psychological -- in infancy, childhood, and adolescence. And their legacy continued in such projects as Jack and Jeanne Block's monumental exploration of stability and change in personality. One line of research examined the association between motor development and mental ability, tracing the processes by which children gain control of their own bodies. One of Bayley's important observations was that variability on various measures of growth increased, then decreased, and then increased again, leading her to propose statistical measures of variance as an objective standard for delineating the various stages of growth. Another line of research correlated "somatic androgyny", as assessed by photographic ratings and physical measurements, with attitudes and interests as measured by questionnaires. These papers, which found essentially no relationship with physique, were the first to employ the concept of androgyny in empirical studies of gender identity and role.
Bayley was interested in mental as well as biological development. Again, focusing on variability, she determined that the preschool years were periods of rapid change, not necessarily associated with language acquisition, such that measures of mental age or IQ in infancy were not predictive of later outcomes. She also found a correlation between mental development and parental (particularly maternal) education. While acknowledging the contributions of genetic factors, she emphasized the role of the environment in stimulating or retarding mental development. Interestingly, she was also documented changes in intelligence during late adolescence -- a period during which other authorities believed intelligence had stabilized; she further theorized that similar changes would be observed later in adulthood, and indeed throughout the entire life cycle. Given her emphasis on environmental determinants of developmental change, Bayley developed instruments to measure parental (especially maternal) child-rearing attitudes and behaviors, their relation to mother-infant dyadic relations, and their effects on later development.
Bayley's research was based on the idea that, in order to understand any psychological process, developmental research was necessary to uncover its earliest appearance in the life of the individual, to follow its progressive differentiation, and to identify its interrelationships with other processes. Against those colleagues who believed that development stopped at adolescence, she called for a developmental science that would encompass the entire life
span. And she emphasized that developmental research, like all psychological research, should not be undertaken simply for the sake of discovering new facts, but also for the purpose of enhancing human welfare and happiness.
--J.F. Kihlstrom
Beach, Frank Ambrose (1911-1988) Professor Emeritus
Frank Beach died on June 15, 1988. He served the University of California with great distinction for 30 years as an outstanding teacher, researcher, and colleague. His absence has been deeply felt locally, nationally, and internationally by the many people whose lives he touched.
Frank was born on April 13, 1911, in Kansas, where his father was a distinguished professor of music at Emporia State Teachers College. After receiving bachelor's (1933) and master's (1934) degrees from Emporia, Beach enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he came under the influence of Karl Lashley. His graduate work was interrupted by a lack of funds and necessitated a return to Kansas for a year of high-school teaching. Upon his return to Chicago he found Lashley departed for Harvard University, where Beach was to rejoin him in 1936 for a postdoctoral year; but first he completed a doctoral dissertation on the role of the neocortex on maternal behavior of rats.
In 1937, Beach joined the scientific staff of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he eventually founded and headed the Department of Animal Behavior. His interactions with biologists of various stripes intensified during these years and were to continue
throughout his career. In 1946, he left for Yale University, where he held a Stirling Professorship in the Psychology Department. His appointment to the Berkeley faculty in 1958 reunited him with several old friends (Edwin Ghiselli and David Krech, in particular); he achieved emeritus status in 1978 and remained active in scholarly pursuits and departmental and university life until his death.
Beach and his first wife, Anna Beth (Abu) Odenweiler had two children, Frank and Susan. After Abu's death in 1971 he married Noel Gaustad. Despite all too frequent interruptions due to ill health, the final years of his life were filled with travel and enjoyment.
Beach had a lifelong interest in animal behavior. The mating patterns of mammals and the role of hormones in the organization and activation of male and female sexuality were enduring concerns. Over a span of nearly 5 decades, he developed objective behavioral categories for the description of behavior, and specified the manner in which hormones, the external environment, the animal's past history, and the nervous system interact to control behavioral actions. In 1948, Beach authored the book Hormones and Behavior, an influential treatise which ushered in the modern era of behavioral endocrinology. He was the founding editor of the journal Hormones and Behavior which remains the principal scientific publication in this field. Beach also made enduring contributions to the study of human sexuality, beginning with Patterns of Sexual Behavior, co-authored with C.S. Ford and, including the four chapters he contributed to the book, he edited Four Perspectives in Human Sexuality. Beach was a valued consultant to the major institutes devoted to human sex research and was president of the International Academy of Sex Research in 1977.
From his earliest laboratory work and in his many subsequent writings, Beach emphasized the importance of the comparative perspective in animal behavior. He developed warm friendships with the ethologists Robert Hinde and Niko Tinbergen, and played an important role in introducing American psychologists to the work of European ethologists. Although Frank seemed to value empirical observations more than speculative theorizing, he repeatedly redefined the conceptual underpinnings of behavioral endocrinology and his persistent insistence on clarification of terminology and reminders that behavioral classification must precede physiological and biochemical analysis were necessary tonics for younger investigators impatient to get on with the study of underlying mechanisms.
Beach was the “complete” scholar, having implemented extensive programmatic research, authored critical theoretical articles and monographs, trained many students, including more than 20 who received Berkeley Ph.D.’s, developed and successfully taught large undergraduate courses, served on many university committees and held office in national and international professional societies. He was the founding director of the Field Station for Behavioral Research, a facility dedicated to the study of animals in semi-natural settings. His partners in starting the Station were Sherwood Washburn of Anthropology and Peter Marler of Zoology.
Frank Beach received virtually every honor open to a biological psychologist, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Warren Medal of the Society of
Experimental Psychologists, and the American Psychological Foundation's award for distinguished teaching in biological psychology. Locally he was the Faculty Research Lecturer in 1977 and received the Berkeley Citation.
Professor Beach was an invaluable mentor to junior colleagues, an outstanding university and departmental citizen whose wisdom and boundless enthusiasm for new ideas are sorely missed.
--H.A. Bern, S.E. Glickman, W.J. Loher, I. Zucker
Block, Jack (1924-2010) Professor Emeritus
Jack Block, one of the leading personality psychologists of his generation, died on January 13, 2010, at his home in El Cerrito, California. His first publication appeared in 1951, and his most recent one is now in press. Each year in-between saw substantial contributions to the literature, many of the most important of them written in collaboration with his wife Jeanne (1923–1981), herself a distinguished developmental psychologist.
Block was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 28, 1924, the son of immigrant parents, and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1945. After receiving a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1946, he completed his graduate training at Stanford University, earning his doctorate in 1950. From 1950 to 1954, he was a research psychologist at the Langley-Porter Clinic of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. His association with Berkeley began in 1952 with an appointment as assistant research psychologist at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (now IPSR, the Institute of Personality and Social Research). He joined the Department of Psychology as an associate professor in1957 and spent the whole of his career in the department, retiring in 1991. The honors he received during his career will give a good sense of the range of his accomplishments: Henry A. Murray Award (1985) of the Division of Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA); G. Stanley Hall Award (1990) of the Division of Developmental Psychology, APA; Bruno Klopfer Award (1998) of the Society of Personality Assessment; Saul
B. Sells Award (1998) for lifetime achievement of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology; award (2000) from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology for distinguished contributions to personality psychology, thereafter named the Jack Block Award; award (2006) from the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development. He was, in addition, a fellow of five divisions of the APA and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Block is probably best known for the two major longitudinal studies he conducted. The first one, begun in 1960, brought new life to data collected earlier at the Institute of Human Development. This study, published in the book Lives through Time (1971), was noteworthy not only for its contributions to the understanding of stability and change in personality, but also for its inventive methodological approach. Aware of the limitations involved in the use of data collected by others, the Blocks in 1968 undertook an ambitious, multi-method longitudinal study of their own
design that followed participants on a wide range of psychological and behavioral variables from nursery school through adulthood. The project generated a continuous stream of publications that consistently demonstrated a remarkable continuity between childhood and early adult personality and adaptation. The sensitivity to issues of methodology that is a strength of these studies was present in Block’s work from the outset. Indeed, his first two books, The Q-sort Method in Personality Assessment and Psychiatric Research (1961) and The Challenge of Response Sets (1965), were both psychometric in focus.
There are two other facets of Block’s career that need to be mentioned to give a complete picture of his scholarly contribution. First, he was a formidable critic, sometimes unrelenting, but not intemperate, who sought by his criticism to improve the quality of research and thinking in personality and social psychology. Most notable in this regard was his empirical and theoretical critique of the substantial group of psychologists who, in his view, speciously attacked the validity of the concept of personality. Second, much of Block’s research was informed by his theorizing about the dynamics of personality development and the intrapsychic factors that eventuate in behavior. It was, though, not until 2002 that he presented an extended and fully integrated account of his theoretical approach in his book, Personality as an Affect-Processing System.
The last time many of us saw Jack in a professional setting was during one of the weekly colloquia at IPSR, which he continued to attend as long as he was able to do so. At the end of a presentation, he would regularly ask, “Have you looked at individual differences?” That question was one he addressed in study after study; it lay at the heart of his long, productive career.
--G.A. Mendelsohn
Block, Jeanne Humphrey (1923-1981) Professor in Residence
Jeanne Humphrey Block, research psychologist, Institute of Human Development, and Professor of Psychology In Residence, Berkeley, died of cancer on December 4, 1981, at the age of 58. She is survived by her husband, Jack Block, Professor of Psychology, Berkeley, and by their four children.
Her death abruptly terminated an impressive career as an internationally recognized scholar, teacher, researcher, and critic. It would be difficult to estimate the number of people who saw her as an ideal of the humanist and the scientist, for she combined an extraordinary intellect with the qualities of great erudition, profound love, warm intuitive understanding of others, willingness to exchange ideas, beliefs and feelings, vivacity, humor, and an unending kindness.
She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and spent her childhood in Portland, Oregon. She served in the SPARS (Coast Guard) during World War II, graduated from Reed College in 1947, and
received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1951. Her dissertation was on the development of ego control in children, a central theme of much of her later work.
She remained at Stanford for a year as an instructor after completing her doctorate. Between 1954 and 1963, she held positions as research psychologist at a number of institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area including the Palo Alto Medical Research Foundation, the California Medical Association, the San Mateo Health Clinic, and the Children's Hospital of the East Bay. During 1963 and 1964, she was a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway. In 1965 she was appointed research psychologist at the Institute of Human Development, Berkeley, and in 1979, became Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Berkeley. In 1968, she was awarded a five-year National Institutes of Mental Health scientist development award. Her accomplishments were further recognized by two additional five-year renewals of this prestigious award.
Jeanne was a vigorous, creative, and productive research scholar throughout her career. Several of her publications were reports of pioneering efforts in areas of considerable social importance that were previously uninvestigated. Among her most significant research publications are studies of somatic and psychological factors in the etiology of asthma in children, parental roles in the genesis of schizophrenia and neurosis in children, social and psychological antecedents of student activism, and conceptions of sex roles in cross-cultural and longitudinal perspective. Her research is of the highest scientific caliber and demonstrates Jeanne's rare talents for applying high standards of scientific rigor to problems of understanding human behavior.
Her research has had widespread influence and the impact of her work has been extensively recognized. In addition to the career research scientist awards mentioned earlier, she also received such honors as appointment as the Bernard Moses Memorial Lecturer, University of California, 1972, the Hofheimer Prize in 1974 (the American Psychiatric Association's most prestigious award for research), Master Lecturer of the American Psychological Association in 1979, and election to Fellow status in the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1980.
Jeanne gave as generously to the field of psychology as she did to her own research work. She participated actively in the promotion of psychology as a profession, and she held many important offices in professional societies. At the time of her death, she was president of the Division of Developmental Psychology of the American Psychological Association, previously having served as Secretary-Treasurer of that division from 1976 to 1979. In addition to serving on committees of the University, and of government agencies, she served as chair of the Maternal and Child Health research review committee of the National Institutes of Mental Health for 1980 and 1981.
Jeanne was a superb and dedicated teacher, who had a major influence on the work and careers of many of her students. Those of us who shared students with her knew that she expected students to meet the same high standards that she held for herself. In imposing these standards, she maintained warm personal relationships with her students who often became members of an extended family. In addition, she was always available for consultation and advice to students and colleagues in many disciplines related to her own. She was extraordinarily kind and
generous in giving time and energy, in listening attentively to plans and ideas, and in helping in a multitude of ways in the design and implementation of research.
Since 1968, Jeanne and her husband, Professor Jack Block, had been collaborating on a comprehensive longitudinal study of the relationships between ego development and thought processes in children, supported continuously by large grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health. In accordance with her wishes, this research program is being carried on by her husband and the project research staff. Anyone interested in understanding the processes of human development will continue to benefit from her thoughts and efforts for many years to come.
Kindness, gallantry, dedication, and poise were cardinal traits that she manifested in her personal and professional life. She maintained these remarkable qualities even during the grave illness of the last few months of her life. She continued to participate actively in research, in the supervision of students, in professional activities, and activities of her family. Her ways of living, working and relating to others and her gallantry in the last months of her life were an inspiration to her friends, colleagues, family and all who had contact with her.
--P. Mussen, D. Eichorn, C. Hardyck
Bridgman, Olga Louise (1886-1974) Professor Emeritus
Olga Bridgman died on February 6, 1974, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday, after a distinguished career in which she served the University on both its San Francisco and Berkeley campuses for more than forty years.
She was born March 30, 1886 in Jackson, Michigan, the daughter of a prominent newspaper editor whose family had migrated from England to Connecticut in 1690. She obtained her early education in the public schools of Jackson, and received her A.B. (1908) and her M.D. (1910) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
After receiving her M.D. she served as resident physician at two public institutions in Illinois and worked with Goddard in New Jersey on developing the first American version of Binet's mental tests. In 1913 she enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned her M.A. in psychology in 1914 and her Ph.D. in 1915. She was immediately appointed instructor in abnormal psychology and pediatrics, joining Professors G. M. Stratton and Warner Brown in the Psychology Laboratory, the nucleus of what was to become in 1922 the Department of Psychology. Thereafter, her professional activities were divided between the Medical School in San Francisco and the Berkeley campus, to both of which she made important contributions as she advanced through the ranks of the professorship. She became professor emerita in 1956, but remained active for many years on University committees and in children's centers near her home in Hillsborough.
Although she published on various topics in mental deficiency and child psychiatry during her long professional career, it was for her teaching and her contributions to school clinics, well- baby centers, and juvenile courts that she is most vividly remembered. She was a gifted speaker, whose lectures were models of clarity and organization, constantly updated to keep abreast of new developments and enriched by anecdotes drawn from her own extensive case experience. Generations of premedical students at Berkeley crowded to take her courses on mental deficiency and on abnormal psychology, and to accompany her on the annual class expeditions which she led to state hospitals in the Bay Area. In San Francisco, medical and nursing students knew her through her service on admissions committees, through her lectures on abnormal psychology, mental retardation, and child psychiatry, and through her supervision of student field work.
She was much in demand for consultation to public and private social agencies, and gave generously of her time. As early as 1915 she was consulting psychiatrist to the San Francisco Juvenile Court. In the years that followed she served as medical psychologist for the San Francisco Board of Health, consultant to the California State School for the Deaf, director of the Division of Mental Hygiene of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, consultant to the Langley Porter Clinic, member of numerous state and county civil service examination boards, and in other capacities too numerous to mention.
Unpretentious in manner, she nevertheless received a long list of honors from professional colleagues who knew and appreciated her work. Only a few can be mentioned. She held national office in the Orthopsychiatric Association and the American Association on Mental Deficiency, and served as president of several local societies in her areas of professional interest. Early in her career she became a Diplomate in Psychiatry of the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry. When psychologists, following the pattern of medical specialty boards, organized the American Board of Professional Psychology in 1947, she was awarded its Diploma in Clinical Psychology. Among her numerous recognitions was the award by Mills College in 1937 of the honorary degree of Doctor of Science, to add to her M.D. and Ph.D. The accolade that accompanied that degree stated well her unique contribution--“Student of inter-relationships of the mind and the body; healer of the ills of childhood that maturity may be free of deep rooted sickness; teacher by word of mouth and by pen of the laws of human development, the obedience to which will ease human experience of preventable tragedy.”
Not the least of her contributions, decades before the strident urgencies of the current women's liberation movement, was the encouragement that this modest and dignified woman gave to younger professional women, not only by her sympathy and understanding, but also by her own quiet example; for it is a relevant historical fact that the first three doctorates conferred by Berkeley's psychology department were earned by women.
--R.D. Tuddenham, J.W. Macfarlane, A. Simon
It is worth noting that two of the earliest faculty appointments in Psychology at Berkeley were women. For more information on "notable firsts", see "10 Trailblazing Women at Berkeley", posted on the Department website.
Brown, Clarence William (1902-1971) Professor Emeritus
Clarence William Brown, called C. W., was born on July 29, 1902, in Ogden, Utah, the son of Chris. J. and Electa Ann Brown. He received his A.B. degree from the University of Utah in 1926 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1929. He came to Berkeley in that same year and served the University without interruption (except for Army service) until his retirement in 1965. He died on February 14, 1971, a few days after suffering a severe heart attack.
On coming to California, he inaugurated an extensive program of investigating by means of ablation methods the role of sub-cortical mechanisms in the mediation of complex behavior. He designed a new and unique method for exploring the functions of the inner parts of the brain and employed it in an extensive series of pioneering studies which have become classic. During this period, he published--frequently with collaborators--a substantial number of papers on the role of sub-cortical structures in the mediation of behavior. He also began his lifelong and mutually satisfying rapport with his graduate students.
In addition to his interests in physiological psychology, Professor Brown was concerned with psychological measurement and statistical analysis. He taught in this area throughout his academic career. It was therefore natural that at the outset of World War II, the Army should solicit his services. From October 1942, until his separation (with the rank of Major) in January, 1946, he directed research in many projects related to pilot and air-crew selection and classification, as well as attitudes of soldiers.
From his return to the University until the beginning of his first term as chairman of the Department of Psychology, he devoted himself, in addition to his teaching and--as always--his family, to developmental work on industrial and driving safety and on personnel selection as well as research for the Air Force. During this period, too, with Edwin E. Ghiselli, a former student, he wrote the two important texts: The Scientific Method in Psychology and Personnel and Industrial Psychology.
After the war, the Department of Psychology at Berkeley underwent two important and widely felt changes. It burgeoned, as did psychology departments everywhere. But at the same time it became dramatically and fiercely democratic in its own governance. It was in these circumstances that CW assumed the chairmanship of the Department in 1949. In such situations the chairman is caught in the pulling and hauling among diverse interests, and for a sensitive man (as a young man CW had interrupted his education to serve two years as a missionary for his church) the chairmanship was therefore, trying. Since he possessed both administrative skills and a fine sense of his responsibilities, the job was, however, also personally satisfying. He served as Chairman until 1955 and again from 1960 to 1964. In this role he was always concerned that human values should not be sacrificed to efficient decision-making.
When Chancellor Kerr in the early fifties looked to the assurance of the continued greatness of the Berkeley campus, he established a faculty committee to share responsibility with the administration for its long-range development. From 1952 to 1958--a period of incredible productivity by the committee--CW was its chairman. Under his leadership it was involved in planning for substantial improvements and expansion of the facilities and landscaping of the campus.
This work constitutes, perhaps, his greatest and most satisfying contribution to the University, and he was to say at the conclusion of it that, “To participate for six years in a program of planning the future academic and physical characteristics of the shortly-to-be greatest University in the world was a great privilege.” His contribution to the planning and completion of most of the major buildings on the campus at the time of his death was, in the words of one who shared this work, “of crucial importance.” After identifying the buildings, he notes that “this is a towering contribution, the details of which CW watched over with imagination, strength, and forbearance, as well as with great affection.... During this time... CW's loyalty to those above and below him was the most enduring and crucial quality that helped us over many a bad spot.” Among the buildings (we can name but a few) are Earth Sciences (Geology, Paleontology, Geography), Kroeber (Art and Anthropology), Tolman (Psychology and Education), the Student Union, and residence halls, as well as the Haas Recreation Center.
There is a memorial to John Galen Howard, an early University architect, in the esplanade at the foot of the Campanile, which reminds visitors that His Greatest Monument You See About You. So is it also with Clarence William Brown.
He is survived by his wife, Edith Allen Brown; a son, Richard James Brown; and a daughter, Elizabeth Ann Brown. The loss, in 1948, from acute anterior poliomyelitis of another son, Clarence William, Jr., was one of the great tragedies of CW's life.
--R.F. Jarrett, E.E. Ghiselli, F.M. Henry
Brown, Warner (1882-1956) Professor Emeritus
Brown was also one of George Stratton's student collaborators. He was born in Georgia on February 9, 1882, and reared there by his New England parents on a large plantation. In Georgia there began in Warner Brown that unique combination of his; namely, hard-headed Yankee honesty and skepticism and southern social and aesthetic sensitivity. His entire education before college was through informal tutoring and his own prodigious and catholic reading. In his teens he read the Greek classics in Greek, the Latin classics in Latin, and French literature in French, and had a wide acquaintance with English literature and an extensive knowledge of law and botany.
He received his A.B. in 1904 and his M.A. in 1906 from the University of California, where he majored in philosophy under George H. Howison, and began his career in experimental
psychology under George M. Stratton in the Psychology Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1908 under Woodworth and he was also influenced by Woodbridge, Dewey, and Cattell.
In 1908 he married Jessie Milliken, a botanist. He is survived by his daughter Ellen, now Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco.
He became an Instructor in 1908 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as teacher, guide, setter of standards, and relentless critic for forty-four years until his retirement in 1952. He was a wise and selfless department chairman for sixteen of these years.
In spite of his breadth of interests and knowledge, he was by temperament and conviction an experimental psychologist. He was a charter member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He was quick to see excellence or vital flaws in an experiment. He had an open- minded readiness to entertain new hypotheses but was stringent with respect to methods.
Several of Dr. Brown's early publications remain classics: his investigations of suggestibility; of the probability of the perception of a difference in the region of the threshold; his careful experimentation showing that even very slight differences are discriminated with a certain frequency while large ones are sometimes not. The ogive curve of discrimination by small increments of difference was a quantitative, solid contribution. He later turned to investigation in the field of learning and memory. His work on whole-and-part methods in learning, on the retroactive inhibitory effects found in a card sorting task, on the actual cues and orientations which humans build and depend upon in maze learning, form part of the facts in advanced texts on experimental psychology.
His list of publications is relatively small, some thirty in number, aside from his text
in Introductory Psychology. Why? He was a perfectionist and his own most relentless critic. Further, he had a great respect for science and no tolerance for the many journal articles that he felt were carelessly done or prematurely published. And perhaps equally important, he would get involved in new ideas that took all of his attention. He was more interested in investigation than communication; yet the general introductory text, which he coauthored, is characterized by great clarity and simplicity of presentation.
Perhaps his most significant contribution to psychology grew out of the fact that he was a vigilant and incorruptible scientific conscience of psychologists. His approval was frequently sought and was never obtained for any scientific undertaking unless unequivocally merited by disciplined thinking and a neat performance. He was generous of his time and of his wide knowledge. He loved to teach, and had a fine sense of pedagogical timing, encouraging the timid and deflating the pretentious. It can be truly said that he was more interested in making dedicated psychologists than in his own scientific achievements.
John Gardner, a former student and now President of the Carnegie Foundation, perhaps best appraised him when he said: “What impressed me most about Warner Brown was a quality of mind; and I think that the word for that quality is `independent.' Someone said of Sainte-Beuve,
`He belonged to the great diocese; he was one of the independent seekers after truth.' If
`independent' is the key word, the great diocese has never boasted more than a handful of parishioners. I think in a wholly unpretentious way Warner Brown was one of that handful.”
Brown died February 6, 1956, after a very painful but gallantly borne illness. He was a man of great personal strength and in his daily contact with people he was tolerant, kindly, and utterly democratic.
--J.W. Macfarlane, H.C. Gilhousen, V.F. Lenzen*
Brunswik , Egon (1903-1955) Professor
Egon Brunswik was born in Budapest, March 18, 1903. His father was Hungarian--an engineer in the Austro-Hungarian government. His mother was Austrian. His childhood tongues were Hungarian and German. When only eight, he was sent to Vienna to be educated at the Gymnasium of the Theresianische Akademie as a preparation for entering government service in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and from this early age he was practically always on his own.
After World War I, he was sent with his sister for some months to Sweden to recover from the malnutrition of the war years. After his return, he graduated from the Theresianische Akademie in 1921. He then spent two years (1921-1923) at the Vienna Technische Hochschule, studying to become an engineer. He passed the first state examination required at the end of that period, but then decided to transfer to the University of Vienna to study psychology. There he worked under Karl Bühler and came under the influence of Moritz Schlick and the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. In 1926 he passed the state examination for Gymnasium teachers in mathematics and physics.
After he received his Ph.D. in 1927, Brunswik became an Assistant in Bühler's Psychologisches Institut. In 1931-1932 he went for a year to be Visiting Lecturer in the School of Education at Ankara, Turkey, where he established their first psychological laboratory. He became Privatdozent at the University of Vienna in 1934.
In 1935-1936 Brunswik received a Rockefeller Fellowship and spent the year as Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. In the fall of 1937, he returned to Berkeley as Assistant Professor and, through the normal course of events, he became Professor in 1947.
In 1938 he married Else Frenkel, who had been a fellow student in Vienna and also an Assistant in Bühler's Institut. They were married in New York upon her arrival from Austria. They became American citizens in 1943. His untimely death on July 7, 1955, came as a complete surprise and terrible shock and sorrow to his friends, colleagues, and students.
Brunswik's own interests in psychology lay primarily in the fields of perception, cognition, methodology, theory, and the history of academic psychology, but he was also fully informed of and intensely interested in the wider psychoanalytical and sociological studies of his wife Else Frenkel-Brunswik; and he took enormous pride in her achievements.
His major psychological and scientific contributions can be indicated by three main headings: (1) his analysis of perception and learning, (2) his complementary doctrines of “representative design” and “ecological validity,” and (3) his devotion to the history of psychology.
(1) PERCEPTION AND LEARNING. He conceived both perception and learning as “probabilistic achievements” by an organism. Perception of objects and events has always, he pointed out, to be built upon changing and fallible sensory cues. Similarly, the customary learning of means-end relations is an adjustment to an environment where the available means change from one occasion to the next, and lead with differing probabilities of success to any specific goal. Most of his own experiments were concerned with perception, but he also did experiments in learning. In considering both perception and learning, he put an ever increasing emphasis on the fundamentally probabilistic nature of the to-be-obtained laws. The uncertainties of environmental events force the organism to use cues (and means) which are probable rather than certain. Any perceptual discrimination or any selection of means is necessarily probabilistic. And hence, he concluded, any generalizations about the organism's responses to the environment may also be only probable.
(2) REPRESENTATIVE DESIGN AND ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY. In advocating
“representative design,” Brunswik stressed that if our research is to be designed to provide representative psychological laws, we must obtain samples representative not only of individuals but also of environmental situations. And in measuring “ecological validity,” he emphasized: (a) the study (in a normal environment) of the merely probable, incomplete validities of different sensory cues as representing the properties of perceived objects, and (b) the study of the merely probable validity of different classes of means-objects as leading to certain classes of goals. For him the true aim of psychology was a study of the organism's functional achievements in perception and in means-end behavior in a merely probable environment. Hence, his choice of the term “probabilistic functionalism” for his psychology.
(3) HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY. Brunswik emphasized that psychology, while conforming to all scientific canons, must not slavishly follow the nomothetic thema of classical physics. In other words, while championing the basic objectives of the “Unity of Science,” he also advocated diversification of content and of method. Much of his teaching (and he greatly enjoyed giving a course in the history of psychology) was devoted to the thesis that true progress in science has come from the various and imaginatively conceived different developments in the several scientific disciplines. He also believed that in the history of psychology itself, one could discern logically sequential trends: away from dualism, away from sensationalism, and towards monism and towards a molar analysis of distal achievement; that is, towards his own doctrines of functionalism, of probabilism, and of representative design.
Any such brief account of the more salient of Brunswik's concepts by no means adequately portrays the complexity, the richness, and the creativity of his thinking. In his own writings there
is a brilliance, a depth, and a subtlety which both dazzles and baffles. The reader is intrigued, stimulated, puzzled, challenged, and enriched.
In the coming years, Egon Brunswik will hold an ever increasingly significant and important position in the history of psychology. His posthumous monograph, Perception and the Representative Design of Psychological Experiments (University of California Press, 1956), will help to hasten this increasing recognition. Those of us who knew and loved him can but be glad that such ever-great recognition lies ahead, though we must grieve that he did not live to see it come.
--E.C. Tolman, L.J. Postman, B.F. Ritchie
Capps, Lisa Margarit (1964-2000) Assistant Professor
Lisa Margarit Capps, one of the most gifted young faculty members on our campus, passed away on February 7, 2000, at the age of 35. Her loss to the campus and to the field of psychology is inestimable. In her few short years with us, she opened up new fields of scholarship; she mentored a great number of undergraduates and graduate students; and she served as a model of grace, wit, effervescence, and scholarship. Her blend of creativity and caring will not pass this way again soon.
Lisa Capps was born on October 22, 1964, in Santa Barbara, California. Attending public schools in Santa Barbara, she competed nationally as a long-distance swimmer. She received her undergraduate education at Stanford University, studying abroad at Oxford University in 1985. Her B.A. from Stanford in Human Biology (with Honors in Humanities) came in 1986, the year of her election to Phi Beta Kappa.
Her first published research pertained to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, DC, as a symbol and agent of healing. It appeared in The Vietnam Reader, a work edited by her father, the late Walter Capps, a longtime professor at UC Santa Barbara and Member of U.S. Congress from 1996-1998.
After working in New York with the eminent psychologists Jerome Bruner and Carol Feldman, she entered the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a master's degree in 1991 and a doctorate (with Professor Marian Sigman) in 1996. At UCLA, she was awarded a University Fellowship, Chancellor's Dissertation Fellowship, American Psychological Association Dissertation Award, and Wenner Gren Foundation Grant. She was a clinical psychology intern at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA. In both clinical and developmental psychology, she performed pioneering research in the social functioning of children with high-functioning autistic disorder and the risk to children of having parents with severe anxiety disorders. In these endeavors, she was advised by Sigman.
She also minored in applied linguistics, expanding work on narrative--i.e., personal story-telling
and the meanings it conveys--to new applications in clinical psychology. For this work, her advisor was Professor Elinor Ochs.
In a groundbreaking integration of her fields of study, Capps analyzed mealtime conversations in families where a parent suffered from agoraphobia, the extreme fear of leaving home. Through her analysis of the family narratives, she discovered the language usages by which agoraphobic parents may inadvertently transmit their own experiences of fear to their children. Her synthesis of clinical and narrative research methods was unprecedented. By the time she had completed her doctorate, she had not only produced stellar scholarship in academic journals but had published one book and was hard at work on a second.
She was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology on campus in 1996, amidst competition from nearly 200 applicants for a position designed to span clinical and developmental psychology. Soon after her arrival, she became a beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague and a distinguished investigator. She taught courses in Introductory Psychology, Developmental Psychopathology, Emotion and Psychopathology, Autism, and Narrative and the Self. Her work was integrative, both within psychology and across other fields.
Her research focused on several topics: social and emotional functioning of individuals with autistic disorder, intergenerational transmission of anxiety disorders, narrative approaches to psychopathology and bereavement, and developmental theories of childhood emotional disturbance. Her work helped to dispel key myths in the field: For example, that individuals with autism show insecure attachments with caregivers or that they lack social understanding. Instead, with Sigman, she showed that such individuals are capable of secure attachments and that they display levels of social awareness not previously recognized. Her work was stunning in its originality and creativity, integrating traditional investigation of psychopathology with linguistics, discourse analysis, and narrative approaches. She paved the way for future generations of studies on narrative psychology and developmental psychopathology.
In addition to numerous scholarly papers, she co-authored three books: Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia (1995), with E. Ochs; Children with Autism: A Developmental Perspective (1997), with M. Sigman; and Living Narrative (in press) with E. Ochs. Capps received support for her research from the University of California, the Spencer Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health. The trajectory of her work and her career appeared to be in continuous ascendancy. We were privileged to have observed and experienced her insights and discoveries; we looked forward to a career that would have witnessed many more.
Her gracious personality, her incisive mind, her utter modesty, and her genuine warmth and affection for others influenced and inspired everyone with whom she interacted. Her work in psychology and her love of teaching guided her and gave her strength, especially during the last year of her life. Unexpectedly, in 1999, six months after the birth of her second son, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, although she was a non-smoker. The cancer soon spread to other systems. Yet, during her remaining months, she continued to meet with students, to be filmed about her illness, to pursue research and to write, and to serve as a loving wife and mother. It is beyond the power of these writers to express the dignity and beauty of her life and of her final days.
She is survived by her husband, Nathan Brostrom, of Berkeley; two sons, David August Brostrom and Walter Holden Brostrom; mother, Lois Grimsrud Capps of Santa Barbara, current Member of U.S. Congress; sister Laura Karolina Capps of Berkeley; brother Todd Holden Capps of Santa Barbara; and Todd's wife Julie Capps of Santa Barbara and their son, Aden Henry Capps. She will be remembered for the remainder of their lifetimes by those who knew her and by those in the fields of scholarship in which she worked.
--S.P. Hinshaw, D. Keltner, M. Main
Coffey, Hubert Stanley (1910-1988) Professor Emeritus
When Hubert S. Coffey died on May 9, 1988, the University lost a creative scholar, a stimulating teacher, and a principled and honorable man. His Berkeley colleagues and students lost a warm, tolerant, and loyal friend. We shall not forget him.
Professor Coffey's family had deep roots in Iowa. He was born in Wellman, Iowa on June 7, 1910, and grew up in a family of 10 brothers and sisters. He attended Coe College for three years, but earned his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 1934, 1935, and 1938 respectively. His first academic post was teaching psychology and child development at the Central Washington College of Education in Ellensburg. It was during this time that he married a colleague, Fanchon Yaeger, who later served for many years on the Education faculty of San Francisco State University. When World War II came, he joined the naval reserve, serving as an officer until 1945. After a post-war year with the Federal Security Agency, he joined the Berkeley Psychology Department in 1946. Here he remained until forced by ill health to retire in 1974, although he continued to hold a part-time, post-retirement appointment through 1977.
Professor Coffey was brought into the Psychology Department to strengthen the offerings in clinical psychology. He entered at once into the instructional program and continued to teach basic courses in clinical psychology throughout his career. In the early years, however, the department had difficulty assimilating the large number of graduate students returning from war. At the same time, clinical psychology was being reoriented from a principal concern with mentally deficient children to a new focus on diagnosis and psychotherapy for emotionally disturbed adults, occasioned in part by the need for professionals to provide psychological services to veterans. Students sought clinical training not only because of governmental subsidization not then as available in other areas, but also because clinical psychology seemed intrinsically closer to their own interests and concerns. Dislocations were a predictable result of setting up quasi-professional training in an academic department. Nevertheless, Hugh's genuine interest in and respect for other areas and his qualities of warmth, understanding and tolerance enabled him to aid immeasurably in establishing the new clinical psychology as an accepted part of the department.
Hugh's primary interests were in group dynamics, including the emerging specialty of group therapy. These interests had several sources, beginning perhaps with childhood experiences in a
large family! At Iowa he studied with George Stoddard and with Beth Wellman (a relative of Hugh's), who were conducting their famous investigations concluding that children's IQ's could be raised, given appropriate social and educational stimulation. Believers in IQ constancy vigorously attacked these studies. Nevertheless, the Iowa psychologists persisted in conceptualizing children as mutable, social beings in a social context, and this point of view influenced all of Hugh's later work.
Another key influence at Iowa came from Kurt Lewin, a refugee from the University of Berlin and one of the most influential of mid-century psychologists. Lewin's dynamic theory of personality extended gestalt principles from the domain of sensory perception to that of social perception. There issued from Lewin's laboratory a series of original and ingenious experiments on complex phenomena of social behavior that broke sharply with the single-variable research paradigm until then dominant in scientific psychology. In Lewin's work, manipulation of abstract variables under strict control gave way to studies of whole human beings in naturalistic situations resembling daily life. Hugh responded enthusiastically to the Lewinian movement, imparting to his own research a depth and a direction that intrigued his colleagues and sparked the enthusiasm of his graduate students.
Given the present-day importance in clinical practice of group treatment, and the volume of contemporary research on group processes in social, personality, and educational psychology, it is hard to remember that forty-odd years ago these topics were little known and seldom studied. Hugh Coffey took a leading role in pursuing them, not only at Berkeley, but as a regular summer staff member at the National Training Laboratory for Group Development in Bethel, Maine, organized by several of Lewin's former students. Hugh also served as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and at the California Institute of Technology, as a visiting psychologist at the Tavistock Institute in England, and as Fulbright Professor at the University of Lucknow in India, not to mention frequent consultative services to business and industry.
In all these positions, Hugh was interested in extending the group approach from therapy with patients to aiding healthy people to improve their interpersonal effectiveness. At a more general level, he sought to use psychological insights to help ameliorate social problems and promote social betterment generally. Typical of this work was the first 1950 number of the Journal of Social Issues which he wrote in collaboration with three graduate students, and titled “Community Service and Social Research: Group Psychotherapy in a Church Program” . He was also the chief architect of an extensive research enterprise on the interpersonal dimension of personality that has had a major impact on social and clinical psychology.
In many ways Hugh was a prototypic humanistic psychologist, although at the beginning of his career the term had not yet gained currency. He was concerned with people in all their complexity and in the infinitely varied social environments in which they live. He was also deeply committed to progressive social values in his own life as well as in his teaching and research. An instance of this was his refusal in 1950 to sign the loyalty oath then required by the Regents of the University of California. Along with other nonsigners, Hugh was dismissed from his professorship. His principled stand in defense of academic freedom was not without personal cost, but characteristically, he stood fast and was eventually reinstated when the oath was declared unconstitutional.
Hugh's last years were darkened by ill health. In 1970 he had the first of a series of progressively more incapacitating strokes. For a time, he was able to teach part-time, assisted by his wife, colleagues, and advanced students, but he was ultimately forced to retire altogether from his University duties. His wife Fanchon died in May, 1985. He is survived by a daughter, Anna Bass, two sons, Francis and Nicholas Coffey, and two grandchildren.
--H.G. Gough, M.B. Freedman, R. Tuddenham
Covington, Martin (1936-2018) Professor Emeritus
Professor Martin Vaden Covington, cherished colleague, scientist, teacher, mentor, and friend, passed away peacefully at his home in Sea Ranch, California, on January 29, 2018. He was just shy of his 82nd birthday.
Marty Covington was born on February 14, 1936, in San Bernardino, California, to Vaden Covington and Dorothy Stone Covington. He and a younger sister, Marilyn Roach, were raised in Redlands. His father, a self-made man, founded Covington Engineering, a firm that produces stone and lapidary equipment, still in existence today. Covington admired that hardy quality of his father’s—likely the source of his own striking can-do attitude toward any challenge that stood in his path. He was among the first in his family to attend college and earned his B.A. in psychology, magna cum laude, from the University of Redlands in 1957. Although he flirted with entering the ministry, he ultimately chose psychology and the University of California, Berkeley, as his professional home for his entire career. Covington received his Ph.D. from Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education in 1962, in the field of educational psychology.
It was in the San Bernardino Mountains that Marty first met Bette Wilson. Both families had cabins there and she was a Stanford student while he was a graduate student at Berkeley. They married in 1962 and marked almost 56 years of a loving partnership. Their two sons, Matthew and Mark, each shared special interests and many travels with their father—Matt, a partner in Marty’s love of nature and photography, and Mark, a partner in Marty’s passion for World War II history. In 1975, the family bought a plot of land in Sea Ranch and together, with the labor of Marty and his sons, built a beautiful home on the meadow overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Professor Covington’s commitment to and love for Berkeley spanned 61 years, starting with his graduate studies. He held a long-standing appointment as a research psychologist in the Institute of Personality and Social Research (IPSR) since 1961 and in 1964 he joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology. Upon his retirement to emeritus status in 2008, he was appointed Professor of the Graduate School.
Professor Covington was internationally known for his research on student motivation, intrinsic learning, and achievement in the classroom. Among his first contributions, in collaboration with Crutchfield, Davies, and Olton, was the design of a curriculum called “The Productive Thinking Program” (1972) with lessons, student problem sets, and a teacher guide. Using creative
curricula, vivid experiments, and memorable conceptualizations, Covington focused attention on the crisis of motivation in education. He argued that a love for learning is greatly undermined when we turn schooling into an ability game. His numerous publications, with many reprinted, and seven books, among them Self-Worth and School Learning (1976), Making the Grade (1992), and The Will to Learn (1998), have become classics in the field and are used worldwide.
With Richard G. Beery, Covington developed self-worth theory, which illustrated the steps that students took to protect their self-esteem in highly competitive learning environments. To avoid attributions made to a lack of ability—when faced with potential failure—students engage in self-defeating strategies such as not trying or procrastinating or employing excuses, all to preserve a sense of worth. While teachers typically encourage students to expend more effort, Covington provided a counterview, by explicating the dynamics of effort as a double-edged sword, occurring in classrooms as we typically construct them.
His research also recast the debate about the relationship between achievement and self-esteem, and called for reform of the reward-scarce schooling system—where grades are equated with worth—instead to embrace the promotion of intrinsic motivation. As he wrote, “It is only when students engage in personally meaningful endeavors for which they can be justifiably proud that self-confidence grows, and it is this growing self-assurance that in turn triggers further achievement.”
Covington’s laboratory could be found in the college classroom. As a dynamic instructor of “Introductory Psychology,” he tested theories about motivation through experiments in instructional innovations. This creative work resulted in an enormous data bank on student learning within varying instructional contexts, which has provided cohorts of graduate students the opportunity to study as well as influence motivation in the classroom. His most recent book, Life Beyond Grades: Designing College Courses to Promote Intrinsic Motivation (2017), heralds what was learned there. Co-authored with Linda M. von Hoene and Dominic J. Voge, the book was published by Cambridge University Press just shortly before his death. The completion of this monumental work brought him much joy and provides the educational community with his parting wisdom about how large lecture courses, in colleges and universities, can be transformed in ways that more deeply engage students in learning.
This translation of instructional theory and research into practice has been the hallmark of Covington’s efforts. Not only did he commit yearly to engaging undergraduates in the wonders of psychology, but he also prepared graduate students to teach Psychology 1—first, as graduate student instructors (GSIs) and second, to be mentored in developing their own Psychology 1 courses. His commitment to the development of teaching moved well beyond psychology.
Professor Covington played a central role in the work of the GSI Teaching and Resource Center for more than two decades as a regular speaker at the Faculty Seminar on Teaching with GSIs, was a central contributor to the How Students Learn Project, a member of the Graduate Council’s Advisory Committee for GSI Affairs and was the instructor of a graduate-level
seminar on designing courses to enhance student motivation. This seminar was taken by graduate students from across the disciplines and has had a significant impact on the teaching these former graduate students are now doing as faculty members. His imprint was felt campus-wide and
beyond.
Among many honors, Covington received the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award (1976), the Berkeley Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs (2002), and he was the first holder of the Berkeley Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education (2001-2006). He served as president of the International Society for Test Anxiety Research (1986-1988) and was honored for distinguished research contributions by the International Mediation Society (1998) and a Miller Professorship Lecture at the University of Illinois (1987). He also earned the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Outstanding University Instructor of the Year (1998) in Northern California.
In addition to Professor Covington’s contributions to research and teaching, he was also involved early on in departmental administration. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Department of Psychology was organized not along content areas, such as clinical psychology, social psychology, quantitative psychology, etc., but rather in Groups 1, 2, and 3, whose faculty membership was based in large part on friendship patterns. When one of us (Zedeck) joined the department in 1969, he became a member of Group 3, for which Professor Covington was the vice-chair. It will long be remembered how Marty and Bette Covington made our lives, both personal and academic, enriching. They warmly welcomed new faculty to the department and their home; they provided advice, support, and consultation for a new Ph.D. getting started in academics. The encouragement for junior as well as senior faculty continued throughout Professor Covington’s time in the department. Another of us (Weinstein) was privileged to teach a graduate seminar on school reform with Marty as well as to receive lessons in acrylic painting. And von Hoene was a longtime collaborator with Marty around the development of university teachers.
Those who worked closely with Marty remember many wonderful things about him: the mischievous twinkle in his eye, his laughter, his wide range of interests and hobbies, his curiosity, and most of all his compassion. What is ever present in submitted remembrances of him is a tremendous feeling of gratitude for this remarkable man who made each individual feel valued in every encounter, whether it be in a classroom, an office hour, a café, on the phone, at a meeting, or over dinner. He maintained a belief in the possibility of education to nurture a love of learning and promote a healthy sense of self-worth, in spite of all the challenges, serving as a role model for all.
A video of his departmental Distinguished Faculty Lecture, given in 2012 at UC Berkeley, provides a glimpse of Professor Covington in
action: https://psychology.berkeley.edu/videos/self-worth-theory-vital-throbbing-center- achievement-motivation-professor-martin-covington
The Martin V. Covington Memorial Tribute demonstrates the profound impact of Professor Covington’s life and work as told through the voices of his students, GSIs, and colleagues alike. The Martin V. Covington GSI Teaching Development Fund at Berkeley’s GSI Teaching and Resource Center has been created to support programs that prepare GSIs for teaching and acknowledge their successes, in a manner consistent with Covington’s life work and dedicated to his memory.
Professor Covington leaves behind generations of students and readers whom he inspired and a loving family, with wife Bette, sons and daughters-in-law Matthew (JoAnn) and Mark (Jody), and four grandchildren, Tom, Neil, Max, and Hannah, to whom he was deeply devoted.
Not surprisingly, this master scholar-teacher, who studied intrinsic motivation, lived his own life fully immersed in the creative process—ever growing—not only in his research and teaching but also in his highly-skilled photography, painting, airplane modeling, and his work as a magician. “Magic teaches us to see,” Covington has been quoted at saying, “And true magic never leaves us feeling the same.” So can it be said for motivated learning in any domain!
--R.S. Weinstein, L.M. von Hoene, S. Zedeck
Craik, Kenneth H. (1936-2012) Professor Emeritus
Ken Craik was born April 10, 1936 and passed away on March 25, 2012 at his home in Berkeley, California, close to his 76th birthday, after a long and debilitating illness. He was a driving force in helping to establish the field of Environmental Psychology, writing the first major review of the emerging field in The Annual Review of Psychology (in 1973), serving as founding co-editor of the Journal of Environmental Psychology (in 1980), and being instrumental in the establishment of the Environmental Psychology Division of the International Association of Applied Psychology. Ken was also a pioneer in developing methods of measuring people and places.
Ken completed his Ph.D. in 1964 at Berkeley publishing the results with his early mentor Theodore Sarbin, the distinguished social psychologist and personality theorist. The university quickly spotted his talents, and he was taken on to the faculty straight away, staying as a professor for the rest of his career. His PhD work was on the perception of time, but even then he was interested in personality differences and the influences of context. Those two areas remained the focus of his intellectual activity throughout the rest of his life; the ways in which the physical environment was relevant to human experience and activity, and studies of personality differences. As his productive career unfolded those central foci broadened into important practical domains such as environmental impact assessment, relating to such matters as awareness and perception of electricity pylons. His interests in personality took him into the psychology of politics and especially of politicians, leading him to be recognized as one of the founders of present-day political psychology.
In the 1970's he collaborated with his good friend Donald Appleyard to set up an environmental psychology laboratory at Berkeley that allowed models of buildings to be filmed as if moving amongst them. A large model of downtown San Francisco was a particular feature that allowed the visual impact of proposed buildings to be studied in moving images. This was typical of his bridging richly conceptual ideas in psychology with direct practical implications.
His concern with the way people interact with their surroundings was also expressed in his seminal “Lived Day” studies that echoed the ecological psychology of Roger Barker and his colleagues at the University of Kansas. For this research Ken and his associates filmed a full day in the lives of participants, opening the way to the consideration of how people actually carry out their day-to-day lives. Ken’s thoughtful conceptual analysis of this method served as an important forerunner to the recent widespread interest in ambulatory assessment and other methods for measuring individuals in situ. Ken’s Lived Day analyses were part of his fascination with significant aspects of human experience in context, which included his studies of humor and reputation.
For many of the early years of the Journal of Environmental Psychology he worked in an editorial role, overseeing the reviews of papers. Like all good editors he never simply sat back and accepted reviewers' comments but always carried out detailed examinations of the papers himself, preparing extensive comments and thoughtful guidance for the authors. As a consequence, the high standard of papers in the journal today owes a lot to the benchmarks he set in its early days.
Ken had considerable influence in the field of personality psychology. He was a gifted supervisor and many of his students, to his great delight, went on to distinction in their field. He was a creative researcher who published important work on the nature of explanation in personality, temporal psychology, and most recently a bold analysis of reputation as a field of interdisciplinary activity. Ken was also a wise and constructive administrator, having directed Berkeley’s Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, a highly distinguished and influential research institute focusing on personality and human achievement.
His colleagues and former students remember his warm, good humor and pleasant manner, informed by a deep and serious commitment to scientific psychology. He is survived by his loving wife, Janice, of 54 years, two daughters, one son, one son-in-law, one daughter-in-law, and one granddaughter.
--D. Buss, D. Canter, S. Gosling, B. Little
Crutchfield, Richard Stanley (1912-1977) Professor Emeritus, Director Emeritus, Institute of Personality Assessment and Research
With the death of Richard Crutchfield on July 19, 1977, the University lost a beloved and respected colleague, and psychology a brilliant and creative scholar. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on June 20, 1912, Crutchfield received his B.A. with honors in civil engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1934 and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1938. In 1938-39 he was a research associate at Swarthmore College, and in 1939-40 an instructor in psychology at Mount Holyoke College. From 1940-46 he held research and administrative appointments with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Office of War Information, and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany. For distinguished service in this last position, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the U.S.
War Department. In 1946, he returned to Swarthmore's department of psychology and served as its chairman from 1950 to 1953. In 1953 he joined the Berkeley faculty as Professor of Psychology and Research Psychologist in the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research and remained here until his death.
At a time when psychologists were tending toward narrow specialization, Crutchfield remained always a generalist, whose work reflected not only his strong training in and orientation toward the physical sciences and mathematics but also his sensitive feeling for art and the humanities. In the 1930s he was a pioneer in moving psychology from a tradition of single-factor experiments to experimental designs based on analysis of variance and covariance, that is to say, on the concomitant study of a variety of variables. During World War II, he made significant contributions to the then developing methodology of opinion surveys. In 1948 his Theory and Problems of Social Psychology, written in collaboration with Professor David Krech of Berkeley, was recognized from the first as a landmark in the field. In the 1950s, his papers and studies helped to establish the linkage between cognitive-perceptual processes and significant facets of personality. During this same period, he developed precise methods for studying decision making under conditions of social interaction and went on to a seminal series of investigations into the nature of conformity in the interpersonal sphere. In the late 1950s and 1960s he published a series of analyses of the process of creative thinking in both children and adults.
Crutchfield's penetrating analyses were accompanied by a humane concern for the welfare of individuals whose lives might be enriched by the findings of his work. These concerns were strikingly evidenced in his creation with Martin Covington, Robert Olton, and Lillian Davies of a program of automated instruction in productive thinking that was used widely in the public schools of America.
He worked effectively alone, but he was also a superb coauthor. His collaboration with David Krech was over the years one of the great examples of cooperative endeavor in the writing of textbooks. In addition to Theory and Problems of Social Psychology, their Elements of Psychology now stands as a classic in the history of psychology.
He was equally effective and innovative in his teaching and guidance of students. His seminars on the presentation of psychological material and on creativity and other special topics for honor students were eagerly sought out by students. Every course that he taught placed fundamental stress on independent thinking. He did not present facts simply for their own sake, expecting students to remember them; his emphasis instead was always on their relation to underlying theoretical principles and on a systematic comprehension of these principles. He conveyed to students the delight that comes from thinking about psychological issues and from mastering the methods and techniques necessary for dealing with them. In his seminars, students would often in retrospect be astonished to realize how much they had learned and how much their intellectual growth had been furthered. By precept and example, he gave them the courage to think for themselves and to confront difficult and complex problems.
At Berkeley, Crutchfield played a significant role in the development of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research; he served twice as its Associate Director (1954-64, 1967-
70) and as its Director from 1970-73 before failing health forced him to relinquish the post. In 1964-65 he also served as chairman of the Department of Psychology.
His good judgment in academic and scholarly matters was widely recognized. Over the years, he served on committees or as a consultant to, among others, the Social Science Research Council, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Ford Foundation, the Educational Testing Service, and the U.S. Office of Education. In the American Psychological Association, he was several times elected to the Council of Representatives. He also served on the Council for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, on the board of directors of the Eastern Psychological Association, and in 1953-54, as president of the Division of Personality and Social Psychology.
Crutchfield's research accomplishments were recognized by his appointments as a fellow to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 1958-59, and in 1962-63 as a research professor in the Miller Institute for Research in Basic Science, Berkeley. In 1976, in recognition of his many contributions to the Berkeley campus and at the time of his retirement, he was awarded the prestigious Berkeley Citation.
Crutchfield was a private person, who at the same time was warm and friendly, witty and charming, and an engaging conversationalist. His interests and knowledge were wide ranging. His scientific competence was exceptional, yet his intellect was not coldly rational but warmly humanistic. His temperament was that of an artistic and aesthetically sensitive person unusually responsive to ethical values. His honesty and insight, whether in dealing with ideas or with persons, were felt and treasured by his colleagues and his students. He was devoted to his family as well as to his profession and scholarly endeavors. He will be lovingly remembered by his wife Mary, his son Paul, and his daughter Lila, and by all of us who were fortunate enough to know and to be friends of this remarkable man.
--Donald W. MacKinnon, Martin V. Covington, Harrison G. Gough
De Valois, Russell L. (1926-2003) Professor
On September 20, 2003, Professor Russell L. De Valois of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident ten days earlier. Professor De Valois was a leading figure in the study of brain and behavior relationships, and with his passing the University of California, as well as the larger scientific community, lost a brilliant scientist, an inspiring colleague, and a dear friend.
“Russ” De Valois was born in Ames, Iowa on December 15, 1926. He spent most of his early life in Kodaikanal, India, where his parents supervised an agricultural missionary station. He went to the Highclerc School and at the time of the accident Russ and his wife, Professor Karen De Valois, were returning from Estes Park, Colorado, where they had attended the 60th reunion of his school class. Russ never lost his love for India, often treating colleagues to spicy curries accompanied by spicy stories of school pranks. During two of their sabbaticals, Russ and Karen
returned to Kodaikanal and it was on one of these that they wrote their influential book, Spatial Vision.
Russ attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where he received an A.B. in zoology and physiology in 1947, as well as an M.A. in psychology in 1948. His time in Oberlin included a summer trip to Europe just after the war, in which he paid for his Atlantic passage by taking care of farm horses being shipped to Poland to help resuscitate that country’s agriculture. An outstanding soccer player at Oberlin, he spent his year as a graduate student as a coach for the school’s team. He sometimes reminisced about having sacrificed what was certain to have been a great career as a professional soccer player to become a scientist. Russ continued his education at the University of Michigan, where he received a Ph.D. in physiological psychology in 1952. It was there that he developed a lifelong interest in neuroanatomy that played an important role throughout his career. Upon finishing his degree, he obtained an invitation to study ethology with Konrad Lorenz in Germany. By chance, just as Russ was about to begin his Fulbright fellowship, Lorenz left for England and directed Russ to work instead at the University of Freiburg with the zoologist G. Birukow. While persevering on the assigned topic, dung beetles, Russ began to interact with a cadre of brilliant postdoctoral fellows working on the visual cortex of a cat in the neurophysiology lab of Ricard Jung, and so discovered the intellectual excitement that would encompass the rest of his research life. While there, he became excited by a paper which proposed that the structure of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), a region in the visual system of the mammalian brain, might provide a biological substrate of the classic theory of color vision described by Helmholtz. At this same time, the retail magnate S. S. Kresge, founder of the chain of stores that became K-Mart, made a large contribution to the University of Michigan to set up a research program in ophthalmology, and through its auspices Russ was offered a position as a research associate and lecturer in psychology as well as a position as one of the first resident scientists at the new Kresge Institute. After five productive years in Ann Arbor, he accepted a faculty appointment in psychology at Indiana University, where he remained until 1968. At Indiana, he and a group of extraordinary students, including G. Jacobs of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I. Abramov of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, developed the opponent processing model of color vision that remains the centerpiece of the field. Professor De Valois then moved to the Department of Psychology in Berkeley where he taught and did research until his untimely death.
The list of his many fine students at Berkeley includes D. Albrecht of the University of Texas, R. Tootell of the Massachusetts General Hospital, M. Webster of the University of Nevada, N. Cottaris and S. Elfar of Wayne State University and M. Silverman. Another extremely fruitful scientific collaboration was with Professor E. Switkes of the University of California, Santa Cruz. However, the most important of Russ’s scientific and personal relations began in 1969 with his marriage to Karen Kennedy. This marked the beginning of a 34-year partnership and intellectual collaboration that yielded a scientific impact greater than the sum of their considerable individual talents.
Professor De Valois was a pioneering and visionary scientist. Some 30 years prior to the 1990s' “Decade of the Brain” and the advent of modern cognitive neuroscience, Russ was among a small cohort who championed the revolutionary idea that one could establish a relationship between behavior and localized electrochemical events observed in the brain. Russ found that a
key to understanding visual behavior was “listening to what the cells were telling us.” He described his research interests as:
The physiological and anatomical organization underlying visual perception. In particular, how wavelength information is analyzed and encoded, the contribution of wavelength and luminance information to spatial vision, and how spatial information is analyzed and encoded in the visual nervous system.
In his work at Michigan and Indiana, Russ first discovered and described the responses of single cells in the primate visual system to attempt to understand the neurophysiology of color vision. Following his strategy of listening to what cells had to say, he performed an elegant set of experiments that resolved a scientific controversy that had its roots in the nineteenth century work of Young, Helmholtz, and Hering. Earlier, experimenters had shown that the spectral responses of photopigments in the three types of cones could provide a biophysical correlate for the first stage of trichromacy, an arrangement in line with the postulates of Young and Helmholtz. De Valois and his associates discovered chromatically antagonistic neurons in macaque LGN and thus demonstrated the neural substrate for the second stage of color processing, similar to that proposed by Hering. Ever the biological psychologist, De Valois always insisted that every physiological observation be correlated with measures of color perception derived from behavioral experiments. No better example of this kind of behavioral/physiological correlation exists. One sees the influence of this work in a 1981 Current Contents designation of his paper, "Analysis of Response Patterns of LGN Cells," as a 'Citation Classic,' one of the most frequently cited papers of the preceding twenty years.
While his work on chromatic vision continued throughout his career at Berkeley, in the 1970s Russ and his students and collaborators began to work on the neural coding underlying another of the great issues in vision, the spatial codes that allow us to see patterns. In addition to physiological recordings and psychophysical observations of spatial vision, they made important strides at understanding the underlying structure of visual processing through groundbreaking studies of functional neuroanatomy. They showed a topographic organization for spatial frequency in the visual cortex in which spatial response of neighboring neurons varies in a regular manner. In 1988, Professors Russell and Karen De Valois published an influential book, Spatial Vision, which summarized two decades of work by vision researchers in applying linear systems analysis to vision. In the 1990s, Russ returned to several perceptual questions that were not satisfactorily explained by the mechanisms of the LGN (e.g., the loci of unique hues). This work (with Karen De Valois) led to a new multi-stage model of color vision. With a record of 40 years of outstanding accomplishments behind him, Russ continued to be as bold and active as ever, and at the time of his death was still deeply involved with new data and more complex models of how the brain deciphers vision.
The outstanding scientific accomplishments of Russell De Valois were recognized by many accolades and honors. Among these were a Fulbright Fellowship (1953-54), election to the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1968), election to the National Academy of Sciences (1976), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1977), election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1977), the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1979),
appointment as Faculty Research Lecturer of the University of California, Berkeley (1983), the Tillyer Medal of the Optical Society of America (1988), William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society (1991), and the Prentice Medal of the American Academy of Optometry (2002).
With all of his honors and career achievements in research, Russ also continued throughout his life in Berkeley to be a hardworking and dedicated teacher. Never one to shun responsibility, De Valois often volunteered to teach the hardest courses, the large lecture courses in biological psychology and the junior-level entry in the psychology major, as well as smaller lab courses. He strongly believed in the Berkeley ethic of teacher/researcher and took special interest in educational planning, such as development of the structure of the graduate proseminar in biological psychology.
Perhaps the most important honor for Russell L. De Valois was the esteem, admiration, and affection felt for Russ by his many colleagues and students. Through the years, from his beginning as a famous young professor to his later years as a wise elder departmental mentor, he never faltered in the excitement for life that was his hallmark. In later years, bad knees limited his mountain hiking and abbreviated his career as a skier, but Russ remained an avid tennis player, who for some 30 years reveled in the Sunday tennis “game” with colleagues. He had a delightful sense of humor and a great gusto for life that was infectious. His premature death left his friends and colleagues with a feeling of profound sadness and loss, but the many of us who have shared his intellect, his unbridled enthusiasm for scientific research, and his personal kindness also feel a sense of gratitude to have had the good fortune to be colleagues and friends of Russell L. De Valois.
--A.J. Adams, E. Hafter, E. Switkes
Dunlap, Knight (1875-1949)
Dunlap was one of the three students who joined George Stratton in founding the Psychological Laboratory at the University of California (at the time, Berkeley was the only UC campus; what in 1929 became UC Los Angeles had previously been known as the "Southern Branch" of the California State Normal School and later the "Southern Branch" of the University of California). After completing his bachelor's degree, undertook doctoral studies at Harvard, working with Hugo Munsterberg. He briefly returned to Cal as instructor, before moving in 1906 to Johns Hopkins University as Professor of Experimental Psychology. A native of California, he completed his career at UCLA, where he was Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department.
Dunlap's research an early demonstration "subliminal" perception, as well as more conventional studies of distance and time perception. He invented or improved several of the "brass instruments" used for psychological research at the time. An assignment to the Army Air Medical Service during World War I led Dunlap to develop research interests in the vestibular sense. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Psychobiology (forerunner to
today's Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology), but he also wrote an important early textbook on social psychology. He served as President of the American Psychological
Association. His research work in the army led to an interest in vestibular work. A colleague of John B. Watson at Hopkins, he wrote trenchant critiques of both introspection and the theory of instincts; but he opposed Watson's radical version of behaviorism, arguing that scientific psychology needed to have a place for cognition as well as habit.
--J.F. Kihlstrom*
Eichorn, Dorothy Hansen (1924-2018) Research Psychologist
Known to her friends and colleagues as “Dot,” Dorothy H. Eichorn died peacefully on March 22, 2018, at the Meadows of Napa Valley, where she was receiving skilled nursing care. She was attended at her passing by her son Eric and her longtime caregiver Monica Johnson. Her health had been in decline for several years due to Lewy body dementia.
Dorothy Marie Hansen was born on November 18, 1924, in Montpelier, Vermont. She was raised there by her parents George Marinus Hansen and Lula Maria (Ryan) Hansen, along with her younger sister Laurel (Mrs. Frederick Reed) and her cousin Helen (Mrs. Harry Betts), whom she always considered to be her elder sister. She had a half-brother, Harry Ryan, who died while serving in the Navy when she was a small child. Her father worked for the National Life Insurance Company and her mother managed a local grocery store. Dot attended Montpelier High School where she was on the debate team, as was her sister Laurel. She was salutatorian of her 1941 graduating class.
She received her B.A. cum laude with special honors in psychology (with a minor in zoology) in 1947 at the University of Vermont, her M.A. in psychology in 1949 at Boston University, and her Ph.D. in psychology (with a minor in physiology) in 1951 at Northwestern University. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
While attending UVM she had various part time jobs, including with the Vermont Church Council. In the course of that employment, she met Herman “Ike” Eichorn, a young pastor serving in his first parish. After a period of courtship, Ike proposed marriage. Dot initially declined, saying that she wanted to continue her education and have a career in psychology. When he surprised her by saying, “You can do both,” she reconsidered and they were married in June 1947. While Dot obtained her advanced degrees, Ike continued his pastoral work in Vermont and then trained in chaplaincy in Elgin, Illinois. After Dot received her doctorate in 1951, they moved to Napa, where he was Protestant Chaplain at Napa State Hospital until his retirement in 1987. Their son Eric was born in 1955.
Dot became a research psychologist at the Institute of Human Development (IHD) at the University of California, Berkeley in late 1951. For the first few years she also lectured at UCB in physiology and then quit teaching to concentrate on research. She was involved in a number of studies of child development, but perhaps the most notable was the Berkeley Growth Study, a longitudinal study of physical and mental development that started with a subject pool of babies
born in Berkeley in 1928-29 and followed them through childhood and into adulthood. By the 1960s she and colleague Dr. Nancy Bayley were collecting data on the children of the original subjects, and Dot took over as director of the study when Bayley left for a position at the National Institutes of Health. Dot became administrator of the Child Study Center, a nursery school operated by IHD, starting in 1962, and associate director of IHD starting in 1976. She retired from the University in 1989.
Her considerable administrative skills benefited a number of professional societies as well as the Institute. She served on many committees and councils of the American Psychological Association, was a member of its Board of Directors from 1969-72 and was President of its Division on Developmental Psychology in 1968-69. She was a founding member of the American Psychological Society (now known as the Association for Psychological Science). She was President of the Western Psychological Association in 1988.
A group that benefited greatly from Dot’s involvement was the Society for Research in Child Development. She was introduced to SRCD while at Northwestern by faculty member Dr. Tom Richards, who was its business manager. When she got to IHD, one of her colleagues, Harold Jones, M.D., was its President, and most of her other colleagues there were members, so she joined. She was actively involved with SRCD throughout the 1960s and was recruited as Executive Officer in 1971 upon the death of Dr. Margaret Harlow who had held the position. The SRCD’s executive office was moved to Berkeley at that point. She served as EO until her retirement in 1989, when Dr. John Hagen took over the position. During her tenure, SRCD grew considerably in membership (from 2,000 to 4,000), budget, journal subscriptions, convention attendance, and influence in the field of child development. She is remembered by her colleagues for her strong organizational skills, balanced with a ready sense of humor.
Dot was preceded in death by her husband Ike and both of her sisters and their husbands. She is survived by her son Eric Eichorn of Hayward; by her nieces, Mary Luci Stephens of Goshen, Vermont, Martha Jo Reed of Lyndonville, Vermont, and Dorothy (Dody) Barrett of Northfield, Vermont; and by their partners, children, and grandchildren. Until his own retirement, Eric was an engineer in the Department's electronics shop. A commited feminist, Dorothy was proud to say that, after delivering Eric on a Saturday, she returned to work the next Tuesday.
--Institute of Human Development*
Ervin-Tripp, Susan (1927-2018) Professor Emerita
Susan Ervin-Tripp, a founding leader in the fields of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, died on November 13, 2018, at the age of 91, in Oakland, California. She was born on June 29, 1927, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She completed her undergraduate education in 1949 at Vassar College, where she studied art history, and then earned a Ph.D. in social psychology in 1955 from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation was on the link between bilingualism and cognition, and she then worked on the Southwest Project in Comparative Psycholinguistics and
studied effects of Native American languages on cognitive processes.
Ervin-Tripp taught at the Harvard School of Education before coming to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958 as a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology. She then moved to the Department of Speech (now Department of Rhetoric) but returned to the psychology department as a full professor in 1975. She was also a research psychologist in the Institute of Human Development and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and was a core faculty member in the development of cognitive science at Berkeley.
Ervin-Tripp was repeatedly a pathbreaker—and the paths that she helped explore have become well-traveled roads. It is remarkable to see so many innovations in one life story: studying both psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, embracing new directions in the study of first-language acquisition as well as bilingualism, and repeatedly applying new technology in her research.
Beginning with her doctoral research on French-English bilinguals, and continuing with a study of Japanese war brides, Ervin-Tripp revealed differences in values and orientation—within a single individual—depending on the language being spoken. Her early child language research focused on acquisition of phonology and grammar—again, comparing children learning different types of languages. In the 1950s, she pioneered in tape recording children’s interactions with parents in their homes, transcribing and coding speech for computer-aided analysis in an era when one had to devise search programs and deal with punched cards and voluminous printouts. In the 1970s, she brought the first available video cameras into homes and preschools to add patterns of activity and gaze direction to studies of language in discourse. She expanded her research to patterns of family interaction, peer play, humor, and politeness, combining her concerns with the individual and the group. All of these innovations led to new formats for transcribing data of multi-personal interaction. This window into everyday communication contributed to the development of the new field of sociolinguistics, extending study of the adult- child dyad to the family, and extending dialog to multiparty interactive discourse.
Sociolinguistics went beyond parent-child dialog into the pragmatics of communication.
Ervin-Tripp was a talented and beloved teacher. Beginning in the 1960s, she played a central role in developing cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research training, mentoring many doctoral students who conducted research in a range of cultures and social settings. She was a cochair of several doctoral dissertations in the other academic disciplines of education, anthropology, linguistics, and rhetoric. She especially enjoyed mentoring undergraduates and sponsored many senior honors projects on child language, bilingualism, and sociolinguistics. She innovated an undergraduate course on bilingualism and always sent students out to listen to language in the field—at home, in public places, in political discourse. She used students' personal observations to hone their academic skills in analyzing language and its use; it is noteworthy how often she encouraged her students to contribute their unique cultural and social knowledge and insights.
She nurtured students into careers, at both –the undergraduate and graduate levels, looking out for them for years after they were at Berkeley. In addition, Ervin-Tripp collaborated with her psychology colleagues in co-teaching such courses as language acquisition (for graduate students) and the psychology of gender (for undergraduates).
Throughout her long and productive career, Ervin-Tripp was active in multiple efforts to make significant advances for women’s equality on the Berkeley campus. In 1969, the Committee on
Senate Policy established a subcommittee to investigate and report on the status of academic women on the Berkeley campus, and Ervin-Tripp was one of the subcommittee members who carried out that work. The 1970 subcommittee report (popularly known as “the blue book”) was groundbreaking in shining a light on many of the inequities that existed for academic women on campus (whose numbers were then at an historic low). As a result of the publicity received by the report, several changes were implemented in academic hiring practices, and the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate established a new standing committee on the Status of Women (later to become SWEM, Committee on the Status of Women and Ethnic Minorities). Ervin- Tripp served on this committee, both as its second chair and as a member (1972-74 and 1983- 85), and coauthored a guide to the tenure process, which was viewed as blasphemy at the time, but later found its place on the web. She was also an active leader of other relevant groups on campus, including the League of Academic Women (which filed a civil rights complaint about sex discrimination). When the Committee on Senate Policy scolded her for having been a signer of this complaint, her famous reply was that, in the Middle Ages, peasants who were treated badly by the nobles complained to the king. Ervin-Tripp repeatedly documented pay inequity (for both faculty and staff), representing the UC system to legislative committees in Sacramento. Wherever possible, she used her academic skills as a psycho- and sociolinguist to provide a scientific foundation to her advocacy. She was clearly a powerful and nuanced observer of gender inequity on university campuses and a forceful activist for cultural change.
She also served on other Divisional committees, including Admissions, Enrollment and Preparatory Education (1970-71), Assembly Representation (1970-71 and 1973-74), Committees (1979-80), and Student Affairs (1990-92), as well as Ombudsmen (1987-89) and Graduate Council (1992-93).
Among many honors, Ervin-Tripp received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an appointment as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1974. In 1985, she was awarded a Cattell Fellowship in Psychology and served as a Fulbright Fellow in France, examining second language in migrant workers. In 1994, Ervin-Tripp was invited by the Academic Senate to present a Distinguished Faculty Lecture to the entire campus community. In 1996, an international group of 45 colleagues and students presented a Festschrift in her
honor: Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language: Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin- Tripp, edited by Dan Isaac Slobin, Julie Gerhardt, Amy Kyratzis, and Jiansheng Guo (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey). In 2000, she served as president of the International Pragmatics Association.
In 2016, Ervin-Tripp completed an extensive oral history narrative of her remarkable career and life, “A Life of Research in Psycholinguistics and Work for the Equity of Women.”. Without a doubt, she was a role model for women students and faculty. Her life story shows a continuing concern for the contexts in which human beings learn and interact, permeated by a deeply felt moral imperative to remove obstacles to growth and development, and by a pervading sense of justice and fair play. Her legacy as a voice of conscience on the Berkeley campus will always be remembered.
Although Ervin-Tripp officially retired from the University in 1999, she continued to work actively until her death. She is survived by her husband, Robert Tripp, a UC professor emeritus
of physics; three children, Alexander Tripp, Katya Tripp, and Nico Tripcevich; daughters-in-law Suzanne Murray and Cheyla Samuelson; and granddaughters Clara Tripp, Iva Borrello, and Sofia Tripcevich.
--D. Slobin, C. Maslach, R. Weinstein
See also "Elizabeth Scott and Susan Ervin Tripp: The Fight for Gender Equity at Berkeley", a lecture by Amanda Golbeck and Rhona Weinstein (2021), honoring Prof. Ervin-Tripp's contributions to gender equity on the Berkeley campus, available on the Department website.
Frenkel-Brunswik, Else (1908-1958) Professor
Else Frankel was born in Lemberg, in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine), but her family moved to Vienna to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1918.
After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1930, she served at the Vienna Psychological Institute as research assistant to Charlotte Buhler, whose explorations of adolescence and old age were pioneering efforts at life-span developmental psychology, and underwent a training analysis by Ernst Kris, one of the founders of psychoanalytic ego psychology. Following the Anschluss, Frenkel emigrated to New York, where she reconnected with Egon Brunswik, whom she had known in Vienna. They married in 1938, and she came to Berkeley with him when he took up his appointment in the Department.
Denied a tenure-track faculty appointment in Psychology due to anti-nepotism policies in effect at the time, Frenkel-Brunswik became a Research Psychologist at the Institute of Child Welfare (later the Institute of Human Development). and a Lecturer in the Psychology Department.
There she published studies of childhood imagination, projective testing, and a pioneering investigation of ethnocentrism in children. By far her most famous research was as part of the team that produced The Authoritarian Personality (1950), including Nevitt Sanford and Daniel Levinson of the Psychology Department, and Teodor Adorno, a leading figure of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, who was living in exile in the United States. This monumental study, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, was begun in the wake of World War II and completed at the onset of the Cold War, ran to almost 1,000 pages. It was probably the first
-- certainly the first large-scale, running to almost 1,000 pages -- marriage of theory (in this case, psychoanalysis, with a little Marxism added in) with the psychometric and statistical tools of modern quantitative social science. It takes its place alongside other classics of midcentury social science such as The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd. The project, a landmark in the development of political psychology, created new scales to measure anti-Antisemitism, ethnocentrism, political-economic conservatism, and, with the "California F Scale", fascistic or antidemocratic tendencies. Individuals scoring in the high and low ranges on these scales then
completed a battery of psychological tests (both "objective" and "projective"), plus an intensive clinical interview. Frenkel-Brunswik conducted the interviews, supervised the testing, and contributed theoretical analyses of parenting, development, and sexuality.
Else Frenkel-Brunswik was a dedicated (if "neo-Freudian") psychoanalyst, but she was also a product of Moritz Schlick's Vienna Circle. In a long essay on "Psychoanalysis and the Unity of Science", she sought to reconcile psychoanalysis with logical positivism. Especially in the post- Einstein age of relativity theory and the uncertainty principle, she argued, psychoanalysis could be as scientific as physics.
Upon Egon Brunswik's death, the Psychology faculty voted to offer her a tenured faculty position, with the rank of Professor; but, tragically, she died before the appointment could take official effect.
--J.F. Kihlstrom*
Ghiselli, Edwin Ernest (1907-1980) Professor Emeritus
Edwin Ghiselli was born and reared in San Francisco. He entered the University of California at Berkeley as a freshman and earned his A.B. degree with a major in Italian in 1930. He then worked briefly in a bank but had been so intrigued by a course in psychology taught by Professor Robert Tryon, that he decided to make that discipline his career. He returned to the University to earn his doctorate, completing his dissertation in 1936 under the supervision of C.W. Brown, on a topic concerning brain mechanisms in learning.
The next year was spent as a National Research Council Fellow in the laboratory of K.S. Lashley at Harvard University. Ghiselli then moved to Cornell University as a teaching fellow, where he was profoundly influenced by an eminent applied psychologist, Professor Jack Jenkins.
Switching his specialty, he moved with Jenkins in 1938 to the University of Maryland to accept a position as instructor.
In 1939 he accepted an invitation to return as Assistant Professor to Berkeley, with a mandate to develop a broad program of teaching and research in applied psychology. Always an innovator, Ghiselli's initial proposal included not only a well-designed curriculum, but also a plan, in cooperation with local business and industry, to give students practical experience in research.
Subsequent adoption of his program was so successful that Berkeley became internationally recognized for the excellence of its training and research in applied psychology. This achievement was partly due to his own talents as a teacher and researcher, partly to the excellence of the younger faculty members he was able to recruit to his team. Together with various colleagues over a period of years, he produced an impressive series of studies on
personnel selection, managerial skills and industrial psychology in general. His classic studies of managerial styles in several different countries, carried out in collaboration with his friends and colleagues, Mason Haire and Lyman Porter, are perhaps the best known.
Ghiselli was a gifted teacher who maintained high standards. Students admired and respected him. He always found time for understanding and warm counsel or patient tutoring when they were needed. He was equally skillful at drawing out the best in his graduate seminar students and at clarifying difficult concepts for bewildered undergraduates in his large lectures.
Ghiselli was dedicated to the welfare of his department. He twice served as its chairman in difficult times when the strains of rapid internal growth and the differences between administration and department made the task especially taxing. Always a champion of the rights of his colleagues, he was a doughty warrior in their defense regardless of the physical and emotional cost to himself.
Notwithstanding his investments in teaching and University service, Ghiselli was first and foremost a research scientist. In this role, he achieved a high and permanent place in the history of applied psychology. His publications included five major books and more than one hundred research papers in professional journals. Never was the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, which he received in 1972 from the American Psychological Association, more richly deserved. The APA gave him also the Walter Bingham Award for his development of measures to identify talented young people. At different times he was President of the APA Division of Industrial Psychology, and President of the Western Psychological Association. He was Donald
G. Paterson Memorial Lecturer at the University of Minnesota and delivered the Annual Lecture before the Canadian Psychological Association. After retirement, he returned to the Berkeley campus to deliver the Robert Choate Tryon Lecture on the Psychology of Individual Differences, which honors his lifelong friend and colleague. Among his international recognitions was an invitation to serve as Visiting Professor at the University of Bologna, where for a year he took major responsibility for developing a research and teaching program in industrial psychology.
Ghiselli was a warm and outgoing individual with an unusually strong and sincere interest in and concern for people--for his friends, for acquaintances, and even for strangers he met on a journey or at some social gathering. He possessed a rare capacity for sympathetic listening which made it easy for intimates and strangers alike to talk to him about their experiences and problems. His lively sense of humor and appreciation of the same quality in others were among his most endearing qualities.
In 1938 Edwin married Louisa Hickox whom he had met at Berkeley when he was a graduate and she an undergraduate student. They married during his employment at the University of Maryland and moved to Berkeley in 1939. Except for three years spent in Texas while Edwin was serving as military officer in the Aviation Research Program, Berkeley remained their home until the time came for retirement. They had three sons, William, John and David, and their gracious hospitality made the Ghiselli home a center for many happy gatherings of friends and professional colleagues.
After retirement, the couple moved to Mountain View, California, partly in order to be closer to two of their sons and their families. The third son followed his father's footsteps into psychology. A joint paper, published by William Ghiselli of the University of Missouri and Edwin Ghiselli of the University of California was a source of special pride to them both. Louisa died in 1976, but Edwin maintained the same residence and continued to enjoy close ties with his children and grandchildren. His death from a heart attack came while he was traveling in Italy with his eldest granddaughter.
--F. Beach, K. Roberts, R. Tuddenham
Glickman, Stephen E. (1933-2020) Professor Emeritus
Steve Glickman, a leading scholar in behavioral endocrinology, animal behavior, and evolutionary biology, died on May 22, 2020. He was born in the Bronx, New York, on January 17, 1933. His mother was an accomplished piano teacher affiliated with the Julliard School and his father was a junior high school math teacher. In his childhood, he made frequent visits to the Bronx Zoo, where his lifelong connection to animals was nurtured.
After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1954 with a degree in psychology, Steve attended graduate school at Northwestern University. A visit from Donald Hebb, the Canadian psychologist and pioneer in the neural basis of learning, convinced Steve to transfer to McGill University in 1956, where he obtained a Ph.D. in physiological psychology, supervised by Hebb and Peter Milner. In his dissertation, Steve investigated the effects of electrical stimulation of the brain on rats’ learning and the reinforcing properties of arousal, with emphasis on the reticular activating system. Three years later, this work led to his foundational article, titled “Perseverative Neural Processes and Consolidation of the Memory Trace” (Psychological Bulletin, 1961), a work years ahead of its time and one that foreshadowed the explosive growth of research on the brain’s mediation of learning and memory.
Steve returned to Northwestern in 1958 as a junior faculty member. Before leaving in 1965, he spent two years as a Miller Fellow at Berkeley, sponsored by Frank Beach. During this time, studying both skunks and rats, Steve completed the manuscript describing his landmark study of curiosity in diverse species at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo (“Curiosity in Zoo
Animals”, Behavior, 1966). In this study, he characterized and quantified the reactions of more than 200 captive vertebrate species to a standardized set of novel objects, revealing significant differences among various taxonomic groups, both in the quantity and form of object manipulation. This work again foreshadowed important current research on species’ differences in exploration and neophilia. In 1965, Steve accepted an associate professorship at the University of Michigan, where he stayed for two years before moving to Berkeley where he would spend the remainder of his career. While at Berkeley, Steve published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, including prestigious publications in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, Science, and Nature. His contributions to ecology, evolution, animal behavior and intelligence and, of course, behavioral endocrinology, will be long lasting.
Throughout his career, Steve employed a powerful comparative approach to questions about behavior, comparing terrestrial and aquatic turtles, as well as diverse mammalian species, such as Mongolian gerbils, domestic cats and rats, dusky woodrats, striped skunks, the common moles, the spotted hyena, and many others. In 1967, he co-authored the landmark “A Biological Theory of Reinforcement” (Psychological Review, 1967), a classic paper that is still cited. In this paper, Glickman and Bernard Schiff proposed a simple theory of reinforcement that could explain the range of apparent disparate behaviors observed across species in reaction to specific stimuli.
They argued that reinforcement evolved as a mechanism to ensure species-typical responses of approach and avoidance. In their theory, preserved neural circuits found in the brain stem could elicit complex and species-dependent behaviors of approach or avoidance, and expected stimuli would act as positive reinforcements, promoting further approach or further avoidance. This positive feedback loop shaped by evolution would serve as a foundational circuit to enable other types of learning, such as those found in classical conditioning, where an unexpected stimulus could reinforce an approach behavior or alternatively an avoidance behavior. This theory exemplifies many aspects of Steve’s approach to biological research: the inspiration obtained from observing behavior in multiple animal species, the appreciation of evolutionary mechanisms, and the formulation of simple yet elegant and powerful theories.
In the 1980s, Steve began his famous work focusing on the spotted hyena and was awarded NIH funding to establish a breeding colony at the field station in the Berkeley hills above campus, adjacent to Tilden Park. This unique colony began with a group of ten infant hyenas that Steve and his collaborators collected in Kenya in 1984 and 1985. Because of the Berkeley climate, hyenas could be kept year-round in very large outdoor enclosures, allowing many natural behaviors to be expressed, including social behaviors such as scent marking, greeting ceremonies, social play, and mating. The Berkeley colony became the largest colony of captive spotted hyenas in the world and served as a pole of attraction for researchers.
Steve’s own work there focused on the neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying sex differences in this atypical species, known for its female-dominated society, where females have masculinized genitalia. His collaborator and pioneer in field studies, Laurence Frank, had initiated this research in Africa but convinced Steve that further progress could only be achieved in a more controlled environment. Steve, Laurence, and collaborator Paul Licht focused on the hormones responsible for this unusual anatomy during sexual differentiation. They hypothesized that the evolutionary costs of this masculinization was offset by the benefits of female dominance in spotted hyena society. Throughout many investigations involving many collaborators, it was discovered that the male hormone testosterone was not directly or solely responsible for this female masculinization but that, in addition, high levels of the pro-hormone androstenedione secreted by the hyenas’ ovaries, as well as differences in the timing of sexual hormones binding globulins, played important roles in this unusual sexual development. These novel routes and dynamics of masculinization helped explain the development of masculinized genitalia in females and the larger size and dominance in females relative to male hyenas while preserving some of the female-specific behaviors (“Spotted hyenas and the sexual spectrum: reproductive endocrinology and development”, Journal of Endocrinology, 2020). This
comprehensive research project revealed the limitations of a male-centric and single species approach for studying sexual biology; in attempting to understand the biology of an exceptional and exotic species, Steve and his colleagues revealed our lack of knowledge and understanding of the multiple pathways involved in sexual differentiation. This research on an extraordinary species provided multiple insights on particular clinical cases of abnormal sexual development in humans. Finally, in addition to observing sex differences in a number of behaviors in the spotted hyena such as juvenile play, scent marking, and meeting ceremonies, Steve also studied “animal intelligence” in the spotted hyena including coalition formation and vocal communication.
The Berkeley Hyena Project became a great attraction for U.S. and international researchers, with faculty from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSF, UC Santa Barbara, Duke University, Cornell University, Kansas State University, Michigan State University, Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Texas, and the University of Lyon/St Etienne (France) visiting the facility to interact with Steve, Mary Weldele, the long-time coordinator of the Hyena Project, and the hyenas themselves. In 2020, the Berkeley Field Station was renamed the “Stephen Glickman Field Station for the Study of Behavior, Ecology and Reproduction” in honor of Steve’s scientific contributions to the interplay of evolution and animal behavior and the creation of this unique research environment.
In addition to his theoretical and empirical research on behavior, Steve imparted his passion for evolution and animal behavior in his lectures and teaching. He always grounded his lecture materials in the greater historical context of the discoveries, as he was also a scholar of the history of psychology. His lectures on the relationship between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace captivated generations of students as well as faculty. Wallace, in particular, was a favorite because of his underdog status, which appealed to Steve, who also had replicated one of Wallace’s most important journeys in Malaysia with his wife Krista. Whether teaching the history of science, animal behavior or physiology, Steve was able to captivate his audience; the lecture material was rigorous, but it was delivered by an extraordinary storyteller. In 1975, Steve was a recipient of Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
As chair of the Department of Psychology for five years (1977-82) and through service on many committees, Steve championed the fair treatment of women and people of color and forged new links among different disciplines within his department. He also served on various Academic Senate committees, including the Berkeley Division Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations (BIR), Committee on Teaching (COT), and the Animal Care and Use Committee.
Steve’s friendships were legion. And to anyone who knew him, heard him lecture, or had seen him extolling the personalities of his hyenas at the Field Station, the deep affection and even reverence felt by so many of us was not surprising. Among us all – colleagues, students, and friends – Steve was known for his humility, intelligence, generosity, kindness, and empathy. This humility mixed with curiosity – the qualities that made him such a powerful intellectual and researcher – also made him a great listener and a dear friend. The outpouring of sincere expressions of love and respect at his passing was indeed overwhelming. Steve is deeply missed both as an inspiring scientist and a cherished friend.
--L. Jacobs, F. Theunissen, I. Zucker
See also an oral history by Prof Glickman, interviewed by his colleague Irving Zucker, posted to the Department website.
Gough, Harrison (1921-2014) Professor Emeritus
Harrison Gough, a major leader in the field of personality assessment, passed away on May 4, 2014, at the age of 93, in his home in Pebble Beach, California. Gough was born February 25, 1921, in Buffalo, Minnesota, and grew up in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He received his B.A. degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota in 1942, graduating summa cum laude. Shortly afterward, he enlisted in the military during World War II, serving from 1942 to 1946. He was assigned to the Air Crew Selection Program, considered by many psychologists to be the outstanding example of applied psychology in the history of the field. There, he would later remark, he learned that psychological tests, properly used, could forecast complex and important outcomes.
After the war, Gough returned to the University of Minnesota to earn his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in psychology (in 1947 and 1949, respectively). After completing his doctorate, he joined the Psychology Department of the University of California at Berkeley and was a distinguished faculty member there for his entire academic career. He taught courses in assessment, psycho-diagnosis, and personality theory. Gough also had a tremendous impact on the training of psychologists – students and colleagues. He chaired or served on approximately 70 doctoral dissertations and is fondly remembered by many. He served as Chair of the Department from 1967 – 1972, a tumultuous period that included the Vietnam War and the firing of UC President Clark Kerr, and that followed several years of contentious strife between different departmental factions. Gough managed to steer the Department through these difficult times and bring the various groups together; he later remarked that although it had been a stressful job, it was redeemed by the fact that he had gained a deep appreciation of the talents of his colleagues. Subsequently, he served from 1973-83 as the Director of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) [currently known as the Institute of Personality and Social Research (IPSR)]. He retired as an emeritus professor in 1986 but continued to work actively on various projects in personality assessment until the time of his death.
Gough’s most important contribution to psychology was the development of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), which continues to have immense influence on applied psychology. The CPI assesses normal personality functioning, rather than pathological functioning, and thus it was a pioneering approach that anticipated the later development of positive psychology. The test is distinguished by a deep appreciation of human diversity, and its many well-researched scales and configural patterns provide a nuanced and highly perceptive way of describing the individual and predicting behavioral outcomes. The test has been translated into many languages and has been utilized in a wide variety of contexts, including educational and organizational settings. Gough always continued to revise and update his original CPI instrument and created a shorter version (the CPI 260). In January 2014, he and his
colleague, Dr. Pamela Bradley, completed what will now be his final work, the CPI 260 Configural Analysis report.
Gough began the construction of the California Psychological Inventory in 1955. His goal was to meet the high psychometric standards set by the aviation selection program, with a primary emphasis on understanding the individual respondent. Moreover, he wanted to publish the CPI so that it could be used in organizations to support professional development and learning and growth. In 1956, Gough formed a lifelong business partnership with Dr. John D. “Jack” Black, when they co-founded Consulting Psychologists Press (now CPP, Inc.), with the CPI assessment as its first product. Since then, CPP has gone on to provide a wide range of psychological assessments, which can help improve the performance of both individuals and organizations.
Gough played a significant role in shaping the company and served on CPP’s Board of Directors from the company’s inception in 1956 until 1996.
Gough never lost his passion for personality assessments, and he continued to construct new scales and measures, most notably the Adjective Check List (ACL), Personnel Reaction Blank, and Interpersonal Dependency Inventory assessments. In his lifetime, Gough created 38 assessments and published more than 200 research papers, chapters, manuals, books, and reviews. He carried out empirical research on diverse topics, such as personality determinants of longevity and creativity, and various predictions from the longitudinal study of thousands of West Point cadets. At IPAR, these research topics included the use of intensive three-day assessments of different groups of people (such as mathematicians, architects, medical students, and others) that incorporated a multifaceted method of studying the participants. This method combined individual interviews, observational procedures, games such as charades, experimental tasks, leaderless group discussions, psychological tests, and informal contacts between staff observers and participants – all of which made the assessments remarkable experiences for both the judges (usually experienced psychologists) and the group studied. Gough and his colleagues at IPAR were interested in the “effective personality,” focusing on genius, creativity, and generativity.
In addition to his research contributions, Gough was quite active in public and professional service. His many advisory public services include the following: the Research Advisory Committee, California Department of Corrections; Research Advisory Committee of Mental Hygiene; and NIMH Clinical Projects Research Review Committee. Professionally, he was Associate Editor for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology for 11 years (1969-80), and served as a consulting editor for many other journals, including the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Without question, Gough has had a substantial impact on the field of psychology, as reflected by his numerous awards and honors. In this regard, it is particularly noteworthy that in 1987 he was honored by the California State Psychological Association as the instructor most frequently nominated by its members as having made a substantial contribution to their graduate training.
Gough received one Guggenheim and two Fulbright fellowships for his work, and several awards from various divisions of the American Psychological Association: a lifetime contribution award from Division 5 (Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics); an award for his outstanding
contributions in normal personality measurement from Division 14 (Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology); and, the Jack Block Award in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the field of personality psychology from Division 8 (the Society for Personality and Social Psychology). In 2010, the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) honored Gough as a scientist who had made important and lasting contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior.
Harrison Gough leaves a remarkable legacy of dedication, creativity, and impeccable professionalism, as well as extraordinary contributions to the field of psychology. He was the quintessential empiricist, and his view on measurement was always utilitarian and pragmatic: does the measure "work" to predict external criteria? His empiricism presaged the contemporary recognition of the power of big data and quantification, and his pragmatism puts him at the core of 20th century psychology. On a personal level, his legacy is one of kindness, intelligence, charm, and wit – he was, to so many people, the epitome of a true gentleman and a scholar.
He is survived by his loving wife of 71 years, Kathryn Gough, his brother Philip, daughter Jane Rhodes, son-in-law Jeff Rhodes, two grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
--C. Maslach, S. Zedeck
Hall, Wallace B. (1915-2009) Research Psychologist
(forthcoming)
Helson, Ravenna M. (1925-2020) Research Psychologist
Ravenna Mathews Helson never stopped wondering. Hers was a lifetime of exploration, studying lives in multiple contexts and the Jungian theory that gave them meaning. Her boundless enthusiasm for this investigation has been an unending inspiration to those around her.
Early on Ravenna wanted to be a preacher, a writer, or a journalist. Soon, however, she fell in love with the process of discovery and investigation itself, first as a reporter, then as wife, mother and psychologist.
She earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Texas at Austin and then received a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949. While teaching subsequently at Smith College she met mathematician Henry Helson, and, after marrying, they moved to Berkeley where he had been offered a position at the University of California. She was overjoyed
not long after to receive an unexpected invitation to join the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) where in 1955 Don MacKinnon was directing a small, dynamic and academically diverse group of psychologists consisting of Robert Harris, Erik Erikson, Nevitt Sanford, Richard Crutchfield, Harrison Gough, Frank Barron and Ronald Taft, with Wallace Hall as archivist. IPAR was heavily influenced by Henry Murray’s Personological tradition which studied the whole person, focusing on people and their motives rather than particular traits and included the study of myth and literature. This approach involved gathering a lot of information in a variety of ways that combined ‘tough and tender’ methods. The highly effective person was the focus of investigation with originality as a key feature. Studying positive functioning was an important change from the usual emphasis on the abnormal. Creativity was a new frontier and IPAR was busy developing new methods and techniques for studying it, including the CPI and the ACL.
For several decades Ravenna was the only woman on this team. She said that for years her highest ambition was to be worthy of the institution. It felt like the court of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in search of their holy grail - understanding the unconscious and how it manifests in personality. Don McKinnon was the King Arthur who brought together ambitious knights, pursuing diverse quests while uniting around the common goal of doing justice to the complexity of personality and psychological functioning.
Motherhood came quickly after arriving in Berkeley, making Ravenna’s mid-30’s a peak time of change, pain, joy, and richness that she says shaped the rest of her life, putting family ‘at the marrow of her existence.’
One morning in 1955 MacKinnon asked her to take over IPAR’s proposed project on creativity in women. “What a surprising and great assignment!” Merlin was indeed at work! She began her studies of creativity in women—mathematicians, authors of fantasy for children, and the Mills College graduates of 1958 and 1960. Still, with a half-time appointment, babies at home and intermittent semesters abroad for Henry’s sabbaticals, publications were slow to come. She felt lonely in her avant-garde feminist consciousness. “I felt that I was the only one who really cared whether Ravenna the psychologist survived.” She was devastated when the reviewer of her first monograph on creativity in the Mills study said, “sample was too small but 1,000 creative college women would not be worth a whole monograph!”
Ravenna persisted. In 1970, she suggested teaching the first women’s studies class at UC Berkeley - Personality, Sex, and Society. It would eventually be offered off-campus in a church basement through the Extension Program. “It was exciting to find materials and work it up,” she recalled. There she met Valory Mitchell (who, many collaborations later, would co-author their book chronicling fifty years of studying those Mills women, Women on the River of Life; a Fifty- Year Study of Adult Development).
In 1980, Merlin was again making magic, and the Mills study became a lifelong project for Ravenna. With funding to transition it into a longitudinal study of women’s adult development, she had come into her full stature as an academic. “I had a persona, a grown-up dress to wear!” She had a research team, grant proposals to envision, fund and fulfill, students to work with, opportunities to be generative!
Wonderful colleagues spent sabbaticals or worked with Ravenna at IPAR, now the Institute of Personality and Social Research (IPSR). Studying the lives of the Mills women over fifty years was the work of many and the richness of collaboration was ‘magical.’ Her personality, life, times and work were interwoven with theirs, and she felt privileged to call them friends. They studied old topics such as sex roles and creativity in a new longitudinal context while finding new ones such as emotion, wisdom, attachment, and personality change distinctive to women. She was excited to discover paths and patterns in women’s lives, links between women’s family lives, work lives, and individual personality differences. Along the way, she received awards including the Sir Francis Galton Award for outstanding contributions to the study of creativity (2000) from the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, the Henry A Murray Award (1984), the Block Award (2002) and the 2017 Legacy Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In 2021 she received the Florence Denmark Award for Contributions to Women and Aging, from APA Division 35 (Psychology of Women).
In Milwaukee, the nature of Ravenna’s creative work was not academic but relational. She said she wished she had arrived at eighty with a little less “lead” in her personality and now she realized that the years of toughness required to survive academic life were unnecessary to carry forward. She came alive in a new way. In the company of her new collaborators, others in their 80’s and 90’s in the Saint John’s community, she learned and shared much that was previously unexpected and unknowable. At ninety, after many years of attending Quaker meeting, she committed to membership in the Milwaukee Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.
Ravenna, a “pioneer in the study of women’s lives” and creative and productive to the end, passed on October 2, 2020, at the age of 95, just days after seeing her remarkable life’s work in print.
--Institute for Personality and Social Research
Heyns, Roger W. (1918-1995) Professor Emeritus and Chancellor Emeritus
Roger W. Heyns, the Chancellor who came to Berkeley in 1965 to head a campus in turmoil from student protest and the responses to it, died of heart failure on September 11, 1995, while traveling in Greece. He was 77. With clear educational priorities, appeals to reason, and a warm, self-deprecating wit, Roger Heyns came (in President Clark Kerr's words “like a gift from heaven”) to lead the campus through what was perhaps the most divisive period in its history.
When he resigned in 1971, he left behind a generous legacy of academic integrity, organizational stability, and personal civility.
Religion had a significant influence on Roger Heyns' life and outlook. He grew up in a Dutch Calvinist family in Michigan and attended a church-supported school. Shortly after high school graduation an illness (treated as polio, later diagnosed as Guillain-Barre disease) kept him bed-
ridden for 18 months, an episode that he said taught him patience and led him to change his college plans and attend nearby Calvin College. It was there, his oral history reveals, that he learned to integrate religion both with his intellectual concerns and his daily life. He was elected student-body president and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He met Esther Gezon at Calvin College, and they were married in 1941. They had three sons--Michael, John, and Daniel.
In 1942, after completing two years of graduate study in psychology at the University of Michigan, he enlisted in the Air Force. Four years later, he resumed his graduate studies and in 1949 completed his doctoral work in social psychology. After a year of additional study at Harvard, he began his academic career at the University of Michigan where he taught social psychology and did research in three areas: problem solving in groups, the methodology of group observation, and affiliation motivation. He developed a measure of affiliation motivation through use of the Thematic Apperception Test, which is still in use today. His findings produced two books: The Psychology of Personal Adjustment (1957) and An Anatomy for Conformity (1962), which he co-authored.
In 1957, he was appointed Dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, a position, he said which taught him that his comparative strength was in administration. Widely admired on the Michigan campus, he was honored by the University with awards for outstanding teaching and distinguished service. After four years as dean, he was appointed Vice President for Academic Affairs, a position he held until 1965 when, by unanimous vote of the Regents of the University of California, he became Berkeley's fifth chancellor.
In the Berkeley of 1965, a new chancellor faced a highly charged atmosphere. The daily life of the campus had been shaken and made increasingly divisive by issues of race and war, student protest, and political maneuvering. The University's ability to govern its own affairs was seriously challenged, on campus by political activists who defied University authority, and around the state by angry alumni, legislators, and regents who wanted to dictate how that authority should be asserted.
In his first year, Chancellor Heyns spoke more than 100 times on campus and around the state, explaining the nature of the challenge and the steps he was taking to meet it. He devoted his energies to four tasks: reestablishing the credibility of campus leadership, strengthening the staff on whose work the campus depended, preventing political activities from interfering with the teaching and research functions of the University, and responding to student concerns about their educational experience.
The campus came under intense national and international scrutiny as the University and the City of Berkeley became a center of anti-war activity, and such protests became a rallying point in Ronald Reagan's campaign for Governor and later the Presidency. Chancellor Heyns approach to holding the campus together was guided by the values and rules that he believed should govern the common life of the University; most importantly, academic freedom and the integrity of academic processes. His courageous stands reflected his personal convictions. As he so often put it, the University is a social institution; its freedom is dependent upon the larger society. To protect that freedom from political manipulation, the University cannot become an instrument of social action that makes it a prize to be captured. From small symbolic battles over the ability of
the campus to set its own rules to large public confrontations with demonstrators, and in public meetings with regents, faculty or legislators, Chancellor Heyns was willing to take the often unpopular measures needed to protect the integrity of the University and to encourage the individual responsibility of faculty and students on which campus freedom is ultimately based. That responsibility, he believed, included the fearless pursuit of knowledge, an openness to ideas whatever their source, the willingness to listen to student grievances and respond with the sensitivity that permits administrators to encourage individual student, faculty and staff initiatives.
The political crises on the Berkeley campus lasted for most of Chancellor Heyns six-year tenure. For those who were not in the center of it, it remains difficult to describe the intensity and dangers of those times. Although the political turmoil of the 1960s may be a faded memory now, many of Chancellor Heyns' initiatives are today a vital part of campus life. To respond to the concerns of students, he created the Office of the Ombudsman; he promoted various experiments in undergraduate education, and established in his office the Committee for Educational Development in order to respond to student initiative and to create new programs on its own. In 1966, he established the Educational Opportunity Program, one of the first student affirmative- action programs of its kind in the nation. He also introduced the first campus affirmative-action program for staff employees.
With his strong support, the University created a new Graduate School of Public Policy, today one of the nation's best. Ever mindful of Berkeley's unique campus environment, he set aside Ecological Study Areas. In 1969, he ordered that the site of Moffitt Library and Campus Drive be redesigned to save a grove of redwoods in the center of the campus. He organized and oversaw a year-long celebration of the University's centennial in 1968. Among its lasting effects are the Robert Gordon Sproul Associates, a rapidly growing University support group, and the Berkeley Citation, an award given by the campus in lieu of honorary degrees, “for distinguished achievements, and notable service to the University.”
When in his low key, self-deprecating way Chancellor Heyns announced his decision to resign, the reaction of both gown and town was one of genuine regret and affectionate understanding. His health, following a heart attack, had been restored. The campus was in good shape. It seemed to him to be an appropriate time to accept new challenges. The American Council on Education invited him to become its President. He moved to Washington, D.C., and served for the next six years as an influential national voice for all of American higher education. In 1977, he became President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Palo Alto, where he served until his retirement in 1993.
On his return to California, Chancellor Heyns renewed his ties with the Berkeley campus. With his close friend, Walter A. Haas Jr. he was co-chairman of Cal Sports 80's, a capital campaign for sports facilities, and he maintained a continuing interest in the University Library and the Young Musicians Program.
For more than two decades, visitors to the Faculty Club at Berkeley have been reminded by the Heyns Room of this academic man who led the campus in the 1960s. On December 3, 1995, Chancellor Tien dedicated an additional and highly appropriate memorial--the Roger W. Heyns
Grove of redwood trees that Chancellor Heyns had saved almost 30 years earlier. These trees stand in the center of the campus, a living symbol of the central and enduring role Chancellor Heyns played in the life of the University.
The record of the Berkeley campus over the six years that Roger Heyns was Chancellor reflects the guidance of a remarkable administrator. Not only did he hold the campus together, he also changed its environment from one of confrontation and disrespect to one where academic norms were accepted. Those who knew the campus well recognized that the strength, counsel and independent activities of Esther Heyns played a major role in her husband's success. His vigorous support of the highest academic standards and the selection of faculty of highest quality in both teaching and research were reflected in the ratings of the Berkeley campus. In 1966, a study conducted by the American Council on Education rated Berkeley as “The best balanced distinguished University in the country.” Four years later, the Council's follow-up study of graduate education once again gave Berkeley the number-one ranking. Among the many people whose work earned this recognition, the one person most responsible was Roger Heyns.
Chancellor Heyns strengthened the commitment to the University of those he worked with and for by his clarity of thought, his good humor, and his utter lack of a sense of self-importance. In this quiet way, he was an inspiring example of the life of virtue and intellect. Even his adversaries found it difficult not to respond to him with warmth. His inner strength, his sense of proportion, and his caring touched people in a way that leaders of large organizations rarely can and almost never do.
--E.F. Cheit, R.H. Cole, R.E. Connick, C. Kerr
Honzik, Marjorie (1908-2003) Research Psychologist
Marjorie Honzik was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on May 14, 1908, and died on June 16, 2003. Her early years in Africa engendered an interest in cultural differences in child rearing, and after her family moved to California in 1927, she began formal studies in child development. All of her higher education was at Berkeley: bachelor's degree in 1930, master's in 1933, and, following a fellowship at what was then the National Child Research Center in Washington, her PhD in 1936. While at Berkeley, she married Charles Honzik, a fellow graduate student who worked with E.C. Tolman on the latter's famous studies of maze learning in rats. They moved together to the University of Hawaii, but returned to California after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Marjorie took up a position at the Institute for Child Welfare (now the Institute for Human Development), while Charles joined what became the Veterans Administration. Honzik, who also taught at Mills College, retired from Berkeley in 1980.
In line with her experience in South Africa, Honzik employed data generated by Berkeley's two groundbreaking longitudinal studies, the Oakland Growth Study and the Berkeley Guidance Study, to study the effects of parental treatment and other environmental factors on developmental outcomes. For example, one study examined the relationship of "normal"
developmental problems (such as nail-biting) from childhood through adolescence. A pioneer in what is now known as "lifespan" developmental psychology, she followed her subjects from childhood and adolescence into adulthood and middle age -- documenting, among other things, gender differences in adolescent and adult development. In 1983, she received the G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Psychology from Division 7 (Developmental Psychology) of the American Psychological Association.
J.F. Kihlstrom*
Howison, George Holmes (1834-1916) Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity
George Howison was not, technically, a member of the Psychology faculty, because the Department of Psychology did not separate from the Department of Philosophy until 1922. However, he did establish the Department of Philosophy at Cal. Beginning in 1888,
Howison taught a course called "Propaedeutic to Philosophy" which included empirical psychology and formal logic. Classroom and laboratory instruction in psychology continued under his student, George Stratton, who, working with three students -- Warner Brown, Knight Dunlap, and Edward K. Strong -- established the Psychological Laboratory at the University of California.
Howison received bachelor's and master's degrees from Marietta College in 1852 and 1855, and also studied theology at Lane Theological Seminary. After teaching for nine years in various secondary schools, he took a position at Washington University in St. Louis, first as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics (1864-1866), and then as the Tileston Professor of Political Economy (1866-1869). At WashU he joined the St. Louis Philosophical Society, and he became committed to that discipline. He subsequently taught logic and philosophy of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1871-1879), ethics at Harvard University (1879-1880), and philosophy at the University of Michigan (1883-1884). He moved to Berkeley in 1888 as chair of the Philosophy Department, retiring in 1909. While at Berkeley he founded the Philosophical Union, which brought prominent Anglo-American philosophers to Berkeley for public talks; the roster of speakers included William James, whose 1898 lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results" announced his embrace of pragmatism.
Fittingly for California's first academic philosopher, Howison endorsed the metaphysical "idealism" of the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, from whom Berkeley got its name (Westward the course of empire takes its way..."). For Berkeley, nothing exists unless it is perceived -- as he put it, mixing Latin and English, esse is percipi. In Howison's formulation, known as "personal idealism" or simply "personalism", persons are self-conscious and free moral agents. Personalism did not win the competition with pragmatism to become the dominant philosophical school in America. But with Berkeley's idea that only perceptual experiences truly exist, it was natural that Howison would take an interest in the emerging experimental psychology, which focused on problems of sensation and perception. Hence the inclusion of
scientific psychology in his course, and his support for Stratton in building the Psychological Laboratory.
---J.F. Kihlstrom*
Janis, Irving L. (1918-1990) Adjunct Professor Emeritus
Irving Janis was born on May 26, 1918 in Buffalo, New York, and died on November 15, 1990 in Santa Rosa, California. In the intervening 72 years, he lived a quite extraordinary life. He and his wife Marjorie raised two daughters; he was a great lover and patron of the arts; he travelled widely; and he had an enormous impact on the fields of social, political and health psychology.
Irving Janis' academic career began at the University of Chicago where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1939 and went on to do an initial year of graduate work. In 1940 Janis entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia University where he was introduced to social psychology in a seminar with Otto Klineberg. During the war, Janis was drafted into the army and worked closely with Samuel Stouffer and Carl Hovland in the War Department designing surveys and field experiments on determinants of military morale. These studies were eventually published in The American Soldier--widely regarded as a classic statement of how behavioral and social science theory can be put to good practical use. After the war, Janis returned to Columbia University where he completed a dissertation on the cognitive and emotional effects of electro- convulsive treatments of psychotics.
Yale University recruited Irving Janis into the faculty ranks of the Psychology Department in the fall of 1947. During his initial year at Yale, Janis worked closely with the research group that surrounded Carl Hovland and participated in the design of a number of the early “attitude change” experiments. These studies defined the research agenda for many psychologists for the next three decades. The studies included pioneering work on the persuasive effectiveness of fear- arousing appeals, personality correlates of persuasibility and the impact of role playing on the internalization of attitudes (when do we actually come to believe what we pretend to believe?).
In the mid-1950s, Janis initiated his influential research program on coping with psychological stress. His first major work in this area, Psychological Stress, published in 1958, drew on both case study and statistical data to explore the reactions of patients to impending surgery. In this book, Janis advanced a number of explanatory concepts--in particular, stress inoculation and the work of worrying--which identified ways of preventing maladaptive behavior by providing appropriate information at the appropriate time.
Around this time, Janis also initiated his work on real-life personal decisions such as dieting and giving up smoking. He continued this work for approximately 20 years and the major results of this research program are summarized in his book with Leon Mann on Decision Making (1977), which presents a conflict model of decision making that describes how people make choices
under stress. This model identifies the conditions under which people respond in a rational or vigilant manner to threats as well as the conditions under which irrational complacency, apathy, hopelessness, rigidity, and panic occur.
In addition to his work on decision making at the individual level, Janis made important contributions to the study of group dynamics. His widely cited book, Victims of
Groupthink (1972) presents a series of detailed studies of foreign policy decisions. In many of these decisions Janis identifies the emergence of intense conformity pressures within decision- making groups that seriously restrict the range of options considered, bias the analysis of existing information, and promote simplistic and self-righteous stereotypes. In this work, which Janis carried on to the end of his life, he also identifies personality, organizational, and political processes that can inhibit or prevent the emergence of groupthink. The groupthink work is widely regarded as a social psychological “classic” and is often featured prominently in introductory classes.
Irving Janis never abandoned the clinical implications of his work. In 1981, for example, he published a book that presented the results of a research program that explores the social influence of counselors on adherence to stressful decisions. This volume reports the results of 23 controlled field experiments that clarify when, how, and why people succeed in adhering to difficult decisions (e.g., going on a diet) and emphasizes the importance of the counselor-patient relationship. The best therapeutic outcomes occur when counselors are supportive but also provide specific behavioral recommendations and warn of the likely difficulties ahead. This work powerfully illustrates Janis' commitment to using psychological theory to promote human happiness.
Irving Janis received many professional awards during his life. These awards included the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, presented by the American Psychological Association in 1981, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Socio- Psychological Prize in 1967, and the Distinguished Scientist of the Year Award for 1991 from the Society of Experimental Psychology.
He retired from Yale University in 1985 and was appointed Adjunct Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. He and Marjorie moved to Santa Rosa to be close to their daughter Charlotte and their grandchildren. Janis also continued to be actively involved in research and writing. He published his final award-winning book Crucial Decisions in 1989 and completed a collaborative book with his wife Marjorie just one week prior to his death (provisional title: Enjoying Art: A psychological approach to gaining pleasure from old and modern masters). His death is a great loss to his family and friends as well as to his profession and science. He was a brilliant scientist and a thoughtful human being who had a major impact on the study of stress, attitude change, and decision making.
--Charlan Nemeth, Phillip Tetlock
Jarrett, Rheem F. (1912-1996) Professor Emeritus
Rheem Foster Jarrett was born on April 10, 1913, in the then small city of Phoenix, Arizona. There he went through school, worked in the family hardware store, and met his future wife, Iris Ashton. They married in January 1937, after both had graduated from the University of Arizona. In July 1937, they moved to Berkeley where Rheem had been accepted for graduate work in the Department of Psychology. With occasional brief absences they remained in Berkeley until their deaths, Iris in 1991, and Rheem on September 5, 1996.
Rheem's early work in psychology was primarily in physiological psychology, especially in the role of the cerebral cortex in learning and motivation in rats. Soon, however, he discovered that his abiding interest was in the conceptualization, design, and analysis of research in psychology: an area that requires a broad knowledge of the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of a number of areas in his chosen discipline. This turn in Rheem's career led to a number of collaborative efforts with colleagues and students in areas as diverse as hand-eye coordination, personnel selection, attitude measurement, associative learning, and more theoretical papers such as one on permissible coarseness of grouping, and another on factor analytic rotation. In all of these research efforts, Rheem's major impact was through his ability to think clearly and quantitatively. This change in direction also led to a temporary teaching position at Stanford University, before his appointment to the Berkeley faculty, and a later post-doctoral fellowship in mathematical statistics at the University of Chicago.
In the view of Rheem's colleagues and his many former students, his greatest contribution was as a teacher, in part because of his deep knowledge of research design and statistical analysis, but also because of his unvarying willingness to teach himself and then make clear to his colleagues and students’ materials that were beyond their grasp because of their inadequate mathematical background. An apt illustration is the occasion on which he mastered Fourier Analysis because a graduate student needed the tool in his Ph.D. thesis, or, when the members of a seminar were having trouble with fine points in the theory of signal detection, Rheem again undertook to master the material to help the others get past the rough spots. Throughout his career as a professor, Rheem was treasured by graduate students because he was willing to spend as much time as it took to bring clarity to difficult problems of design and analysis. He and his wife were also greatly appreciated by the many members of the psychology department whose first taste of Berkeley social life was a warm welcome in the Jarretts's home. During the late 1960s, Rheem, like many others, sought ways to be useful to his community in its attempts to deal with the social unrest of the time. Because of his reputation for independence and integrity, he was appointed a member of the Berkeley Citizens Committee on Public Safety, which advises the City Council.
Rheem was raised in a fundamentalist Methodist family, and during his early years, the church was the center of his and his family's life. Although in later life, his beliefs may have changed, his concern for the moral basis of his actions always remained in the forefront of his thinking. Late in their lives the Jarretts became active members of the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, where Rheem served in a number of capacities, most recently as a member of the finance and administration committee. He also, until shortly before his death, participated in the preparation of the church newsletter. Rheem was a talented but modest man who was happiest
when serving others. Throughout his adult life, his greatest concern was for his wife and family. He leaves two sons, David of Reno, and Christopher of Phoenix and their wives; six grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. He is remembered with affection and appreciation by former colleagues and students.
--G. Keppel, D.A. Riley, M.R. Rosenzweig
Jones, Enrico E. (1947-2003) Professor
Enrico Edison Jones died on March 29, 2003, in San Francisco, California, after a determined and courageous three-year battle with multiple myeloma. Born on November 25, 1947, in Munich, Germany, where his father was stationed in the military, and raised both in Germany and Rochester, New York, Rico was only 55 at his death. He left this world far too early, and at a time when he was enjoying a tremendous wave of research productivity and recognition.
A National Merit Scholar, Rico earned a bachelor’s degree in 1969, graduating cum laude in general studies from Harvard University. Awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship for Doctoral Study, he completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1974 at the University of California, Berkeley. Rico was immediately appointed to the faculty in the department that trained him (a rare occurrence), and he was promoted through the ranks to full professor, ultimately becoming director of the Clinical Psychology Training Program and of the Psychology Clinic from 1994 to 1997. From 1997 to 2000, he served as a visiting professor for the summer research training program at the Department of Psychology, University College, London, England.
Rico was an outstanding exemplar of the researcher-practitioner model of clinical psychology. In addition to his internationally-renowned research program, Rico was a licensed psychologist, a trained psychoanalyst (graduating in 1992 from the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute), and in active clinical practice since 1982. He also held clinical appointments at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute (1997-2000); the Department of Psychiatry and Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, UC San Francisco (1982-96); and Mount Zion Hospital (1976-94). This fruitful marriage of research and clinical practice was to make him one of the foremost scholars of the psychotherapeutic process in the world.
Rico Jones’s earliest research on black-white personality differences and the influence of race on psychotherapy process and outcome championed a new field concerned with cross-cultural issues in mental health. With the publication of the classic Minority Mental Health (Praeger, 1982), a volume he edited in collaboration with his colleague, the late Sheldon Korchin, Rico provided this emerging field with the latest theory and research on minority group differences in attitudes toward mental health, assessment of symptoms, and therapeutic intervention.
As the first African-American professor in psychology at Berkeley, he was deeply committed to developing innovative courses in minority mental health, widening the diversity of the pool of doctoral applicants, and mentoring ethnic minority students in teaching, research, and clinical
supervision. For his outstanding contributions to the professional development of ethnic minority graduate students, he was recognized in 1996 with the Kenneth and Mamie Clark Award from the American Psychological Association.
Rico Jones’s findings that the quality of the therapeutic alliance was not related to ethnic match between patient and therapist led him down a different but immensely fruitful research path. He turned his attention toward systematically measuring qualities of the working alliance between the therapist and patient and testing how this alliance forecast therapy outcome. In the Berkeley Psychotherapy Research Project, he pioneered the development of the Psychotherapy Process Q Set to code videotapes of treatment hours in psychotherapy and he made innovative use of the single case study to chart the dynamics of the mutually influencing interactions between therapists and patients over time. His empirical studies of psychotherapy and the underlying model of change are powerfully explicated in his widely acclaimed book Therapeutic
Action (Jason Aronson, 2000).
Author of more than 60 works, Rico also served as associate editor (1990-96) of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and was a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
and Psychological Issues. His awards included funding from the National Institute of Mental Health (1975-78; 1983-90); a National Science Foundation Fellowship to work at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France (1981); a Fulbright Grant (1981); a National Research Council Fellowship (1985); an award for best paper (1987) from Division 35 (Psychology of Women) of the American Psychological Association; a journal prize from
the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (1990); and his selection as the first Robert S. Wallerstein Fellow by the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute (2001).
Rico’s contributions to the Department of Psychology and to the Berkeley campus (support for ethnic diversity, the study of minority mental health, and the quantification of the psychotherapy process in real world clinical cases) have forever changed the landscape and will be remembered. To the fields of clinical psychology, psychiatry, and social work, Rico’s research and the continuing investigations of his students and colleagues provide both a vivid demonstration of how psychotherapy works and important tools for further inquiry.
Rico’s life outside psychology was full and passionate, especially enriched by a late-in-life marriage to Cheryl Yund Goodrich, also a psychoanalyst. He enjoyed reading, music, opera, and fine wine. He skied, lifted weights, and scaled mountains. Although Rico was an intensely private man, he was forthright with his opinions, stood steadfastly by his principles, and brought wit and humor to every exchange. His empty seat at the table leaves an enormous void.
Professor Jones is survived by his wife, Cheryl; his mother, Marta Jones of Maryland; sisters Ricarda Jones of Maryland, Ramona Moss of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Cornelie Jones of Buffalo, and Manuela Ruby Jones of Maryland.
--P.A. Cowan, R.S. Weinstein, S. Zedeck
Jones, Harold Ellis (1894-1960) Professor and Director, Institute of Human Development
Harold Ellis Jones, Psychologist and Director of the Institute of Human Development, died in Paris, June 7, 1960, at the very beginning of an elaborately planned six-months' retirement vacation in Europe with his wife, Mary Cover Jones.
Professor Jones, although born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, December 3, 1894, was reared in New England by New England parents. He married Mary Cover in 1920 when both were graduate students at Columbia University. They have two daughters and six grandchildren.
Professor Jones attended Massachusetts Agricultural College for two years and then transferred to Amherst College, where he received an A.B. degree in biology in 1918, and where the impact of Alexander Meikeljohn, Robert Frost, and Stark Young left an enduring influence. He received an M.A. degree in psychology in 1920 and a Ph.D. degree in 1923 from Columbia under the guidance of Professor Robert S. Woodworth who remained his model of a disciplined experimenter and scholar. He became an instructor at Columbia in 1922 and had risen to Assistant Professor by 1927, when he came to the University of California as Assistant Professor of Psychology and Research Director of the Institute of Child Welfare. In 1931 he was advanced to a professorship, and since 1935, has been Director of the Institute of Child Welfare (later renamed Institute of Human Development) which he developed into an internationally respected research center for human growth.
Among the most outstanding characteristics of Professor Jones were his relentless curiosity, high energy, and breadth of interests accompanied by meticulous attention to detail. He was an outstanding photographer, a creative gardener with a broad knowledge of botany, a gadgeteer par excellence, and a prolific writer of erudite and humorous doggerel and parody, to name but a few of his many non-professional activities.
His research activities covered the entire age span from infancy through young children, adolescents, adults, to the aging. His publications list contains over 160 titles and includes studies on emotions and emotional development, motor development, mental development or decline, learning, and nature-nurture studies of twins. His research encompasses a large range of methods: experimental, measurement, observational, cross-sectional, and longitudinal. It also shows his sensitivity to the bio-social matrix in which psychological phenomena are embedded and his commitment to the indispensability of a multi-disciplinary approach to human development research.
In addition to his own research, he supported and often gave critical guidance, during his thirty- three years at the University, to over 450 research undertakings of others. He encouraged the wide use of the Institute for the personal research of members of many departments. For example, in his last year of service, twenty-three faculty members from twelve departments of this campus used the Institute facilities and data, and both predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows from twelve other institutions and three other countries, under private foundation and government awards, pursued their research interests at the Institute.
Dr. Jones had rare editorial skills. In addition to editorial service to the University of California Press, he served on the editorial boards of Child Development, Psychological Monographs, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Genetic Psychology, Genetic Psychology Monographs, Journal of Gerontology, and the International Journal of Human Development. He was on the Board of Consulting Editors for the Journal of Experimental Education, Psychological Monographs, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and Parents' Magazine.
Professor Jones served as President of the Western Psychological Association and the Society for Research in Child Development. He also served as President of three divisions of the American Psychological Association: the Educational Psychology Division, Developmental Psychology Division, and Maturity and Aging Division. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association and was a member of the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council. He was Pacific Coast Representative of the later council for years.
As Director of the Institute of Human Development, the aspect that perhaps stands out most sharply from his energetic and extremely full professional life was his heroic refusal ever to accept defeat even in the face of budgetary, staff, or administrative obstacles. The unflagging pursuit of knowledge about the nature and the process of growth and change outweighed personal comfort and at times even political expediency.
--J.W. Macfarlane, D.H. Russell, M.B. Smith
Jones, Mary Cover (1896-1987) Professor Emerita
Mary Cover Jones, one of the great pioneers of the field of developmental psychology, was born on September 1, 1896, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and died in Santa Barbara, California, on July 22, 1987. She attended Vassar College and after graduation entered Columbia University for graduate study in psychology. While at Columbia, she met and married a fellow graduate student, Harold Ellis Jones, who later became professor of psychology and director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California at Berkeley.
Mary Jones established an outstanding reputation as a development psychologist very early in her career, for in 1924, when behaviorism was the most influential theory in psychology, she published an article reporting her success at using conditioning procedures to eliminate a child's fears. Many years later, when behavior therapy became prominent, that 1924 paper brought her the unofficial title, “mother of behavior therapy,” a title that she enjoyed with amused grace during her last years.
She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1926. In 1927, Harold and Mary Jones moved to the University of California at Berkeley and its Institute of Human Development, then known as the
Institute of Child Welfare. Together they initiated the longitudinal studies for which the Institute is so well known, studies that still continue, making them truly life-span research. Mary played a central role in the design and conduct of the studies and published more than 100 articles based on the longitudinal data. Her innovative studies on the behavioral correlates and long-term consequences of early and late maturing and on the developmental antecedents of drinking behavior are widely cited in the psychological literature. Mary, more than anyone, held the longitudinal study together by establishing caring personal relationships with the participants in the study, whom she regarded as “partners in the study of human lives.” She became their beloved friend, confidante, and counselor.
Mary remained active professionally as a researcher until a few months before her death, and throughout her professional life was a model of the scientist-humanist-educator, avant garde in her attitudes and actions, generous in spirit and conduct, an active advocate for humane and environmental causes. Her research focused on problems of social importance, and she always clearly articulated the social, applied implications of her findings. The humanistic and the scientific were balanced in her writing; statistical findings were enriched by case studies. In her research, teaching, writing, and community activities, her goal was to contribute knowledge that could better the human condition, and she was remarkably successful in achieving that aim.
Because of then-prevailing nepotism rules at the University of California, Mary could not have a faculty position early in her career. Finally, in 1946, she became a lecturer in the Department of Psychology and in 1952, at the age of 56, she was appointed assistant professor of education at Berkeley, becoming a full professor in 1959. As professors, Harold E. Jones and Mary C. Jones were recognized as stimulating teachers who were supportive of young colleagues. Together they produced the first educational television course on developmental psychology. Unfortunately, Harold died in 1960, very shortly after he and Mary retired.
Her monumental contributions to the field brought Mary Jones many honors. She was president of the Division of Developmental Psychology of the American Psychological Association and received the G. Stanley Hall award for outstanding contributions to that discipline. She frequently served on state and community committees that dealt with the welfare of children and gave generously of her time and effort to many worthy causes. Mary always maintained that her life had been enriched by her research and teaching, but she was too modest to acknowledge that she played a critical role in shaping and guiding the field of developmental psychology.
She is survived by two daughters, Leslie Alexander of Santa Barbara and Barbara Coates of Claremont, California, and six grandchildren.
--Millie Almy, Dorothy Eichorn, Paul Mussen
Keppel, Geoffrey (1935-2010) Professor Emeritus
Geoffrey Keppel, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research expanded our understanding of what causes humans to forget, died on December 31, 2010, after a long struggle with chronic lymphatic leukemia. He was 75.
During his 47 years at UC Berkeley, Keppel served as dean of social sciences, chair of the Department of Psychology, and director of the Institute of Human Learning. His accolades include a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1993 and, at the time of his retirement in 1994, the prestigious Berkeley Citation.
Along with his mentors, UC Berkeley psychologist Leo Postman and Northwestern University psychologist Benton Underwood, who both preceded him in death, Keppel demonstrated that forgetting is the result of interference from a variety of sources, including past memories, various aspects of the current memory, and new memories.
“Keppel's work continues to be influential in describing and understanding how the human brain copes with interfering thoughts and memories,” said Stephen Hinshaw, chair of the UC Berkeley psychology department, quoting UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Shimamura, a world- renowned memory expert.
Ruth H. Maki, a professor emeritus of psychology at Texas Tech University, studied statistics and experimental design under Keppel as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. She said his teaching inspired her love of statistics. “He touched many students, showing them that statistics isn't so hard and, in fact, can be fun,” Maki said. “Thousands of students were helped by his superb statistics textbooks. New revisions of his textbooks will be greatly missed.”
The oldest of three brothers, Keppel was born on March 17, 1935, in Oakland, California, and grew up in nearby Albany. His father worked for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, but his true passion was writing poetry. Geoffrey Keppel and his brother Bruce both attended UC Berkeley and played on its water polo team. Their younger brother Stephen worked for the U.S. Postal Service.
Keppel and his wife Sheila, an art historian, were high school sweethearts. After earning a bachelor's degree in psychology at UC Berkeley in 1957, Keppel went on to obtain both a master's degree and a Ph.D. in psychology from Northwestern University, where he met Underwood, a pioneer in the post-World War II study of verbal learning and memory.
In 1963, Keppel joined UC Berkeley's Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1970. After more than a dozen years exploring the human memory, Keppel turned his attention to experimental design in psychology and the social sciences. His goal was to show students of behavioral science how to conduct research in ways that allow for clear and statistically meaningful answers. This enterprise yielded a series of major works on experimental design and analysis. Those included Design and Analysis: A Researcher's Handbook, and Data Analysis for Research Designs: Analysis of Variance and Multiple Regression/Correlation Approaches, which he wrote in conjunction with UC Berkeley psychology professor emeritus Sheldon Zedeck.
“Generations of psychologists around the world learned how to conduct rigorous research from these clear, precise and inspired volumes,” said UC Berkeley psychology professor emeritus Gerald (Jerry) Mendelsohn, a longtime friend and colleague of Keppel's. “The warmth, humor and concern for others that made him so fine a colleague and friend were among the qualities that made him so fine a teacher.”
In response to receiving the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1993, Keppel wrote: “I approach the undergraduate psychological statistics and methodology course by drawing the students into the puzzles and challenges of experimental research ... I do not present statistics as an arbitrary set of procedures, but as a means for revealing the answers to the fundamental issues that spark excitement in our discipline.”
Among other honors, Keppel served as president of the Midwestern Psychological Association, president of the Division of Experimental Psychology of the American Psychological Association, and chair of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology.
He was also the recipient of a National Institutes of Mental Health fellowship at the Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge University in England, and of an additional fellowship at Wolfson College at Cambridge University.
In 1997, Keppel was honored by the American Psychological Association for distinguished career contributions to education and training in psychology.
He is survived by his wife of 54 years, Sheila Keppel of Oakland, California; daughter Melissa Keppel Riley of Point Reyes Station, California; son Peter Keppel of Asheville, North Carolina; and four grandchildren.
--Y. Anwar, E.R. Hafter, S.P. HInshaw, G.A. Mendelsohn, D.A. Riley
Korchin, Sheldon J. (1921-1989) Professor
Sheldon J. Korchin was born in Brooklyn on September 8, 1921. Thirteen months later he contracted polio, which left him with a lifetime physical disability, and with an unshakable determination to go wherever his interests lay, to enjoy life to the full. He spent his early years in his parents' “appetizing store,” a neighborhood delicatessen and social center in which his lifelong interest in good friends and good food began.
Shelly Korchin earned a B.A. in 1942 at Brooklyn College. Among the most notable accomplishments of his undergraduate years was meeting Sylvia Brecher, whom he married and who remained the love of his life. An M.A. at Clark University in 1943 was followed in 1946 by a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University. His academic career did not follow a linear path. In 1947 he left Harvard to become the assistant chief psychologist at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Philadelphia. He was one of the architects of the Post-World-War-II model of training of clinical psychologists. His vision was that, unique among mental-health professions,
clinical psychologists can and should be dedicated equally to providing high-quality clinical services and to providing new knowledge through research and scholarship. This is still the dominant approach to the education of clinical psychologists in major universities across the country.
Shelly Korchin went on to direct the psychology laboratory at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, and then to head the Division on Stress at the National Institute of Mental Health. He accepted with good humor Tom Wolfe's later description of him and his colleagues in The Right Stuff as psychologists who persisted in trying to assess stress in astronauts who didn't believe that they had any.
Shelly came “home” to academia when he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1963. He founded its Psychology Clinic a year later and served as clinic director and head of the clinical program from 1964 to 1972 and again from 1984 to 1987. This was a time of growth in university clinical psychology programs, but also a time in which some universities were abandoning their commitment to maintaining clinics as training, research, and service centers. Shelly simply refused to hear arguments that threatened the abridgment of clinical-intervention training. He protected and strengthened the clinic, and it remains the centerpiece of the clinical-psychology program to this day.
During his 26 years at Berkeley, Shelly made other enduring contributions to the growth and direction of clinical psychology. In 1976 he published his classic text, Modern Clinical Psychology. This eloquent, intensely personal view of the field has inspired students in many countries and has been translated into Japanese and Italian. The book contains his central message: Clinical psychologists who want to understand and alleviate human suffering must consider the intrapsychic, dynamic functioning of the individual and the social context and values in which the individual's life unfolds. In a field that tends to choose between intrapsychic and social contextual interpretations of personality development, Shelly strongly supported attempts to integrate the two alternatives.
Shelly was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 1960-61 and again in 1976-77. In recognition of his contributions to clinical training and research, he received the Distinguished Contribution to the Science and Profession of Clinical Psychology Award from the Clinical Psychology division of the American Psychological Association (1978). The following year the California Psychological Association recognized him with an award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution.
A man of strong and definite liberal values, Shelly Korchin worked hard to put them into action. Under his leadership, long before the institutionalization of “affirmative action,” Berkeley's clinical program became a center for the education of ethnic-minority students. He obtained one of the first National Institute of Mental Health research-training grants in minority mental health. With Enrico Jones, he co-directed the training program and coedited Minority Mental
Health (1982), which contained summaries of both theoretical issues and empirical research by the editors, their students, and other notable contributors. On the national level, he served as a member and then chair of the American Psychological Association's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility in Psychology. On the campus, he became active in the establishment of services
for disabled students, helping to make this campus more hospitable and more accessible to students with physical and psychological disabilities.
In his later years, Shelly's influence on the development and direction of clinical psychology extended from Berkeley and the United States to the world's stage. He was frequently invited to teach in his beloved Italy and in Germany. Shortly before his death, he was still active as president of the Division of Clinical and Community Psychology for the International Association of Applied Psychology.
Shelly Korchin cared about clinical psychology, but he cared even more about his relationships. He was first and foremost a family man--a devoted husband to Sylvia and father of Ellen Korchin Curtis, Jon Korchin, and Mark Korchin. He was always a loyal friend to us and to many of his campus colleagues. No matter how busy he was, or we were, he drew us into his office for a talk, a joke, a lunch or dinner plan. He was a loyal member of the department poker group. He loved fishing, not the catching but the sitting and talking in the sun or the fog. He was a valued, unforgettable mentor to many students, and to countless friends inside and outside academia all over the world.
Shelly Korchin died on March 4, 1989, after a valiant struggle against cancer. As he battled with leaving life, he showed the same fierce spirit, courage, and determination that he displayed in the living of it.
--P.A. Cowan, P. Mussen, R. Weinstein
Krech, David (1909-1977) Professor Emeritus
David Krech came from a long line of teachers and learned people, a line studded with eminent rabbis and Talmudic scholars, so it is not surprising that he, too, became a distinguished scholar and teacher. He was born in Russia in 1909, and when he was but a small boy his family emigrated to the United States, settling in New Britain, Connecticut. He entered New York University with the intent of studying law, but found it unsatisfying. A course in psychology convinced him that it was here his interest lay, for it provided what he wanted, a scientific and objective way of examining the behavior of living creatures. Graduating in 1930, Krech took an additional year at N.Y.U. to obtain a master's degree. For his thesis he performed an experiment demonstrating that even with rats, learning is not a haphazard hit-or-miss affair. Rather, the individual behaves systematically, testing one possible solution or “hypothesis” after another in the attempt to master a problem. This was a classic study, because the conventional wisdom of the 1930s held that learning is purely a trial-and-error process in which incorrect responses are gradually eliminated and correct ones “stamped in.”
In 1932 Krech came to Berkeley, taking his doctorate in 1933. Studying with Professor Edward
C. Tolman, he repeated his original experiment on hypotheses in animal learning and performed some additional studies to examine in greater detail the nature and genesis of hypotheses. So
significant were these findings that even before they were published, they became known nationally and began to exert an effect upon general theories of learning. The association between Tolman and Krech was a happy and fruitful one. Not only did each have a significant effect upon the thinking of the other, but they became lifelong friends as well.
Completion of his degree coincided with the depths of the great economic depression of the 1930s, when faculty positions were unobtainable. However, Krech was awarded one of the few National Research Council postdoctoral fellowships in psychology and went to the University of Chicago to work with K.S. Lashley. This was followed by two years of assistantships at the same institution. In the three-year period, Krech explored the brain mechanisms underlying hypothesis behavior.
In 1937 he went to Swarthmore College as a research assistant to the eminent Wolfgang Kohler and in 1938 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Colorado. There was a clash of opinion between Krech and the board of regents on political matters, and as a result he left the university at the end of one year. During the next few years, he worked at nonacademic jobs.
Early in World War II he entered the army and, refusing a commission, he was assigned to the Office of Strategies Services. Near the end of the war, he joined a program that sought to determine through attitudes studies the effects of strategic bombing upon civilian morale in Germany. Before entering the army, he had also worked on attitudes surveys for the War Office.
After the war Krech returned to Swarthmore College for two years as assistant professor. In 1947 the University of California asked him to return, and he spent the remainder of his life as a member of its faculty. It was a rejoining of minds that were mutually stimulating. On the Berkeley faculty were Tolman and R. Tryon, with whom he had studied as a graduate student.
Soon to arrive were E. Ballachey, F. Beach, R. Crutchfield, D. MacKinnon, and B. Ritchie, with whom he had spent endless hours arguing various ideas and issues at Chicago, Swarthmore, or the OSS. The ideas of such colleagues as E. Brunswik, M. Rosenzweig, and L. Postman further challenged him. He was equally stimulated by the many compatible and exciting colleagues he found in other departments. Then, too, his intellect was constantly sharpened by the bright undergraduates who thronged to his classes, along with the many eager graduate students who came from all parts of the country and abroad to study with him. This was just the particular sort of intellectual climate that permitted Krech's creativity to flower.
On his return to Berkeley, Krech taught principally in the area of social psychology. His first book, Theory and Problems of Social Psychology, marked the beginning of many significant collaborative efforts with Crutchfield. Another joint enterprise was their highly successful elementary text, which appeared in several editions. However, Krech's original interest in the cerebral factors in behavior was so deep-rooted that social psychology could not continue to dominate his thinking. In 1950, with Melvin Calvin, Professor of Chemistry, he began exploring the possibility of analyzing chemical changes in the brain that might underlie the learning process. This led to his initiation with Rosenzweig of a long and fruitful research program on brain chemistry in relation to behavior. Their principal collaborators on this project were E. Bennett and M. Diamond, and other members of the faculty also participated in some studies.
This research team produced an impressive series of empirical investigations and theoretical
articles. Their program of brain chemistry research stimulated similar work in a number of other laboratories, so that today it is a lively and productive field across the United States and in various other countries as well.
After a full and active life as a scientist, teacher, and humanist, Krech retired in 1972, and in 1977 he died. He had lectured in many universities in this country and abroad, serving as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Oslo (Norway), the University of Nijmegen (Holland), and Brandeis University. Among other honors, he received a citation of achievement from his alma mater, New York University, an award from the International Forum of the Neurological Organization, a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo. He held a Miller Research Professorship, and on two occasions Fulbright fellowships. He was a member of a number of psychological and neurological societies.
He is survived by his wife, Hilda Sidney Krech, a son Richard, and two grandchildren. He also had a host of friends and gloried in them. Their misfortunes and grief saddened him, and their successes and happiness brought him joy. At every stage of his life and wherever he visited, he made fast friends. The sheer number of people who knew him is astounding, and the high proportion of these who respected and revered him is equally impressive. The social group was Krech's habitat. In it his wit sparkled, his laughter resounded, and he exuded both warmth and joy. He especially enjoyed an intellectual contest, when he could utilize those sharp rapier thrusts of wit of which he was so capable, together with the gentle and involved rabbinical logic that he employed so beautifully. Everyone who knew Krech has a special story about him. Those of us who were fortunate enough to have known him for a long time have many such stories--stories that bring warm memories. But even a wealth of such stories cannot possibly fill the gap his death leaves.
--E.E. Ghiselli, F.A. Beach, A.G. Pickerell, M.R. Rosenzweig
Landreth, Catherine (1899-1995) Professor Emerita
When Catherine Landreth died at her home in Berkeley on January 29, 1995, the University lost a distinguished faculty member. The now well-established field of early childhood education lost one of its pioneers. Her friends lost a stimulating and witty colleague.
Landreth was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, July 20, 1899. She received her early education there and was graduated in 1920 from the University of Otago. After teaching for several years, she came to the United States, earning an M.S. in nutrition and education from the Iowa State University in 1926. For four years, 1926-1930, she held a coveted Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship that enabled her to study at first hand the newly established nursery schools at Merrill Palmer, Teachers' College at Columbia, and the University of Minnesota. In 1936 she earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
She taught first at the University of Chicago, but was called to Berkeley in 1938. Except for several summer appointments elsewhere and a 1959 award of a Fulbright research grant at the Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, Landreth remained at Berkeley throughout her professional career, in the Department of Home Economics until 1950, thereafter as professor of psychology until her retirement in 1964. During all the years at California she was Director of the Nursery School, where she supervised a large number of graduate theses in nursery-school education, in addition to her own active program of research and writing. She was also in demand as a consultant to boards of education, to curriculum planners, and to Head Start administrators, both in California and elsewhere.
Her research fell mainly into three broad areas, and in all three she was concerned with increasing the scientific rigor of investigations in a field that had typically been descriptive and anecdotal.
First, early childhood education: She and her students conducted careful observational studies of teacher-child and child-child interactions in the nursery school. Her study of incidents of children's crying is still cited.
Second, social perception: Perhaps best known are a series of investigations to trace the origins and development of young children's social attitudes and prejudices. It was found that prejudice is related to parents' education, and that children as young as three years show prejudice based on skin color. These studies were among those that influenced the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision against segregated education. Other studies concerned children's ideas of which behaviors are “good” and which are “bad,” and parents' ability to predict their children's responses. Parents were often far wide of the mark, suggesting the fallibility of unverified parental reports.
Third, the place and value of the preschool in a comprehensive program of public education: A statewide survey on which Landreth collaborated led in 1947 to a legislative decision to finance child-care centers for children of working mothers.
In addition to a substantial number of shorter publications, Landreth authored three classic books that were influential in shaping the scope and nature of early childhood education: Education of the Young Child (with Katherine H. Read), 1942; The Psychology of Early Childhood, 1958; and Preschool Learning and Teaching, 1972.
Teaching was always of central importance to Catherine Landreth, who believed that the value of nursery school education was ultimately dependent upon the quality of this specialized form of teaching. She herself was a superb teacher, and her undergraduate courses were crowded with potential parents who wished to learn what they could about young children. At the graduate level, she inculcated with her values and skills several generations of students who taught in the nursery school while earning their master's degrees. The quality of their theses shows that she also taught them to be good researchers, capable of finding worthwhile problems and pursuing them to useful conclusions.
Landreth's contributions to her field were not only psychological and educational, but also architectural! The UC Harold E. Jones Child Study Center, built in 1964, memorializes the contributions of Harold E. Jones to developmental psychology, but his own research was principally concerned with adolescence. In a very real sense, the Child Study Center is a memorial also to Catherine Landreth, who strove to secure administrative support for the project, and then collaborated closely with the architect, Joseph Esherick, to create a model environment in which children could play and learn. Between them, they created a physical space tailored to the interests and abilities of the preschoolers who would attend, while providing for the multiple and not always congruent needs of researchers conducting experiments with child subjects, the needs of teachers with educational objectives, and the needs of the children themselves.
Catherine will be remembered by those who knew her as a unique and colorful personality. She possessed ineffable qualities of elegance, grace, and beauty. At the same time, she was a tough- minded researcher in an area and at a time when concern for experimental and methodological rigor was rare. She was physically vigorous. She swam every day for many years and walked everywhere even in advanced age. She never learned to drive a car, nor did she wish to. An outstanding trait was her wish to be independent. Although a kind and thoughtful friend, always ready to help others, she much preferred to care for her own needs and found it hard to accept help from others. She had a wonderful sense of humor, and a delightful way of expressing herself. She had an endless store of anecdotes and could enliven any conversation with one that was at once perfectly apropos and very funny.
We, her friends, have lost a uniquely talented and colorful colleague. Though at ninety-five years of age she had outlived many of her associates those of us who remain make up for our dwindling number by the depth of our admiration and affection for her.
--M. Almy, D.H. Eichorn, P.H. Mussen, R.D. Tuddenham
Lazarus, Richard S. (1922-2002) Professor Emeritus
Richard Lazarus, a distinguished scholar, researcher, and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, died on November 24, 2002, following a fall in his home.
Born March 3, 1922 in New York City, Professor Lazarus graduated from the City College of New York in 1942. After serving in the Army for three and a half years, he completed his doctorate in 1948 at the University of Pittsburgh, following which he served on the faculties of Johns Hopkins University (from 1948 to 1953) and Clark University (from 1953 to 1957), joining the faculty at Berkeley in 1957. He remained at Berkeley until he became professor emeritus in 1991.
When he began his research and writing at Johns Hopkins, there was little interest in stress or emotion, except on the part of the military. By the 1970s, after interest was stimulated by his influential 1966 monograph, Psychological Stress and the Coping Process, and the work of other
academic pioneers, it became apparent that emotion and stress were important not only to the military, but for all of academia. The 1966 monograph was eventually considered a classic in behavioral science, and its influence was felt in sociology, anthropology, physiology, and medicine.
In his theoretical approach to stress and emotion, Professor Lazarus proposed that emotions, far from being intrapsychic feelings, reflected the fate of one’s goals. He proposed the concept of appraisal to refer to the impact of events on a person’s strivings, and that different patterns of appraisals accounted for the rich array of different emotional states.
Beginning in the late 1950s at Berkeley, Professor Lazarus began a rich and impactful series of investigations typically using motion picture films to arouse stress and emotion, and instructional sets designed to bring into play ego defense mechanisms to change the manner by which the film affected the viewer, both subjectively and psychophysiologically. By documenting how ego defenses such as denial and intellectualization changed the way that participants evaluated the meaning of film events, lowering or raising levels of stress, this celebrated line of work effectively demonstrated the power of appraisal to influence a person’s emotions, as well as their means of coping with emotional stress.
Professor Lazarus’s concept of appraisal, which had its roots in the work of Magda Arnold, and before that, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, eventually became a principal rationale for cognitive-behavior therapy, which became one of the major approaches to psychological treatment beginning in the 1970s.
Professor Lazarus also emphasized that the way people cope with stress is crucial in their physical, social, and psychological well-being. A basic premise of his was that stress and coping are reciprocals of each other. When coping is effective, stress is usually controlled; when coping is ineffective, stress mounts and can get out of control, leading to physiological disturbance, subjective distress, and impaired social functioning.
In 1984, in collaboration with Susan Folkman (who had obtained her doctorate as his student), Professor Lazarus published Stress, Appraisal and Coping, which became the most widely read and cited academic book in this field. He published a sequel to it in 1999, entitled Stress and Emotion: A New Synthesis. There, he made a case for stress as being part of the broader area of emotion and made a case for the use of narratives or prototypical stories as an approach to the emotions. Professor Lazarus also stressed the importance of daily hassles as a source of stress, arguing that such hassles typically cause more human suffering than major life events. This view presented an important counterpoint to the then-prevalent views about the significance of major life stressors. He also made clear that daily hassles and major life stressors can be interrelated— major life stresses can become the source of hassles, and hassles can become life events.
Throughout his writings on stress, whether of major life events or hassles, Professor Lazarus emphasized the importance of appraisal—the meaning and impact of an event for the individual.
After his retirement in 1990, Professor Lazarus published five additional innovative books, as well as numerous chapters and articles. His 1991 book Emotion and Adaptation is considered one of the most significant publications on emotion in recent history and significantly advanced
understanding of the concept of appraisal, its relevance for understanding culture and emotion, emotional development, and psychopathology. In 1994, with his wife Bernice, he published a trade book, Passion and Reason: Making Sense of our Emotions. This was followed in 1997 by a compilation of his articles, entitled Fifty Years of the Research and Theory of R. S. Lazarus: An Analysis of Historical and Perennial Issues, which in addition to describing his own thinking, provided a history of the changes in psychology and in his own views during the second half of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Life and Work of an Eminent Psychologist, was published soon after in 1998, and Stress and Emotion: A New Synthesis, noted earlier, appeared in 1999. In 2006, his last book on emotion in aging was published; it was written in conjunction with his wife, with editorial assistance from Professor Joseph Campos.
Professor Lazarus received numerous honors during his career. For example, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969-1970. In 1984, the California Psychological Association gave him special recognition for his outstanding contributions, and in 1989, the American Psychological Association gave him one of its highest awards, for Distinguished Scientific Contribution. Professor Lazarus was very proud of having received two honorary doctorates, one in 1988 from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and a second in 1995 from the University of Haifa, in Israel.
Professor Lazarus was widely sought after abroad as a visiting professor, often together with his wife Bernice. Among his visiting appointments were a special fellowship at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, in 1963-1964; a series of appearances at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, between 1965 and 1976; and visiting professorships at Heidelberg University in 1980, the University of Western Australia in Perth in 1984, and at Aarhus University in Denmark in both 1991 and 1997. He also was invited to present numerous lectures in Israel between 1975 and 1995.
Professor Lazarus is survived by his wife of 57 years, Bernice, and their two children, David and Nancy, along with four grandchildren. It is noteworthy that on the occasion of his receiving the honorary doctorate at the University of Haifa, he mentioned that his wife Bernice was equally responsible for his professional success and his good fortune. Professor Lazarus leaves a legacy of over 150 scholarly publications, and 20 books, read all over the world.
--J.J. Campos
Leiman, Arnold L. (1932-2000) Professor
January 5, 2000 Professor Arnold L. Leiman, in his 67th year, died in his sleep after a long struggle with cancer. He was an active, vibrant part of the Berkeley campus for over 35 years. A native of the Bronx, Leiman received his B.A. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, and postdoctoral training from the Stanford Medical Center before joining UC Berkeley's Psychology Department in 1964. Leiman quickly became one of the most popular professors among both undergraduates and graduates, a position he would hold until the century's end. His excellence as a teacher was recognized by Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching
Award in 1990. As a biological psychologist, Leiman studied the emergence of fine anatomical connections in the developing brain and the effects of brain damage on cognitive functions in organisms ranging from crayfish to humans. He developed new undergraduate courses dealing with the psychobiology of human brain disorders and worked toward creating a graduate degree in that area. In 1982, he and psychology colleague Mark Rosenzweig wrote a textbook
of Physiological Psychology that would go through five editions and be translated into three languages. The text is still in print, now with Marc Breedlove as a co-author, and in use at over 200 universities.
Leiman joked that when he first arrived, as a bachelor, he was given a lesser salary than promised, because the chair said he “wouldn't need all that money without a family.” But soon he met and married Lannon, and together for 32 years they raised Jessica, presently a graduate student in English at Yale, and Timothy, a Michigan law graduate and associate in Chicago.
Leiman must have had prodigious insulin-producing capacities, as he was famous for never meeting a dessert he didn't like. Once a group of graduate students, knowing his fondness for sweets, arranged an armada of desserts, from which Leiman was to select the best. Lovingly sampling each in turn, Leiman's monologue kept the students in stitches as he awarded each dish the first prize in one category or another. The most desired seat during any faculty meeting was the one next to Leiman, who would maintain a hilarious running commentary. No pretense was hidden from his glance, no arrogance ever floated beyond the reach of his needle-sharp wit. But Leiman was equally willing to tease people to their face as behind their back. His twinkling eyes and boyish grin removed any sting, and it was rare for the target to avoid laughing out loud.
We'll also never know how many people looked to Leiman for medical advice, as he was an eager reader of the medical literature and had the great teacher's knack of explaining the biological processes underlying a disorder or treatment.
After complaining for years about campus policies, Leiman was challenged to join the administration and fix them. As Special Assistant to the Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education, Chair of the Faculty Senate, Chair of the system-wide Academic Council, faculty representative to the UC Board of Regents, and finally as Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, Leiman became a skilled facilitator and advocate. He fought for more lights to make the campus safer at night, fostered the Freshman Seminars to allow new students a chance to know faculty, and founded the campus McNair Scholar's program to guide ethnic minority and first-generation college students into doctoral programs. He also served as Chair of the Committee for Educational Policy and, in the early 1990s, as Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education. In recognition of his tireless efforts for the University, he was awarded the Berkeley Citation in 1999.
--M. Breedlove, M.R. Rosenzweig, R.S. Weinstein, S. Zedeck
Macfarlane, Jean Walker (1894-1989) Professor Emerita
When Jean Walker Macfarlane died on March 4, 1989 at the age of 95, she had become a legendary figure for a generation of psychologists whose careers had begun after hers had ended. Yet to those of us who were privileged to know her she was far more than a legend. As a friend and colleague, she was warm, outgoing, and generous. As a professor, she was a popular teacher and a vigorous researcher who made important contributions to both the science and the profession of psychology.
Professor Macfarlane was born on New Year's Day 1894 in Selma, California, a small San Joaquin Valley town, and grew up nearby in Dinuba and Visalia. She graduated in 1917 from the University of California, majoring in philosophy. She then began graduate study under Professor Olga Bridgman. She earned her Ph.D. in 1922, the second doctorate conferred in the Berkeley Department of Psychology. (Prof. Bridgman had herself been the first.) For two years she undertook postdoctoral training in clinical psychology in Boston, then returned to the Department of Pediatrics in the UC Medical School in San Francisco. In 1929 she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Department of Psychology, and Research Associate in the newly established Institute of Child Welfare, now the Institute of Human Development. She spent the remainder of her professional life on the Berkeley campus. She retired from the Psychology Department in 1961 but continued her research into the 1970s.
Professor Macfarlane represented clinical psychology in the Psychology Department during the pre-World War II years. A colorful and witty teacher, her classes were crowded, although her lectures were reputed to be hard to record because her illustrative case material was so fascinating that students simply forgot to take notes.
At the end of World War II many returning veterans entered the Department of Psychology as graduate students, very nearly swamping facilities and rendering impractical the tradition of graduate training as a personal apprenticeship with one's sponsor. At the same time the focus of clinical psychology was being radically transformed from children's abilities and behavior problems to the emotional problems of adults. To cope with heavy student load and with a changing field, a more formal program had to be created quickly. Jean was the person centrally responsible for establishing a clinical training program that soon came to be recognized as one of the best and most influential in the country. Programs at some other universities adopted a quasi- psychiatric approach and taught diagnostic and therapeutic methods of untested and often dubious validity. At California, the program maintained a firmly psychological orientation, based insofar as possible upon empirical research. The clinical training program was one of her major achievements, and an important contribution to professional psychology.
Prof. Macfarlane's other great contribution was to the science of psychology. She initiated and for many years directed the deservedly famous Guidance Study, an investigation of the development from birth to maturity of a group of 250 normal infants born in Berkeley in 1928 and 1929. Data were collected at frequent regular intervals on the physical growth, psychological development, and family, medical, educational and socio-economic histories of each child, using a wide variety of measurements, psychological tests, interviews, etc., which were carefully quantified to permit statistical analysis.
Jean had a warm and sympathetic interest in each of the study subjects and their families, and shared in their joys and sorrows from childhood into adulthood and maturity; yet the research program was from the beginning directed toward fundamental issues of human development. The original purpose of the Guidance Study was to find out whether or not psychological guidance was really helpful to parents and their young children. To put the matter to test, outcomes in a guidance group of children whose parents were given advice based on the best current research were to be compared with outcomes in a control group who were observed but not given guidance. It soon became clear that the basic question would have no simple answer, nor could the neat division between Guidance and Control groups be maintained as envisioned. Nevertheless, the study evolved into a huge, multifaceted investigation of normal personality development from birth to maturity and beyond, and produced what is unquestionably the richest, most comprehensive body of data on normal development extant anywhere. The Guidance Study is probably Professor Macfarlane's finest achievement.
In a field where lofty theoretical edifices had often been erected on tiny data bases derived from psychopathological samples Jean's empirical data demonstrated the enormous variety of developmental histories, the many paths of growth which must all be considered normal. She knew well that the orderliness and coherence of a personality theory were inevitably achieved by leaving things out. perhaps that is why she never gave her allegiance to any theory nor formulated her own. Rather, her goal was to apprehend development in all its complexity -- to get everything in -- for she was convinced that in each developing personality every factor is related to every other one. Her approach didn't match the theories for neatness, but it came much closer to the realities of human development.
Another instance of Jean's willingness to put psychology to empirical test was her insistence, after the study had been going for several years, that all the staff, including herself, write out concrete predictions as to how the various children might turn out. Later, when they had reached adulthood, predictions were compared with outcomes. Characteristically, she was not upset, but actually delighted to discover that the predictions, including hers, had been wrong almost as often as they were right, clear evidence of the need for more research! Jean had the greatest respect for human resourcefulness. Hence, she was especially pleased when some of the children who had had difficult starts in life, e.g., severe illness, family instability, or economic hardship, children who might have been expected to be handicapped in later life, turned out to be psychologically healthy, responsible, and reasonably happy adults.
Professor Macfarlane received many honors during her long career -- President of the California State Psychological Association and of the Western Psychological Association, member of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association and President of its Division of Clinical Psychology. In 1963 she received the A.P.A. Award for Distinguished contributions to the Science and Profession of Clinical Psychology, and in 1972 the G. Stanley Hall Award, A.P.A.'s highest honor in developmental psychology.
Perhaps Jean's salient personal quality was her warm interest in other people. She regarded her students as junior colleagues. The study members and their families were not just objects of scientific scrutiny, but friends and collaborators in a shared endeavor. She was generous, vigorous and forthright. She believed one should confront one's problems, deal with them as best
one could, and get on with the business of living. She had her full human share of difficulties and disappointments, but never complained about her lot, not even about her growing deafness, a handicap which must have been especially frustrating for one so oriented towards other people. Even when her vitality was sapped by advanced age, she remained optimistic. She is no longer with us but her influence upon the University and upon the science and profession of psychology, transmitted through her colleagues, students, and their students, will long be felt. In her honor, the street adjacent to Tolman Hall was named Jean Macfarlane Lane.
--M.P. Honzik, C. Landreth, P.H. Mussen, R.D. Tuddenham
It is worth noting that two of the earliest faculty appointments in Psychology at Berkeley were women. For more information on "notable firsts", see "10 Trailblazing Women at Berkeley", posted on the Department website.
MacKinnon, Donald W. (1903-1987) Professor Emeritus
Donald Wallace MacKinnon was born on January 9, 1903, in Augusta, Maine, and died on January 20, 1987, in Stockton, California. He earned an A.B. degree, summa cum laude, from Bowdoin College in 1925, an M.A. at Harvard University in 1926, and a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1933. In 1927-28 he was an instructor at the University of Maine, in 1928-30 an instructor at Harvard University, and in 1930-31 a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellow of Harvard University studying primarily with Kurt Lewin at the University of Berlin, and with Carl G. Jung in Zurich. From 1931-33 he was an instructor at Harvard University, and a tutor in the Department of Philosophy at Radcliffe College.
From 1933-47 he held a professorship at Bryn Mawr College, from which he was on leave in 1944-46 to serve as director of Station S in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in World War II. In 1947 he came to the University of California, Berkeley, as a Professor of Psychology, in preparation for the establishment of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research in 1949. He was the first director of the institute and continued in this post until his retirement in 1970.
In 1973-74 he was a Visiting Fellow, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina, and an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the summer of 1953, he was a faculty member at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Austria. Additional summer appointments included Harvard University in 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, and 1941, the University of Minnesota in 1940, and the University of Hawaii in 1955 and 1969. In the spring of 1955, he was a visiting professor at Harvard.
He was a member of the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association in 1948-51 and 1954-55, a member of the Board of Directors in 1955-56, and president of the Division of Personality and Social Psychology in 1951-52. He was also president of the Western Psychological Association in 1963-64. From 1962-65 he was a member of the Board of Directors
of the California State Psychological Association, from 1953-58 a member of the Psychology Panel of the United States Armed Forces, from 1957-64 a member of the Standing Committee on Research of the Educational Testing Service, from 1962-65 a member of the Advisory Research Board of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, and from 1961-64 a member of the Psychology Sub-Committee of the National Institutes of Health.
On the Berkeley campus, MacKinnon was a member of the Committee on University Welfare from 1956-58, of the Committee on Committees in 1958-59, and chairman of the Coordinating Committee on Graduate Affairs in 1959. From 1949-55 he served on the statewide Editorial Committee of the University of California Press.
He was active in editorial work outside of the University, serving at various times on the editorial boards of Character and Personality (1940-44), Contemporary Psychology (1956-70), the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1944-61), the Psychological Bulletin (1960), the Journal of Creative Behavior (1969-87), and Innovacion Creadora (1977-87).
Among MacKinnon's many honors may be mentioned the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Lectureship of the American Psychological Association in 1962, the Richardson Foundation Creativity Award in 1967, and the Founder's Medal from the Creative Education Foundation in 1978. From 1974 until his death, he served on the Board of Trustees of the Creative Education Foundation. In 1981 he received the Henry A. Murray Award from the American Psychological Association for distinguished theoretical and empirical work in the field of personality psychology.
MacKinnon's first professional publication in psychology was in 1931, and his last in 1981, with over 100 papers, chapters, and books within that span. All of his writing was characterized by impeccable scholarship and graceful expression. Major themes may be noted, including creativity, personality structure, motivation, hypnotizability, and methodological issues in assessment. Certain of his writings achieved classic status and are now standard reading for contemporary psychologists. Examples are his 1944 analysis of the structure of personality, a 1948 book on personality assessment that he co-authored with other members of the O.S.S. war- time staff (The Assessment of Men), his 1962 Walter Van Dyke Bingham lecture and American Psychologist article on the nature and nurture of creativity, and his 1978 book In Search of Human Effectiveness.
The remarks above represent significant facts concerning MacKinnon's professional career but tell little about him as a person. He was one of six children of Norman MacKinnon and Abbie Etta Whitehouse. Norman was an immigrant from the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland, a cabinet maker who worked his way through the Harvard Theological Seminary to become a Congregational Minister. Abbie Whitehouse was the daughter of a State Senator from Topsham, Maine. Independence, resourcefulness, and respect for God's word were deeply rooted familial values. One of Don's most salient attributes was a strong ethical sense joined to a high level of personal integrity.
In 1927 Don met Mary Clare Linehan, and in September 1928 they were married. Mary earned a Ph.D. degree in English, and during her life with Don she wrote a successful novel (One Small
Candle), several books for children, and was co-author of a widely used textbook on English grammar. They had two children, Julia (now Mrs. Daniel C. Rosenblat), and Ann (now Mrs. Roy A. Povell), and four grandchildren. Don's own intellectual bent was more than supported by Mary's, and the two maintained a lively interest in good fiction, travel, and ideas during their life together. Mary, we should mention, preceded Don in death by almost exactly one year.
Another of Don's key attributes was his kindly treatment of students and colleagues. Everyone in any way connected with the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) during the period of his leadership can testify to the many ways in which he lent a helping hand and sound scholarly advice when either was needed. A recent count suggests that he introduced well over 200 psychologists and other scholars to the professional practice of intensive personality assessment.
Assessment at the Institute was not just a matter of giving some psychological tests, plus (perhaps) a short personal interview. Drawing on the early model of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, where MacKinnon worked with Henry A. Murray, and the selection program in World War II at the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, MacKinnon at IPAR evolved a complex, multifaceted method for studying persons that combined individual interviews, observational procedures, games such as Charades, experimental and laboratory tasks, and informal contacts between staff observers and assessees lasting up to three full days. From all of the information thereby produced, an enormously rich and varied set of psychological variables was derived and analyzed. The training at the Institute for this kind of assessment was, and is, the best and most thorough offered anywhere in the world.
Finally, Don was a human being worthy both of love and admiration. His openness to others, keen intelligence, delightful sense of humor, and natural dignity brought pleasure to everyone who knew him.
--Kenneth H. Craik, Harrison G. Gough, Wallace B. Hall, Ravenna Helson
Main, Mary (1943-2023) Professor Emerita
Our cherished colleague, Mary Main, passed away peacefully at her home on January 6, 2023, just short of her 80th birthday and after a courageous battle with a long illness. An academic pioneer, Mary joined the UC Berkeley Psychology Department in 1973, as part of a new wave of female faculty hired in the 1970's, after decades in which women were not considered for such positions. Since her young adulthood, she also faced recurring medical challenges, but despite these constraints, she forged a remarkable career of great impact.
Mary was born on February 7, 1943 in Redbank, Michigan, to Raymond Biggar and Mary Louise Biggar (Snyder). She earned a 1968 B.A. in Classics and Natural Sciences from St John's College in Annapolis, Maryland and a 1973 Ph.D. in Psychology, with distinction, from The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, under the supervision of Mary Ainsworth. Mary Main was blessed with two loving marriages. In 1964, when she was 21, she married Al Main, her undergraduate tutor in Greek history at St. Johns. Retiring early, he followed her to Berkeley but sadly he passed away in the summer of 1974, at the end of Mary's first year as an assistant professor. In February 1980, Mary and Erik Hesse (who survives her) became partners in work and life.
Mary Main, along with her husband Erik and her students, transformed the study of attachment— the universal need of animals and humans for proximity and nurturance in times of stress. Mary built upon the ethological perspective of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, who studied ducklings imprinted on their mothers, and of John Bowlby, who focused on the reactions of children separated from their parents during WWII. She expanded upon the experimental method developed by her mentor Mary Ainsworth, of measuring children's separation from and reunions with their mothers in a laboratory setting (the Strange Situation). Mary Main’s enriched formulation of attachment theory and her invention of a method of assessing cognitive/emotional models of attachment in adults by asking about the quality of their relationships with their parents broke new ground. Her highly cited work stimulated yearly conferences and the involvement of literally thousands of researchers and clinicians in countries and cultures across the world interested in the generational transmission of parenting styles.
Mary’s first theoretical advance was to go beyond Ainsworth’s assumption that the Strange Situation measures three specific reactions to separation, to include a new fourth category and to recognize that these categories could be interpreted as universal patterns of behavior and emotion regulation in response to threat: (1) Secure attachment, in which child behavior emerges to maintain closeness to the parent; (2) Avoidant attachment, in which the child’s withdrawal serves the function of keeping the parent close while not demanding a direct response; (3) Anxious attachment, in which the child engages in frantic attempts to re-establish contact with a caregiver; and (4) Disorganized attachment, in which the child’s behavior shows a serious disruption in patterning. These patterns of attachment behavior were associated with adaptation or maladaptation in many different life domains, including adult and child personality styles, reactions to conflict, depression, and aggression. Mary’s initial research at UC Berkeley was novel for its times in the 1970s (and is still rare) in that the sample included children’s reunions with their fathers as well as with their mothers after a brief separation.
A second and novel contribution by Main, Hesse, and her students Carol George and Nancy Kaplan was the idea that adults also create working models of attachment, based on early family experience, that shape their abilities to cope with stress and provide nurturance to their offspring. That is, beyond observable behavior, attachment systems exist on the level of cognitive representations that can be elicited and measured in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), in which adults are asked to describe the qualities of their relationships with their parents or caretakers, especially when those relationships were under stress. The creation of the AAI along with the Strange Situation allows for the study of attachment in parent-child and intimate couple relationships across cultures and across the lifespan.
A third contribution of Main and her collaborators, supported by many studies, was the insight that the attachment system functions as a mechanism to explain the transmission of behavior patterns across time and generations. While there is considerable stability across time and family relationships, many children with insecure attachment are not doomed to remain so, and it is possible for insecurely attached parents to rear children who are securely attached. The possibility of shifts in attachment security has challenged investigators to create interventions for parents to help them respond sensitively to their children’s cues in order to foster both the parents’ and the child’s development of more productive ways of maintaining proximity and nurturance in their relationships.
Mary’s significant contributions to the field of Developmental Psychology have been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988; many invited lectures and grants, three honorary doctorates (University of Uppsala, Sweden in 2000; University of Goteborg, Sweden in 2007;
University of Haifa, Israel in 2010); the establishment in 2004 of the Mary Main Chair in Life- Span Studies of Attachment at Leiden University, Netherlands; and a 2017 lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social, Emotional and Attachment Studies (SEAS). Her intellectual biography appears in the book Cornerstones of Attachment Research (2020) by Robbie Duschinsky, and her scientific papers and correspondence will be archived at the Wellcome Trust in London.
At Berkeley, Mary was often a quiet and modest presence. Mary served as area head in developmental psychology and on a number of departmental and university committees, including an 11 year stint on the Academic Senate Committee on Research (2003-2014). She was experienced mostly by her colleagues in small seminars, in dinners at her home, or at lunches in local restaurants. One colleague described fond memories of a lunch with Mary “that lasted for hours and will stand forever as one of those ‘this is why we are academics moments.’” Others recalled co-teaching seminars with her and the twinkle in her eye as she engaged eagerly in both discussion and debate. Another colleague remarked on her caring and "unique ability to really listen to new ideas." They characterized her commentary as sensitive and incisive, demonstrating a deep appreciation of both biological and psychodynamic determinants in the understanding of family relationships. Two of us (Cowans) collaborated closely with her on student dissertations where we witnessed her reluctance to approve the work until it was (almost) perfect. One of us (Weinstein) remembers a thoughtful and cherished gift from Mary—the video-taping of her twin sons at play at 6 months and 4 years of age.
Still, none of her kindness, wisdom, and supportive mentorship conveyed to those who knew Mary, but did not know her work well, what a towering and path-breaking figure she was in so many venues outside UC Berkeley and across the world. She will be deeply missed by her colleagues and by the multitudes of students and faculty members whose work has been shaped by her generous and creative intellectual contributions to the study of intimate relationships.
--Philip Cowan, Carolyn Pape Cowan, and Rhona Weinstein
Martinez, Joe L. (1944-2020) Professor
Joe Martinez took his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, where he worked with James McGaugh, one of the pioneers of cognitive neuroscience. His research focused on the neurochemistry and neuropharmacology of learning and memory, especially the role of endogenous opiates in the hippocampus. He also investigated the modulation of learning and memory by signals originating in the peripheral nervous system; in vivo studies of synaptic plasticity; and changes in gene expression induced by learning.
Martinez was deeply committed to expanding the ranks of Latino and other underrepresented minorities in psychology, neuroscience, and science (and society) in general. After moving up the ranks at Berkeley, Joe resigned to take a position at the University of Texas, San Antonio -- a branch of the UT system with a large contingent of Latino students. He was the founding director
of UTSA's Cajal Neuroscience Research Center (now the UTSA Neurosciences Institute) and held the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Chair in Psychology. He also served as Co-Director of the American Psychological Association's Diversity Program in Neuroscience, and established a Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics, and Survival (SPINES) at the Wood's Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, intended to attract underrepresented and disadvantaged students to neuroscience. In 2013 he became chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Chicago (another institution devoted to underrepresented minorities), from which he retired in 2016.
For his efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in psychology and neuroscience, Joe received the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1994), the Education Award from the Association for Neuroscience Departments and Programs (2003), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association (2010).
--J.F. Kihlstrom*
McKee, John Parker (1921-1971) Professor
John Parker McKee was born August 11, 1921 in New York City, one of five children of H. Harper McKee, a geologist, and Mabel H. McKee. He received his elementary and secondary education in the public schools of New York City and entered Harvard College in 1937. At Harvard he pursued a variety of interests--French literature and psychology among them. He graduated with the class of 1941. In 1942 he married Mary Ellen Driscoll before being assigned, as a second lieutenant, to the American forces in Great Britain. He participated in the Normandy landings of June 1944 and served in the European theater until the end of the war, advancing to the rank of captain.
After the war he entered the graduate program in child development at the State University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. under Vincent Nowlis in 1949. Upon receipt of his degree, he was invited to Berkeley under a joint appointment as research associate in the Institute of Child Welfare (now the Institute of Human Development) and assistant professor of psychology. He became a full-time appointee in the department in 1959 and was advanced to professor in 1967.
John McKee was a broadly trained psychologist of catholic interests. Although primarily a developmental psychologist, he was highly knowledgeable about theories of learning and of sensory discrimination. Graduate students and colleagues alike profited from theoretical discussions with him in these areas as well as in those more closely related to developmental psychology.
Most of McKee's research was undertaken jointly with others, but his was always a full and active collaboration. His early research was based upon that large and diverse body of carefully and systematically collected developmental data which--since the twenties--had been accumulating in the Institute of Child Welfare. His work entailed analysis of these data with an
eye both to the determination of developmental parameters and to the testing of a variety of hypotheses about the course of child development. He also worked in the area of attitude formation and cultural stereotypes, the experimental work dealing with attitudes of men and women toward men and women. His contribution with Marjorie Honzig on the nature-nurture question, using the sucking response as a point of departure, was a careful historical and theoretical account of this issue. In work with D. A. Riley and others, he concerned himself with problems of absolute and relative auditory discrimination in children.
McKee possessed an active appreciation both responsibilities that the fortune of birth and educational opportunity lays upon the competent and educated person, and of the values that should guide the lives of persons and institutions. (He would certainly have you reminded, however, that his values would not be perfectly consistent with yours!) It was this appreciation and this sense of values that made so valuable his contributions to the analysis and amelioration of many of the problems which--during his tenure--faced the growing department. He served as vice-chairman (experimental-biological group) from 1967 to 1970. Both as a faculty member and as vice-chairman he turned his truly exceptional administrative talents to the advantage of the department.
His most important contributions to psychology and to the department were made in the encouragement and support of students and colleagues in the work they were doing: informal discussions of theory and methods with students and colleagues; critical review and editing of articles others were preparing; and in the wise, thoughtful, and tactful discussion of--and decision making about--departmental policies.
McKee was fiercely--sometimes aggressively--independent. In him this was a trait at once admired and deplored by his friends. It often seemed to them that his understanding of friendship was that friends should be cherished and friendship nourished with kindness and helpfulness
on his part--but that friends were not to be permitted to be helpful to him in troubled times. The intensity of his independence undoubtedly made his own life and that of his family more rigorous than it need have been.
In his case, independence was a general trait, manifest in all aspects of his life, personal and professional. It moved him to a certain disregard of the conservative traditions and constraints of academic life. Thus, although he wrote well and with a real appreciation of style, his own published output was limited.
His independence of thought led editors to request of him critical reviews of potentially influential new books in the areas of his competence. These reviews were always carefully and critically written and were contributions to the field rather than mere guided tours through the book under review.
He was a man of quick and ready wit, a raconteur, and a thoroughly competent psychologist who respected the capacity of undergraduates; his undergraduate courses were popular and appreciated.
A man of deep convictions and loyalties, his notable strengths were his exceptional ability, his intellectual honesty and persistence, his theoretical competence, his ability to stimulate students to understand existing theory but to honor the facts rather than to save the theory, his skill in leading a colleague to clarify either his ideas or (Is there a difference?) his expression of them, and the ability to cut through the superficial.
Effortlessly he could elucidate the important features of theories of rote learning, of discrimination learning, of physical, physiological, intellectual, and personality development, recite dozens of data on any of these topics--yet with equal enjoyment he could produce for you exactly the right word, the correct grammatical structure, the complete Shakespearean quotation (and identify it) or the whole of that vaguely remembered fragment from Gilbert and Sullivan.
This would have been a better memorial had we had in its preparation the editorial assistance from him which we have had with other writing chores.
He died March 5, 1971. Psychology, the department, and the University are the poorer in his loss.
--R.F. Jarrett, F.A. Beach, D.A. Riley
McLearn, Gerald E. (1927-2017)
(forthcoming)
Meredith, William M. (1929-2006) Professor Emeritus
William M. Meredith, professor of psychology, emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and an internationally renowned psychometrician, died at his El Cerrito home on December 4, 2006. He was 77. Bill, as he was known to all, served the Department of Psychology, the Institute of Human Development, and the psychometric field with distinction for close to 50 years.
Bill was born to a farming family in Webster, South Dakota, on September 20, 1929. Growing up during the Depression, Bill moved around the country with his family until they settled in Tacoma, Washington, where he attended high school. He went on to the University of Washington to study statistics and psychology, earning B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees, in 1952, 1956, and 1958, respectively.
Bill joined the Department of Psychology at Berkeley in 1960 as an assistant professor and moved up to associate professor in 1965 and to professor in 1967. He was a major figure in the field of psychometrics, publishing many articles on factor analysis, measurement theory, and
longitudinal data analysis. Bill was just as curious about behavior as he was about methods. He participated in numerous projects that assessed and compared individuals with respect to physical abilities, mental abilities, social relationships, and personality traits over their life spans.
Bill was probably best known for his work on factorial invariance, which is an elegant way to discover what varies over time and what remains constant. A landmark paper that was the start of these ideas was “Notes on Factorial Invariance” (1964), published in Psychometrika. Bill was also highly respected and admired for his work on latent curve modeling, which offers a formal framework for testing linear and nonlinear theories of change over time. Some of these ideas began in a paper called “Latent Curve Analysis” (1990), also published in Psychometrika. Bill made many other intellectual contributions to psychometrics, including the edited book, Methodological Issues in Aging Research (1988), and an article, with Constance Jones, “Developmental Paths of Psychological Health from Early Adolescence to Later Adulthood” (2000). Bill and Constance reported the improvement of psychological health after the age of 30 for the 236 participants who were followed from adolescence to age 62.
Bill was a modest gentleman, but his professional colleagues recognized and appreciated his contributions. He served as president of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology in 1988, winning the society’s Sells Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1996, and was president of the Psychometric Society in 1992. In 1995, he received the Annual Tanaka award for Best Paper in Multivariate Behavior Research. Bill also served the profession as a consultant to various organizations and journals, including the Journal of Gerontology, Psychological Sciences, the British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, Psychometrika, and the Colombian National Testing Service.
These achievements reflect only a small part of what will be most remembered by those of us who were lucky enough to know Bill. His personal influence was enormous. To us, Bill was a “giant.” He was warm, kind, funny, and generous with his time for colleagues and students. He loved reading Mark Twain, exploring the outdoors, talking about baseball, and telling humorous stories. His love of adventure took him to Hawaii for several trips, including a sabbatical. One unfortunate experience, however, occurred in 1982: when surfing in Oahu, he was knocked unconscious by gigantic waves. He was eventually resuscitated, but the accident damaged the nerves in his spine, a problem that continued for the rest of his life. His spirit, however, recovered and he continued to engage in life with his family, friends, and scholarly pursuits.
An important and fulfilling part of Bill’s career was the training and mentoring of students, many of whom have become leaders in the field of psychometrics. Some of Bill's gifts for one-on-one teaching come through in the comments made by his students and colleagues. Professor Emeritus Phil Cowan noted that “[i]n a quiet way, his work provided the foundation for a whole new way to analyze longitudinal data, much more powerful and informative than anything we’ve had before.” One of his former undergraduate students, and a subsequent colleague in the Department of Psychology (and contributor to this memorial), currently professor in the Haas School of Business, Barbara Mellers, stated, “His good natured, low-key style and his powerful intellect made him a patient and inspiring teacher. He loved literature, good food and friends. He will be greatly missed by those who were fortunate enough to enjoy his salty humor, his creative mind, and his extraordinarily generous spirit.” Both Sheldon Zedeck and Rhona Weinstein (also
contributors to this memorial) recall numerous visits to Bill’s office, first making small talk and exchanging funny stories, and then telling Bill about being stumped while analyzing a set of data. Bill would ask a few questions, go to his chalkboard, write some formulae, and tell you what needed to be done. And his advice was priceless. He provided a deeper and richer understanding of the question and how to answer it. Such efforts would ordinarily gain coauthorship on student and colleague papers, but Bill’s modesty resulted in his refusal of coauthorships.
His students, however, repaid him for his contributions by hosting a symposium in his honor in Berkeley in 1999. Over 60 students and colleagues participated in a two-day event, at which students presented papers and told stories about Bill. Comments from students show the remembrances of Bill as a person: his scholarly influence, his warmth, his style, his humor, and his lively interest in people and their lives. Sheri Berenbaum, a former graduate student, said, “During my first meeting with Bill … and students … we were asked about our interests. Bill said something like ‘I’m interested in Norse sagas, but I work as a psychometrician to make a living.’ I often think of that – and lots of other examples provided by Bill – to remember the importance of a well-rounded life.” Richard Duran remarked, “Bill … offered us other training. I most appreciate his stoicism and grit, e.g., Meredith’s law: ‘Those who got, get.’ Bill gave me tremendous respect and support as a graduate student, and he strengthened my values on the importance of self-reliance … It is good to know that we were able to build on Bill’s bountiful talents, and crusty attitude.” Finally, Bob Janerone said, “I got my Ph.D. under Bill’s (un)supervision in the 1970’s. Throughout, he saw to it that I was reasonably supported, inspired, educated, happy, and above all else independent. Don’t ask me why, but despite all that I still love Bill dearly.”
Bill is survived by his wife of 55 years, Vivian, daughter Nancy, sons William, Tom, and Douglas, four grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. He will be deeply missed by those of us who had the good fortune to have him touch our lives.
--S. Zedeck, R.S. Weinstein, B. Mellers
Mussen, Paul H. (1922-2000) Professor Emeritus
Paul H. Mussen, a renowned developmental psychologist, died Friday, July 7, 2000 at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, ending a long struggle with prostate cancer. He was 78. Born March 21, 1922 in Paterson, New Jersey, Mussen grew up in Willimantic, Connecticut and attended the (present) University of Connecticut at Storrs until he received a scholarship to Stanford University in 1939. He completed both his undergraduate and master's degrees at Stanford before joining the U.S. Navy in 1944. First assigned to the Language School in Boulder, Colorado, he served as an ensign in Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., Hawaii, and San Francisco. In 1949 he completed the Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University.
From 1949-51, Mussen taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then at the Ohio State University, Columbus, until 1955. A Ford post-doctoral fellowship to the University of California brought him to Berkeley in 1955 and the offer to join the Psychology Department. During a distinguished career that spanned 30 years, Mussen received a Fulbright Award for research in Florence, Italy in 1960 and served as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1968. At Berkeley, he was Director of the Institute of Human Development from 1971-1980 and Acting Director in 1987. He taught as visiting professor or served as consultant in many universities and institutes in the United States and Canada. He lectured and consulted at departments and symposia throughout Europe, Egypt, Nigeria, Israel and the Middle East, India, Pakistan, New Zealand, and Australia. Twice invited to Japan, he also was one of the first American professors who taught in China following the Cultural Revolution. During a semester in 1980, and two return visits, he actively assisted in revitalizing the formerly suppressed social and developmental psychology programs at universities in Beijing as well as other Chinese cities. There he introduced contemporary research methods and techniques and espoused many social issues. He also mentored students and faculty and encouraged academic exchange with several American institutions including the University of California.
Mussen's research explored the effects of parent-child relations on children's developing personality and social behavior, including their moral behavior, attitudes and opinions. He made many highly regarded contributions to our understanding of children's developing prosocial behavior, friendships, social theories and personality. In addition to numerous publications of his research in scholarly journals, Mussen synthesized his findings in a book entitled The Roots of Caring, Sharing and Helping: The Development of Prosocial Behavior in Children, co-authored with his former student, Nancy Eisenberg.
Mussen's scholarship was wide-ranging and his writing was clear and graceful. Considered a masterful editor, he produced more than 20 books. His classic text, Child Development and Personality (with J. J. Conger, J. Kagan, and A. Houston) was the standard in the field for three decades; it was published in seven editions and translated into six languages. A primer, The Psychological Development of the Child was also widely translated. Standard scholarly works edited by Mussen include the Handbook of Research Methods in Child Development;
the Handbook of Child Psychology; and the Annual Review of Psychology (with M. Rosenzweig from 1969-1974). Mussen was honored by the Society for Research in Child Development in 1997 for his outstanding contributions to education in developmental psychology.
Mussen was a source of strength, leadership and support to his profession and to his many colleagues and students. He served on numerous academic and professional boards, agencies and committees essential to maintaining and furthering the growth of his discipline. He was President of the Western Psychological Association in 1973-74, and the American Psychological Association's Division of Developmental Psychology in 1977-78. For many years and until his death, Mussen served as a member of the Children's Advertising Review unit of the Better Business Bureau, upholding standards of writing and advertising on Children's Television. He is survived by his wife, Ethel, daughter Michele, son Jim, brother Irwin, grandson Jacob, and many cousins on both Coasts.
--J. Langer, J. Watson, R. Weinstein
Palmer, Stephen (1948-2023) Professor Emeritus
Steve Palmer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley died on July 29, 2023, after an extended battle with a rare neurological disorder, multiple systems atrophy. He was a vibrant member of the Department of Psychology for 44 years and had a profound influence on the department, university, and field of cognitive psychology. Steve was a founding member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (originally the Institute of Cognitive Studies), serving as director from 1990-2000. During that time, he spearheaded an initiative that led to creation of the undergraduate Cognitive Science program. His accolades include election as a fellow in the Association for Psychological Science and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
Steve was born and raised in New Jersey, and stayed local for college, graduating from Princeton University in 1970. Foreshadowing his extraordinary experimental skills, Steve received the Howard Crosby Warren Prize, awarded to the outstanding psychology major, in both his junior and senior years, a feat that remains unmatched. He attended graduate school at UC, San Diego, working under the supervision of Dave Rumelhart and Don Norman, two leading figures in the cognitive revolution that was in full bloom during the 1970’s. His interest in perceptual organization emerged during that time, a theme that was to remain central to his research program throughout his career.
Steve joined the Department of Psychology at UC, Berkeley in 1975, was promoted to Professor in 1984, and transitioned to a Professor of the Graduate School in 2009. He was truly one of the 20th Century giants in the fields of perception and cognition, recognized as the flag bearer of the modern era of Gestalt psychologists with his focus on understanding the principles that underlie our phenomenological visual experience.
Steve made groundbreaking contributions to fundamental problems in cognitive representation and perceptual organization. His 1977 paper titled, “Hierarchical structure in Perceptual Representation” remains a classic, providing a formal theory of how objects are efficiently coded in a hierarchical scheme, a representation that brings to the forefront critical, invariant features. Steve extended these ideas over the years to explain a broad range of core perceptual phenomena essential for shape constancy, motion perception, figural goodness, and contextual effects. He identified novel principles of perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization such as common region, edge-region grouping, element connectedness, and uniform connectedness. A key thread of Steve’s work concerned the relationship between perceptual organization and other stages of object recognition. In a series of studies, he challenged classic ideas and showed that many grouping phenomena occur relatively late in processing, and indeed, may undergo revision during the perceptual process. Indeed, this work was also emblematic of Steve’s willingness to revise his own thinking as the data demanded; he had published influential papers earlier in his career arguing for a more fixed processing order.
In the latter phase of his career, Steve took up the study of aesthetics. Here he sought to understand general principles of aesthetics as well as individual and cultural differences. In the spatial domain, he sought to understand people’s preferences for the spatial layout of compositions, such as those found in paintings or photographs. He found that these preferences
are governed by several kinds of biases. For example, they typically prefer a horse to be depicted as facing inward in a portrait, but this preference can change to match the context. If the image is meant to convey a front runner, people will prefer the horse to be shifted off to the side with its head facing the close edge as if it is running out of the frame. Steve referred to such context effects as representational fit, referring to the goodness-of fit between the visual input and the semantic context of the scene.
In the color domain, Steve put forth what has come to be recognized as a leading theory of color preferences, the ecological valence theory (EVT). The core idea is that color preferences are based on how much people like concepts associated with those colors. Blue tends to be liked because we associate it with clear skies and clean water; dark yellows are disliked given their association with rotting food and biological waste. (And Cal grads prefer blue-and-gold whereas Stanford grads red-and-white.) While the EVT had its roots in correlational studies, casual evidence came from work showing that color preferences could be systematically manipulated by priming individuals to think about positive/negative objects associated with specific colors. Steve’s work on these problems was instrumental in bringing psychophysical and neuroscience methods to the study of aesthetics, a field that came to the forefront with his book, co-edited with his colleague Art Shimamura, Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience.
While laying foundations for aesthetic science, Steve also developed an interest in cross-modal perception. He sought to understand how people mapped perceptual features between modalities. For example, why do people associate one type of music to one set of colors and another type of music to a different set of colors. Here he catalogued systematic mappings such as the association of major scales being associated with bright, saturated colors and then proposed the emotional mediation hypothesis, the idea that these matches reflect shared emotional associations between colors and music. For example, the happiness of music was strongly correlated with the happiness of colors selected to go with the music. In a creative series of experiments, Steve found support for this hypothesis across a wide variety of stimuli, including musical genres, human faces, and visual textures.
Steve’s theoretical and empirical contributions are many, but his most lasting mark on the field arises from his extraordinary ability to see, as the Gestalt psychologists would say, both the forest and trees. Steve was a big picture scientist, someone who was comfortable listening to talks in linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, computer science, art, etc. and appreciate the unique perspectives and approaches that emerge from these diverse fields. Members of our Berkeley community, as well as conference audiences were always primed to listen when Steve spoke during the Q&A, anticipating that he would place the work in a broad context with his probing questions and synthetic comments. These intellectual skills are most evident in his foundational book, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. Ten years in the making, this book has been the essential primer in the field since its publication in 1999.
Steve was an outstanding teacher and mentor. With the Institute of Cognitive Studies thriving in its mission to promote interdisciplinary research and graduate training, he led the effort to create an undergraduate program in cognitive science at Berkeley, one that in just a few years was bursting at the seams with over 300 majors. His Perception class was legendary, with the students’ reaction best summarized in one end-of-term evaluation, “Palmer rocks! Please give him a raise and bonus.” He opted to sit at a desk in his subterranean lab in Tolman Hall, foregoing a windowed 3rd floor office, so that he could be close to the action. He made his students feel like anything they had to tell him was important. He encouraged the lab members to share works in progress—what were referred to as “drafty drafty drafts”—and would do the same in return, providing deep insight into his creative processes. And with his many hobbies and passions, he
demonstrated by example the importance of maintaining a balanced life.
Despite Steve’s stellar scientific accomplishments, he was kind, humble, and caring. One of his favorite things to do at the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) meeting was to visit student posters, learn about their work, and discuss ideas on future directions for their research. Steve noticed that once the students saw his name on his name tag, they would freeze up out of intimidation. Many famous scholars would be proud for people to know their name, but Steve had the opposite reaction. He would use his program to shield the name tag, settling in for a relaxed, creative conversation.
Steve practiced what he preached, nurturing the artist within in the second half of his life. His photographs grace the hallway of Psychology’s space within Berkeley Way West. After moving to New Mexico post-retirement, Steve turned to a creative form of painting, pouring acrylics on plexiglass to make dazzling kaleidoscopic works that filled the home he shared with his husband, Avi Kriechman in the hill country north of Albuquerque.
In addition to Avi, Steve is survived by his two children, Nathan and Emily, his grandson Calloway, and brother Rob and sister-in-law Sharon.
Steve was a wonderful scientist and colleague, a man with a passion for all seasons.
--Rich Ivry, Karen Schloss, Joe Brooks, Bill Prinzmetal, and Daniel Levitin
Porter, Lyman (1930-2015) Dean and Professor Emeritus of Management, UC Irivne
Dr. Lyman W. Porter, the former dean of the University of California, Irvine, Graduate School of Management (now known as The Paul Merage School of Business) died on July 2, 2015, in Newport Beach, California. He was 85.
Lyman William Porter was born in 1930 in Lafayette, Indiana. He was the youngest of three sons born to Charles Lyman Porter, a professor of biology at Purdue University, and his wife Mary Allen. Dr. Porter wrote in a personal history that he was "a product of a middle-class, middle west upbringing," and continued that his "roots and basic character formation were anchored in my first eighteen years growing up in a college town in Indiana."
Dr. Porter attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1952. He continued his education at Yale University, where he earned a PhD in psychology in 1956. In the same year he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he rose to full professor of industrial psychology. He, along with Prof. Emeritus Edwin Ghiselli helped put UCB on the map for the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology.
In 1967, he began a new chapter in his life with his appointment as the assistant dean of what was then the Graduate School of Administration (GSA) at the University of California, Irvine. As assistant dean he was instrumental in starting the PhD program in the GSA. He served with great distinction as dean of the school from 1972 to 1983. His tenure was marked by the creation of strong connections between the school and the business community, primarily through the highly successful Corporate Partners Program and the development of the MBA program. Long after becoming emeritus in 1992, he continued to teach, research and serve his campus. The Dr. Lyman W. Porter Colloquium Room in the Paul Merage School of Business building was named in his honor.
Lyman William Porter was a scholar of great distinction and influence in his field of Organizational Behavioral Psychology. He was one of the primary founders of the study of organizational behavior. His texts are considered classics in the field. He taught and mentored generations of academic and industrial leaders, and played a major role in ensuring that organizational behavior would become an important component of modern business education. His scholarship has been recognized in honors and awards too numerous to count, most prominently: the Catell Award (American Psychological Association, 1969), Scholarly Contributions Award (Academy of Management, 1983), Distinguished Faculty Research Award (University of California, Irvine, 1989), Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award in Industrial and Organizational Psychology (American Psychological Association, 1989), an Honorary Doctor of Law degree (De Paul University) and an Alumni Merit Award (Northwestern University, 1994).
He was an important builder of institutions. In addition to leading the creation of the MBA program at the UCI Graduate School of Management, he achieved AACSB accreditation, a challenging task for such a small, new school. He was the first to build the aforementioned strong community relationships and worked tirelessly to ensure the school admitted the most outstanding students and hired the most promising faculty members, establishing the school's leading global academic reputation that remains today. After his formal retirement he served as Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, on committees for the National Academy of Sciences and led the effort to reform and internationalize business school curricula for the AACSB. He also led numerous academic associations, among the most noteworthy: The Academy of Management and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
He was a beloved educator, not only to his own students who have gone on to become leaders of their scholarly fields and universities, but of his junior colleagues as well. He nurtured many careers and lives with his wisdom and generosity.
--S. Zedeck*
Postman, Leo (1918-2004) Professor Emeritus
Leo Joseph Postman, professor emeritus of psychology and a dominant figure in the study of human memory, died on April 22, 2004, of heart failure at his home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He was 85.
Postman was “a major theoretician in the development of the theory of forgetting,” said friend and colleague Donald Riley, professor emeritus of psychology. “His contributions were monumental.” Postman was listed in a 2002 article in the Review of General Psychology as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the last century. “Within the field of human memory, the range of his contributions has been vast,” wrote one of his former students, Geoffrey Keppel, professor emeritus of psychology, in recommending Postman for the Berkeley Citation. Postman received the award, the highest honor given to University of California, Berkeley faculty and staff, upon his retirement in 1987.
In 1961, Postman founded the Institute of Human Learning at Berkeley, which lives on today as the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, a center devoted to an interdisciplinary study of the mind and the brain.
Postman primarily studied perception, learning, and memory. He participated in the beginnings of the “new look” school of perception that emphasized the role of cognitive factors such as emotions and expectations in determining what people perceive.
His main interest, however, was forgetting. Based on studies he began in 1958, he became known as the principal spokesman for and architect of modern interference theory, the only comprehensive account of forgetting that exists today. The theory, Keppel wrote, holds that forgetting is the result of interference from a variety of sources, including past memories, various
aspects of the current memory, and new memories acquired subsequently–that is, a dynamic interaction of the entire memory system, past and present. Postman was sensitive to the weaknesses of the theory, and spent the last part of his career investigating the mechanisms that conserve memory in the face of interference. Much of this research was conducted at the institute he founded and directed until 1977.
Postman, who served as chair of the Department of Psychology for several years in the late 1950s, had a reputation for excellence in teaching, emphasizing clarity and organization.
Born June 7, 1918, in St. Petersburg, Russia, Postman moved at an early age to New York City, obtaining his B.S. from the College of the City of New York in 1943 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1946. He taught at Harvard from 1946 until 1950, interrupted by one year at Indiana University, and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1950.
In his first years at Berkeley, Postman was recognized nationally as a major figure in the field of perception and the role of motivation in perception. His research shifted, however, and he embarked on a long series of studies on learning with and without the intent to learn (the latter being what is referred to as incidental learning). He later switched to the study of forgetting, which he pursued until his retirement.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association, he also served in 1968 as president of the Western Psychological Association, and in 1974 received the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists for outstanding achievement in experimental psychology.
Postman was married for 58 years to Dorothy Lerman Postman, who for many years worked with her husband at Berkeley and shared his love of psychology and of reading. They met when, as a graduate student teaching assistant, he graded her psychology paper. The couple moved to Marblehead a decade ago. In 2003, Dorothy Postman, who had a B.A. from Radcliffe College and an M.A. in psychology from Wellesley College, died after a long illness. Leo Postman leaves a sister- and brother-in-law, Lorraine and Edward Berman, of Marblehead, a niece and three nephews.
He was buried at Temple Sinai in Danvers, Massachusetts, on April 25.
--R. Sanders
Robertson, Lynn C. (1946-2021) Adjunct Professor Emerita
Lynn Robertson received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from UC Berkeley in 1980, working with Stephen Palmer. She served as a research psychologist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Martinez, CA from 1982-1993 and on the faculty at the UC Davis School of Medicine, Departments of Neurology and Medicine (1984-1998), where she rose through the adjunct professor ranks. Lynn returned to UC Berkeley in 1998 as an adjunct professor in the
Department of Psychology, Vision Sciences, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, while also a Senior Research Career Scientist in the Department of Veteran Affairs. She was last an Adjunct Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley.
Lynn's research in cognitive neuroscience has contributed significantly to our understanding of how the parietal lobes “bind” different features of incoming visual information to recognize objects and their importance. Think about a gray ball coming towards one’s head—one has to rapidly encode, using different regions of the cortex, the color, shape, size, and movement, to understand this is a ball and not a rock. Lynn's work helps us understand the brain regions and cognitive processes shaping this binding. She used neurocognitive measures in healthy persons and those with well-defined brain lesions to study these processes. Her work has major implications for understanding visual disorders in those with neurological injury and disease, including those with unilateral neglect, prosopagnosia (face blindness) and congenital visual- spatial deficits.
Dozens of her articles, including work published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have been cited more than 100 times. She is the author or co-author of four books—including books describing cognitive neuroscience findings in synesthesia, spatial processing abilities, and (with Rich Ivry) hemispheric influences on perception—and over 200 research articles. She had garnered sustained research funding, mentored generations of students, shouldered numerous administrative and committee roles, including the advance of women in neuroscience, and had been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association.
--Department of Psychology* For more remembrances of Lynn Robertson,
see https://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/remembering-lynn-robertson.
Roberts, Seth A. (1953-2014) Professor Emeritus
(forthcoming)
Rosenzweig, Mark R. (1922-2009) Professor Emeritus
Mark R. Rosenzweig, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, whose early studies paved the way for today’s recognition of the brain’s ability to grow and to repair itself, died at his home in Berkeley on July 20, 2009, from kidney failure. He was 86.
A prolific researcher, writer and French-speaking internationalist, Mark collaborated with some of the greatest minds in neuropsychology at Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France. At Berkeley, Mark Rosenzweig collaborated with biochemist Ed Bennett, psychologist David Krech and neuroanatomist Marian Diamond on studies that provided early evidence of brain plasticity, the now well-established notion that neural pathways change throughout our lives as we grow and learn. In addition, his earlier research into auditory perception also laid the groundwork for modern, noninvasive hearing tests.
“Mark Rosenzweig’s investigations were rigorous, groundbreaking and continue to be cited in all current accounts of brain development and plasticity, though they were conducted over half a century ago,” said Stephen Hinshaw, chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology. “If anyone deserves the term ‘pioneer,’ he does.”
Through extensive studies of laboratory rats at UC Berkeley in the 1950s and 1960s, Mark and his colleagues were able to show that “environmental therapy” can stimulate brain growth at a cellular level not only in juveniles but also in adults. For example, he found that rats living in an “enriched environment,” which were given stimulating interactive tasks, performed better at learning activities than those living in passive, impoverished conditions.
A descendant of Lithuanian and Russian Jews who came to America in the 1880s, Mark was born in Rochester, New York, on September 12, 1922. His father was a lawyer and his mother a homemaker who was bilingual in English and German. In an autobiography published in The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography (5: 2006), Rosenzweig described a warm, stimulating upbringing in which his parents fostered a love of languages and cerebral activities, playing word games with their son and daughter to improve their vocabulary.
He attended public schools in Rochester and was selected class valedictorian in both grammar school and high school. In 1940, he entered the University of Rochester, and while he started out drawn to history, his fascination for psychology won out. In 1943, he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and in 1944 went on to earn a master’s degree, specializing in the brain mechanism of auditory perception.
In 1944, he was drafted into the Navy, stationed at the Anacostia Naval base in Washington D.C., and put to work as a radar technician. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, he marched in the funeral procession. Later, he shipped out across the Pacific Ocean to Tsingtao Harbor in China. He was stationed on the seaplane tender USS Chincoteague.
After being discharged from the Navy in 1946, Mark was accepted to Harvard University, where he worked in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory. In his 1949 doctoral thesis, he demonstrated that electrodes placed on the skull could pick up “electrical activity of all the auditory stations from the cochlea to the cortex.” This meant that the “activity of subcortical centers can be studied without surgical invasion of the nervous system,” he later pointed out. In the 1970s, his method of testing stations of the auditory system via the surface of the brain was developed to identify newborns with hearing loss.
In 1949, Mark was offered an assistant professorship in physiological psychology at UC Berkeley. At the time, all University employees were required to sign a loyalty oath, which stirred much protest, and made Mark wary about taking the job. But, he wrote in his autobiography, Professor Edward C. Tolman, for whom UC Berkeley’s psychology department building is now named, told him, “If you are interested in the position, take it. There are enough senior professors to maintain the fight against the loyalty oath and we don’t want to cripple the future of the university by stopping recruitment of young people.” Mark accepted this position and was appointed in 1950, although he did not arrive on the Berkeley campus until 1951.
At UC Berkeley, he continued his investigation into “binaural perception,” but soon he and his colleagues were drawn to the study of learning and memory, and thus began their investigations of the whole brain: “Our first reports that differential experience induces measurable changes in the brain were greeted with skepticism and incredulity,” he wrote. But in later years, their findings gained acceptance.
“We did not invent the concept of the ‘enriched environment,’ but I believe that our publications introduced the concept and the term to the neuroscience community,” he wrote. In 1982, he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions for his research demonstrating that weight, chemistry, and ultrastructure of brain components are affected by environmental stimulation.
A strong supporter of public education and equal opportunity, in 1964 Mark Rosenzweig served with UC Berkeley physics Nobelist Owen Chamberlain as cochair of the Special Opportunity Scholarship Committee, designed to prepare underprivileged high school students for university education. Their initiative developed into the federal program known as Upward Bound.
Another of Mark’s passions was psychology as an international science, and he became heavily involved in the International Union of Psychological Science, which he served as president from 1988 to 1992. In turn, Mark received the American Psychological Association’s Contribution to International Psychology Award in 1998.
Among other accolades, Mark Rosenzweig was awarded the Berkeley Citation in 1992. He also received honorary doctorates from the Université René Descartes in Paris, the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg and the Université de Montréal. He served as editor of the Annual Review of Psychology from 1968 to 1994. Mark was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
A memorial gathering, arranged by Mark Rosenzweig’s children, was held at the Men’s Faculty Club on September 11, 2009. It was attended by colleagues and many former graduate students, as well as his three children and several grandchildren. Mark’s son Philip provided a set of stories that completed the portrait of Mark Rosenzweig as a warm and engaged father and grandfather. “Our father’s dedication to science was matched by his devotion to his family,” said his daughter, Suzanne Washburn. “He enriched our lives through education, travel, and laughter.”
For those of us who knew Mark as a colleague, he was also a friend, a fine scholar and a formal, old-fashioned gentleman. But, as was recounted by speaker after speaker at the memorial gathering, he also had a marvelous sense of humor, which emerged with a special impish smile.
Many of those reminiscences, along with those of other students and colleagues who knew Mark, can be read in the December 2009 issue of The Observer, published by the Association for Psychological Science.
Mark Rosenzweig is survived by his daughters, Anne Janine Rosenzweig of Morgan Hill, California, and Suzanne Jacqueline Washburn of Moraga, California; son, Philip Mark Rosenzweig of Sedbergh, England; sister, Patty Epstein of Green Valley, Arizona; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife of 60 years, Janine, who passed away in 2008.
--S.E. Glickman, E.R. Hafter, D.A. Riley
Sampson, Edward E. (1934-2019) Associate Professor
Edward Sampson received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1960, and held a faculty position at Berkeley until 1970. He subsequently taught at Clark University (1971-1982), the Saybrook Institute (now Saybrook University, and served as Dean of the Wright Institute from 1982-1986. He then moved to California State University, Northridge, where he was Professor of Psychology and Dean of Social Sciences. Sampson was a pioneer in what we would now call "critical" psychology, and what he was mostly critical of was the tendency of psychologists to "de-contextualize" the individual's identity, mental life, and behavior, as if these things were unrelated to the surrounding sociocultural matrix. As such, he advocated increased interaction between psychology and the other social sciences. In the 1960s he was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, and was one of the founders of the Center for Participant Education, a "free university. In 2007, Sampson received an award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology from Division 24 (Philosophical Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. He was an inspirational teacher -- so much so that, more than 50 years after leaving Berkeley, an anonymous student created a fund in his honor.
--J.F. Kihlstrom
Shimamura, Arthur Paul (1954-2020) Professor Emeritus
Art Shimamura was a cognitive neuroscientist and renowned memory researcher in the Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience program. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 and was appointed as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 1989. His initial research focus was in the area of memory, including the study of individuals with memory disorders. While this remained a focus throughout his career, Art’s interests expanded into multiple domains, all of which he ultimately combined into new theories regarding the mind and brain. He authored or edited 9 books and published over 100 papers on topics ranging from amnesia, visual illusions, the frontal lobes, art appreciation, and how to maintain a healthy brain.
Art’s life was filled with family, art, and psychology. Born in Los Angeles on June 26, 1954, he grew up in Southern California in a loving family that extended from L.A. to Washington State and Japan, and to whom he remained close his entire life. Art’s approach to his many scientific and nonscientific interests could be described as intensely joyful. He had many passions in his life. Art loved being in the water, a proclivity that led him to do his undergraduate studies at the UC Santa Barbara where he participated in both water polo and long-distance swimming. Later, as a faculty member at UC Berkeley, he swam the Shark Fest, from Alcatraz to San Francisco.
While an undergraduate at the University of California Santa Barbara, Art was seduced by another passion: science. Working in the lab of Walter Gogel, Art became intrigued with the idea that science was the way to approach many problems. After graduating from UCSB, Art went on to obtain his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Washington, supervised by Geoffrey Loftus. While there, he took up photography, another passion that would later become important in his scientific and personal life. From 1982 to 1989, Art was a postdoctoral fellow and staff scientist at UC San Diego, working with Larry Squire. Art’s work at UCSD was part of the first wave of cognitive neuroscientists, co-authoring some of the most influential studies of memory disorders. This early work, including more than 30 articles in top journals, resulted in Art being ranked the 9th most-cited psychologist for 1986-1990, in an APS Observer survey of highest impact authors.
Art’s pioneering work in cognitive neuroscience continued after joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1989. While he continued his work involving brain-injured patients, he also conducted important neuroimaging studies of learning, memory, and cognitive functioning in the normal brain, leading to a novel theory concerning the role of the parietal lobe in memory retrieval. In 1994, Art edited an influential book on metacognition with Janet Metcalfe (Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing) and co-founded the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, now in its 28th year. A year later, he published a study that evaluated cognitive aging in UC Berkeley professors, finding that a combination of intelligence and ongoing mental activity may compensate for age-related changes in cognition. He went on to explore various forms of cognitive control and how the frontal lobes mediated executive functioning as well as source memory, temporal order judgments, emotion and metamemory. Art’s eclectic approach to his work allowed him to explain learning and memory as an elegant mix of various cognitive functions and neurological mechanisms.
Art found great satisfaction in finding links between his academic interests and his passion for photography and film. Reflecting his early interest in visual perception at UC Santa Barbara, he developed and tested a theory to account for optical illusions, explaining how we perceive an object’s orientation regardless of how our eyes or body are oriented. With his flair for historical research, he contributed a fascinating article to History of Photography on the early 20th century photographer Edward Muybridge, making the case that Muybridge’s creative inspiration could be traced to personality changes that came about following a severe traumatic injury to the frontal lobes.
Towards the end of his career, his interest in photography enabled him to be one of the pioneers in the empirical study of aesthetics. A John Simon Guggenheim fellowship enabled his 2013 book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder and the book Psychocinematics: Exploring
Cognition at the Movies (2014). With another pioneer in this new field, Steve Palmer, also a UC Berkeley Psychology professor, he edited the book, Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (2013).
In 2015, Art retired and moved to the North Shore of O’ahu with his wife and soulmate, Helen Ettlinger. He traveled the world, camera in hand, to capture broad landscapes and exquisite details in environments ranging from New Zealand to Alaska (https://artshimamuraphotography.wordpress.com/). He continued to write, but turned his attention to books for the general public, distilling his knowledge from science (Five Steps Toward a Healthy Brain, 2017, and MARGE: A Whole-Brain Learning Approach for Students and Teachers, 2018). He continued to write even after his cancer diagnosis, with a book describing his walk around the island of O’ahu (A Walk Around O‘ahu: My Personal Pilgrimage, 2019) and a blog for Psychology Today (“Maintaining an active brain and body even after cancer”).
Art was a wonderful teacher and mentor. He won a UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching award in the Division of Social Sciences in 1996. His Psychology 1 class was a campus favorite with his unique combination of science and humor. Art was an Osher Fellow & Science Advisor at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco. With his clarity of thought and calm but intensely joyful demeanor, Art generously provided advice and guidance to his students as well as to a broad range of scientists around the world. He is greatly missed by his wife, two sons, and all of us, after his far too early death on October 6, 2020.
--W. Prinzmetal, N. Dronkers, K. Paller, R. Ivry
Stratton, George Malcolm (1865-1957) Professor
George Malcolm Stratton was born in Oakland, California, September 26, 1865. His father, a civil engineer, came to California in 1850. The son attended the public schools and graduated from the University of California in 1888. As a college student he came under the influence of George Holmes Howison, a philosopher whom he greatly admired, and whose biography he published in 1934 in collaboration with John Wright Buckham. After teaching in a secondary school for a year and then serving as its principal, he received his M.A. in philosophy from Yale University and in 1890 returned to the University of California as a Fellow in Philosophy. He married Alice Elenore Miller on May 17, 1894, and then spent two years as a member of Wundt's Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig, receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1896. He then returned to the University of California as Instructor in Psychology. In 1896 and 1897 he published two papers reporting the investigation for which he is probably best known, “Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image .” Dr. Stratton is credited in this experiment with having “settled both Kepler's problem of erect vision with an inverted image and Lotze's problem of the role of experience in space perception.”
In 1899, working with three undergraduates -- Knight Dunlap, Edward K. Strong, and Warner Brown, all of whom became distinguished psychologists in their own right -- he established the psychological laboratory in the University of California. In 1904 he moved to Johns Hopkins University as Professor of Psychology and Director of the Psychological Laboratory. [Based on the inverted vision studies, E.R. Hilgard, in Psychology in America: A Historical Survey (1987) gives the date as 1896.] In 1908 he returned to the University of California, where the rest of his academic life was spent as Professor of Psychology.
He was President of the American Psychological Association in 1908, a member of the National Research Council from 1921 to 1924, and chairman of its Division of Anthropology and Psychology in 1925 and 1926. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1928. He was also an honorary member of the National Institute of Psychology and a corresponding member of the American Institute of Czechoslovakia. He lectured frequently in various universities in the United States, Europe, and in the Orient.
Although Professor Stratton's studies on binocular vision and depth perception have had the greatest impact on the thinking and research of his colleagues in psychology, he himself probably considered of greater importance his studies in the fields of emotions, social values, and international conduct. He staunchly believed that the understanding of impulses, instincts, and motives in man merited the same careful scientific analysis as did sensation, intellect, or learning.
His book, Experimental Psychology and Its Bearing upon Culture (1903), was his first systematic excursion into the realm of social behavior, and included a thorough description of experimental findings in such areas as mental measurement, unconscious ideas, illusions, memory, imitation, and suggestion, as well as investigations of the influence of color and the fine arts on behavior. For each topic he emphasized the significance of the findings on the everyday cultural life of the individual.
During World War I, he served in the psychological division of Army aviation, attaining the rank of Major, and became more deeply interested in international relations and the causes of war, later writing many articles and two books dealing with the problems of war and peace. It was his strong conviction that the time had come for the scientific psychologist to contribute his energy and talents to man's efforts to avert war. Other books written during the last years of his life were directed toward the same end, and although written for the general reader, they presented current psychological knowledge of the creative and destructive aspects of human nature. It was his belief that it was possible for nations to develop the attitudes toward one another which the most civilized individuals and communities have achieved.
During the years following his studies in Leipzig he performed many experiments in the fields of perception, memory, and emotion, but he never abandoned entirely the philosophical and broadly religious ideas stimulated by Howison while he was still an undergraduate student of philosophy, applying to them the concepts developed from his experimental investigations. He disagreed with those scientists who regard man as “merely an animal, or merely a mechanism, or merely an inert particle driven hither and yon by the wind,” and added that “hosts of men become confident that a highest reality... is the source and meaning of the universe verified by our senses.” This
theme he enlarged in his last published book, Man--Creator or Destroyer, which appeared in 1952 when he was eighty-seven years old.
At the time of his death, Professor Stratton was completing a book with the tentative title, The Divisive and Unifying Forces of the Community of Nations. Before the book was in final form he died at his home in Berkeley on October 8, 1957, at the age of ninety-two. He is survived by Mrs. Robert Fliess, Dr. J. Malcolm Stratton, Mrs. Albert Reinke, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
His was a familiar figure on the campus during the twenty-two years after he became Professor Emeritus. He was in his office every weekday morning until a few weeks before his death, and even though his vision was failing, he worked steadily on the material for the book which he had hoped to complete. He was respected and liked by all of his colleagues, many of whom had joined the staff of the Department long after his retirement from active University duties.
Among psychologists, Dr. Stratton's reputation rests primarily on his early experimental work, particularly the research in sensation and perception. His article, “Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image,” although published sixty years ago, still appears in current volumes of psychological readings. His experiments were varied and numerous, and were planned and executed with painstaking thoroughness; nevertheless, for him the most important aspects of psychology lay beyond the possibility of exact and objective investigation. Thus, he felt an urgent need to make the world more intelligible by going beyond those boundaries “where science stops, declaring it can as yet go no farther.”
--C.W. Brown, O.L. Bridgman, R.F. Jarrett, E.C. Tolman
Strong, Edward K. (1884-1963)
Of Stratton's triumvirate of student assistants, Edward Strong was the only one who never held a faculty position at Berkeley. He actually spent his career at Stanford, but we list him here because of his seminal role in establishing the Psychological Laboratory.
Strong received his bachelor's degree in biology from Cal in 1906, and completed a master's degree in psychology in 1909 before undertaking doctoral studies at Columbia under James McKeen Cattell, concluding with a dissertation in 1911 on the effects of commercial advertising. After working for a time in the advertising industry, he served during World War I on the Army's Committee on Classification of Personal, which used aptitude tests such as the Army Alpha and Beta Tests, forerunners to the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, in personnel selection. After the war, Strong continued his work in personnel selection and industrial psychology at the Division of Applied Psychology at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), with a focus on training life-insurance salesmen. In 1923 he moved to Stanford, where he developed the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (later the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory, now the Strong Interest Inventory), whose innovative method of empirical keying anticipated the method used to develop the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Originally intended to
aid career planning in people making the transition from military to civilian life, Strong's questionnaire remains a popular aid to vocational counseling.
Strong had theoretical as well as applied interests. He believed that s abilities, interests, and achievements combined in complex, reciprocal, dynamic interplay reciprocally to shape career paths. As he put it: "The relationship among abilities, interests, and achievements may be likened to a motorboat with a motor and a rudder. The motor (abilities) determines how fast the boat can go, the rudder (interests) determines which way the boat goes."
---J.F. Kihlstrom*
Swanson, Guy E. (1922-1995) Professor Emeritus
Guy Swanson died of bone marrow cancer on February 28, 1995, following a valiant four-year battle against the disease. Ed, as he was more popularly known, was born in 1922 in Pennsylvania and grew up in the town of Erie. He received the B.A. and M.A. in sociology, both in 1943, at the University of Pittsburgh, and his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1948. His academic career began as an Instructor at Boston and Indiana universities, followed by a distinguished early term of service at the University of Michigan, where he began as an Instructor of Sociology and moved up the ranks to Professor; he served two terms as Department Chair.
In 1969, Ed joined the UCB faculty as a professor of sociology, a position he retained until 1984, when he changed departments to become a professor of psychology. From 1980-1987, he was also the director of the Institute of Human Development, one of the university's oldest and most renowned research units. Although Ed officially retired in 1991 and became emeritus, he continued to teach and be active in faculty affairs until his death. He is survived by his wife, Eliane Aerts Swanson, four daughters, and six grandchildren.
The intellectual framework for Ed's theorizing, research and teaching was provided by the fields of sociology and social psychology. Although social psychology has a strong interdisciplinary focus in the two disciplines, most social psychologists tend to be expert in one and relatively ignorant of the other. He, however, was the unique exception to the rule, in that he was not only the intellectual master of both fields but someone who constantly bridged and integrated them in his scholarly work. The fact that he served as a professor in two different departments at UCB was unusual, and is testimony to his interdisciplinary strengths.
Ed was known for two major bodies of work. In his early years, he was a leading analyst and critic of sociological theory, evaluating the emerging concepts of structural-functionalism and symbolic interactionism; his ideas had a great deal of impact on subsequent developments in the field. Later, at Berkeley, he became known for his investigations of family structure and socialization processes. Integrating theoretical ideas from his earlier writings, he demonstrated how the interplay between structural properties of families and the dynamic interactions among
individual family members help us to understand children's' personality and social development. He was an early contributor to the field of family typology, doing research on child development and the role of fathers and mothers in decision-making. In other research, he related family structure to religious orientation, showing that the way people conceptualize and communicate with God has much to do with the kinds of families in which they were reared. He was also one of the first sociologists to focus on the relationship between family style and occupational role.
During his career, Ed published a stream of articles, chapters, and review essays in leading journals, and eight books, including The Changing American Parent (with Daniel R. Miller) in 1958; The Birth of the Gods, 1960; Social Change, 1971; and Ego Defenses and the Legitimization of Behavior, 1988. He also served as a co-editor in 1993, with four Berkeley colleagues, of Family, Self, and Society: Toward a New Agenda for Family Research; this was a book of original papers emerging from an ongoing Berkeley faculty seminar on the family that he helped to originate in 1988.
Both the breadth and depth of Ed's scholarship were fully appreciated by his students. As they often commented, “Professor Swanson knows everything!” His courses reflected the care and attention he always brought to his teaching; he was meticulous in his coverage of traditional course material while challenging students to discover new ways of thinking about it. He was as committed to teaching undergraduates as he was to training graduate students. He regularly taught the basic undergraduate course in social psychology (which attracted hundreds of students) and developed a new lecture course on personality development and family structure. He also co-taught the core graduate proseminar in social psychology every year. Moreover, he was an important research mentor to graduate students, even after his formal retirement, always willing to provide constructive feedback on their research proposals and to guide them in their future research directions.
Beyond his research, teaching, and administrative duties, Ed always found time to be of service to his academic profession and to the campus. He was a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council from 1962 to 1965. He was especially generous in his service to the Berkeley Academic Senate, as he was a member of 10 different Senate committees, often for multiple years of service. In particular, he was a long-time member of the Graduate Council, as well as its Chair, and he served for many years as a faculty representative to the statewide Assembly.
Ed Swanson was known as a man of strong principles, who was dedicated to seeking the truth. These principles informed all areas of his academic work, and were the hallmark of his relationships with both colleagues and students. He was a unique character in terms of both his personality and his career achievements. His presence will be missed by all of us.
--P.A. Cowan, C. Maslach
Tolman, Edward Chace (1886-1959) Professor Emeritus
Edward Chace Tolman was born in West Newton, Massachusetts, on April 14, 1886. His mother, of Quaker origin, was warm and loving, but puritanical. His father, a member of the first graduating class of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of its trustees, was strong, gentle, and prosperous.
After graduation from Newton High School, Dr. Tolman entered M.I.T., preparatory to entering the family business: a rope manufacturing company. During his senior year, however, he began reading William James, and in the summer of 1911, after his graduation from M.I.T. with a degree in electro-chemistry, he enrolled in two summer school courses at Harvard: a philosophy course from Ralph Barton Perry, and a course in comparative psychology from Robert M. Yerkes. This step was decisive, for that fall he began graduate work in psychology at Harvard. The work with Perry and Yerkes influenced much of his later thought: from Perry he learned the objective-relativist answer to Titchenerian subjectivism; from Yerkes, the functionalist answer to Watsonian behaviorism.
Dr. Tolman spent the summer of 1912 in Germany with Kurt Koffka who introduced him to Gestalt psychology. After receiving a Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1915, Dr. Tolman married Kathleen Drew on August 30th of that year, and in the fall the two of them moved to Evanston, Illinois, where for three years he taught at Northwestern University. In 1918 they came to Berkeley. For forty-one years, at this University, Dr. Edward and Kathleen Tolman led a happy and full life, honored and loved by neighbors, colleagues, and students. Generations of students remember with warmth the friendly Tolman house on LaLoma Avenue.
In 1922, four years after crossing the Rocky Mountains, Dr. Tolman was elected President of the Western Psychological Association. From this time until his death, November 19, 1959, his contributions to the world of science brought distinction to him and to the University. A listing of his honors clearly indicates the eminence of this gentle and kind man of science: elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists; President of the American Psychological Association; member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Co-President of the Fourteenth International Congress of Psychology; appointed Penrose Lecturer of the American Philosophical Society; Visiting Professor of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society; Faculty Research Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley; recipient of the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award presented by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; honorary Doctor of Science from Yale University; honorary Doctor of Science from McGill University; recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award presented by the American Psychological Association.
During his first years at the University, Dr. Tolman established an animal laboratory, and almost immediately there was an extraordinary burst of research publications by graduate students working in the Tolman Laboratory: testimony to his gift for teaching. His favorite teaching was done in a class known widely as “The Tolman Seminar” --a most marvelous seminar in which teacher and student were often indistinguishable. Dr. Tolman's curiosity and open mind enabled him gladly to learn as well as teach.
Perhaps one reason that “The Tolman Seminar” had such a hold on generations of students was that Dr. Tolman was always able to uncover the essential problems underneath the fluctuating experimental fads. Three questions continued to command his interest: (1) the evidence that rats and men learn even when there is no immediate practical advantage for such learning led him to ask how rewards and punishments influence behavior; (2) the evidence that rats and men learn more than is directly evident in their behavior while they are learning led him to ask how we can describe the changes in association that learning produces; and finally (3) the idea, original with Kurt Lewin, that the rat or man can be conceived to be a particle in a “perceptual space” composed of attractive and repellent forces led him to ask how we can describe acts of comparison and choice as the resultants of these competing forces.
Many American experimental psychologists saw no necessity to face these questions. It was generally accepted that Pavlov had proved that associations were stimulus-response connections; that Thorndike had proved that reward stamps in such associations; and that Watson had proved that questions about perception and choice were metaphysical, not experimental questions. But Dr. Tolman, through his theoretical arguments and his experimental data, forced his colleagues to re-examine the accepted answers. Fifty years after this M.I.T. student of electro-chemistry discovered William James, the intellectual climate of American psychology is changed, and no experimental or theoretical psychologist will today deny the intrinsic importance and currency of Dr. Tolman's three questions.
During the long year that stretched from the spring of 1949 to the summer of 1950, “The Year of the Oath,” Dr. Tolman raised one more question that had to be faced: Is the college professor responsible for academic freedom? He answered that question with firmness and dignity by leading an effective fight to keep this University free. Perhaps in no other action did Dr. Tolman so clearly demonstrate his faith in the idea of a university and his loyalty to the University of California. Ten years later, the Regents and the President of the University expressed their appreciation of Dr. Tolman, the scientist, teacher, civil libertarian, and revered colleague, by awarding him an LL.D. degree, honoris causa.
Edward Chace Tolman is survived by his widow, Kathleen Drew Tolman; his two daughters, Mrs. Deborah Tolman Whitney and Mrs. Mary Tolman Kent; and his son Edward James Tolman.
--D. Krech, B.F. Ritchie, R.C. Tryon For a video honoring Tolman's contributions contributions to Psychology and the University,
see "Edward Chace Tolman: A Psychologist with Purpose and a Map".
In 1961, a new building housing the Department of Psychology and the School of Education was named in his honor.
Tolman Hall was declared seismically unsafe and demolished in 2017, but a plaque honoring Tolman remains on the site. See "Farewell to Tolman Hall", a video posted on the Department website.
Treisman, Anne Marie (1935-2018) Professor Emerita
Anne Marie Treisman, née Taylor, was one of the most influential cognitive psychologists in the world. She revolutionized the way we think about cognitive functions and the human brain. She argued that scientists cannot know the brain’s purpose until they understand what it has evolved to do, and the job of cognitive psychology is to figure that out. She provided elegant methods that were creative and resilient in the study of memory and attentional systems that select what we perceive in the world and leads to our coherent (if perhaps illusory) understanding of that world. She became a member of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986.
Anne (as she preferred to be called) was born in Yorkshire, England, on February 27, 1935, shortly before World War II. She spent the war years listening to “doodlebugs” flying over her home on their way to bomb London. She attended Cambridge University, graduating in 1956 with a B.A. degree in modern and medieval languages (to please her father), but was always fascinated by the science of the mind. She immediately went back to university to study psychology and completed another bachelor’s degree the following year which led to a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1962.
While still in graduate school, she performed what have become classic experiments on auditory selection. When two streams of speech are heard at the same time, we can attend to one and ignore the other even while carrying on a conversation (as in a busy restaurant or at a cocktail party), but how much of the ignored speech is actually ignored? Anne used a method called “shadowing” where study participants are asked to repeat a conversation projected to one ear and to ignore the conversation in the other. The trick is to have them repeat the words on the attended channel at the same time they hear them, so that attention is highly focused. It may not be surprising that participants detect their own names on the ignored channel since a person’s name is very salient, but there is far more information that gets in. The changes of language or the gender of the speaker as well as similarity of features of words on the two channels all affect what we hear. Her work led to decades of debate about whether we filter information early or late; as Anne predicted over 40 years ago, it is both. It depends on the task at hand and the complexity of the selected information.
In a review paper in 1969, Anne foresaw how her early work might generalize to other stimulus input, to memory, and to theories of consciousness. For instance, she demonstrated that visual features (e.g., color, motion, orientation) are processed in parallel independent of their location, while objects themselves required focused attention to integrate their features together at a particular location. Feature Integration Theory was the result, and its formulation led to thousands of new studies in a range of disciplines, including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, computational neuroscience, and vision sciences. Anne’s work also caught the attention of philosophers around the world. In her autobiography published in The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography: Volume 7 (Squire, L. R., Ed., 2011, Oxford University Press), she stated, “We have no sense that stimuli are in any way decomposed and recomposed. The implication of the theory was that in some ways we create our experience rather than its being determined directly by a camera-like process. Perception is more like a controlled hallucination than like an automatic registration of stimuli.”
Dr. Treisman was repeatedly acknowledged for her work, the most prominent honor being the National Medal of Science presented to her by President Barack Obama in 2013. It was noted then that “her creativity and insight have often challenged investigators to think outside the box, to reach beyond their own specialties and to address the hard questions of human cognition.” She was also an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of London, all conferred on her while she was a professor of psychology at Berkeley. She left Berkeley and joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1993, where she was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus.
During Anne’s career she also held professorial positions at Oxford University and the University of British Columbia, Canada. Along the way she gave birth to and raised four children, one a special needs child. When asked how she did it all, she would typically reply “badly.” In fact, she excelled at all of it. One daughter is fiction editor for The New Yorker. Another is a prominent neurobiologist at the New York University School of Medicine. Her son is a professor of political science at UC Los Angeles. Her Down’s child remains in England where his father, Michel Treisman, lives. Anne was married twice, most recently to Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and best-selling author. After retirement from Berkeley, she and Kahneman moved East to take positions at Princeton University.
Anne Treisman was driven by the best kind of scientific curiosity. In an interview after receiving the National Medal of Science, she said, “for me what has always been fun is the excitement of the new ideas, so let your imagination go and shake it out if you can. Think of ways of bringing it down to earth so that you can actually test it.” It was the message she gave to her students, and they followed her advice joyfully. She was the complete academic and a loved mentor and colleague.
She died on February 9, 2018, in New York, New York.
--L. Robertson
Tryon, Robert Choate (1901-1967) Professor
Robert Choate Tryon was born in Butte, Montana on September 4, 1901. He died in Berkeley, California, on September 27, 1967. He is survived by his wife, Frieda; two sons, James and David; and a daughter, Joan.
Tryon lived out his life at the University of California, spending half a century on his beloved Berkeley campus, first as an undergraduate, receiving his A.B. degree in 1924; then as a graduate student, earning his Ph.D. in 1928; then as a National Research Council fellow for two years; finally, as a faculty member of the Department of Psychology for 36 years commencing in 1931.
This was his chosen home, and except for the wartime period when he served in Washington as deputy chief of the planning staff of the Office of Strategic Services he remained always in sight of the Campanile and the Berkeley hills. He was a pioneer who ranged over a wide world of the intellect--always at home.
Tryon's contributions to science began in graduate school. With Edward Tolman and Lloyd Jeffress he developed what was perhaps the first rationally designed automatic recording apparatus designed for the laboratory study of behavior in animal populations. His doctoral dissertation in 1928 on “Individual Differences at Successive Stages of Learning” represented a landmark in the study of animal behavior. He succeeded in measuring individual differences in the behavior of animals with an unprecedented degree of reliability. It was this thesis and his follow-up journal articles which made the coupling of objective behavioral observation with sophisticated measurement theory and statistics the peculiar attribute of the new breed of psychologists. The measurement and study of individual differences, their determinants and consequences, continued to be his abiding research concern throughout his career.
The large body of Tryon's creative research can conveniently be divided into three quite different principal areas. The first area of work--one in which he quite literally pioneered--was behavior genetics. His classic study begun in the late twenties on a selective breeding program for maze learning capacity in rats was the very first successful study of its kind and established the field of experimental behavior genetics. In his research, which spanned two decades, he developed two strains of maze-bright and maze-dull rats, which are among the basic strains used today in behavior genetics and physiological psychology throughout the world. At the time of his work, the nature-nurture issue was being heatedly contested in psychology, and with the ascendancy of behaviorism the exclusively environmental interpretation of the determinants of behavior became near dogma. Tryon's study, elegant and precise, constituted the principal contrary evidence, and almost alone, preserved hereditary concepts from complete obliteration within the psychology of learning. From Tryon's laboratory came the first students trained in behavior genetics; the work of Searle, Hall, Krech, and Hirsch had its origin in the seminal study and teaching of Tryon. Had he done nothing else, Tryon's place in the history of science would have been secured by this.
The second main area of his interests and work was in the theory and methods for the measurement of individual differences. He developed new objective operations for the analysis and interpretation of individual differences through the sampling of rationally defined domains of behavior. In particular, he made noteworthy contributions to the psychometrics of behavior- domain validity, to the estimation of generality (“communality”) of variables, and to factorial methods for multidimensional analysis.
His theory of cluster analysis, and the particular set of cluster analysis methods which he derived from it, have played an influential role in the work not only of psychologists, but of all who would measure multidetermined events. He developed the BC TRY system for computer analysis, which is a general-purpose and powerful tool for multidimensional analysis. The use of this computer system has been abundant in a widespread set of disciplines, including geology, political science, business administration, sociology, public health, psychiatry, and, of course, psychology. In this system Tryon has bequeathed the multivariate scientist much greater computational power than any of his predecessors possessed. He will have influenced and aided
the research of many, many people, and each time BC TRY is run it will serve as a memorial to him.
The third principal field of work in which Tryon played a decisive role was that of human behavior ecology. He was guided by a major assumption that people in urban regions are grouped together in “social areas” on the basis of their behavioral characteristics, and that these social area groupings can be studied and measured objectively. He developed the requisite methods and carried out extensive studies which identified three main social dimensions defining the behavior ecology of metropolitan man. His original analyses, based on 1940 census data in the neighborhoods of the San Francisco Bay Area, were closely confirmed in a new analysis based on the 1950 census data. His study revealed that the three dimensions and the social areas they defined remained relatively invariant over more than a decade during which a socially disruptive great war occurred.
That these relatively constant areal groupings of people are to some extent differentiated biologically Tryon showed in special studies of assortative mating systems in the social areas; persons in very contrasting social niches are reproductively isolated from each other. In further ecological work Tryon developed a systematic taxonomy of “environmental stressor situations,” useful in studying the incidence and characteristics of psychiatric disorders related to the social neighborhoods he had identified.
It is not possible here to detail the many significant contributions which Tryon made to the University and to the Department. But his tenure as Chairman of the Department may serve to illustrate something of his character. He evolved an effective new committee system for governance of the Department, in which the role and power of the chairman were reduced--no lust for power here. And later when the system he had initiated needed change, he supported the change--no pride of self here.
Tryon's influence upon his students and colleagues reflected his qualities as a person. One of his students and long-time colleagues, Egerton Ballachey, on the occasion of a memorial meeting dedicated to Tryon, had this to say: “He was a plain and modest man, unselfconscious, no pretense, no pomposity. He taught, by precept and example, honesty of scientific purpose. He fostered respect for candor and openness. He was a disciplined specialist, but not imprisoned within his specialty. His interests and enthusiasms ranged over the entire field of psychology.
This catholicity of mind attracted to him persons of diverse interests--both within and without psychology. He gave generously to all.
“Tryon was a tolerant man. His acceptance of the human condition was almost that of the naturalist. He was rarely censorious of human frailty. His friends knew him as gentle, affectionate and playful. His humor was tender and self-mocking. He hugely enjoyed good talk, good food, good beer, and bad poker. To a remarkable degree, he lived and worked and judged himself by his own standards. He was his own man.”
Another student and colleague, Bhuwan Joshi, commented at Tryon's funeral service: “Tryon was a perfect personification of the playful spirit of man. He never made any distinction between work and play. He was always at play, and his work was always play. He was a territorial
animal. He loved his territory: his family, his home, the University of California, the Department of Psychology, the Bay Area whose social structure and mating-patterns he studied, the Berkeley hills whose trees and birds he knew, and the State of California.
“Despite his deep territorial roots and loyalties, he was truly a universal man. He was fascinated by the drama of human evolution. He could see only one family of Man. And he recognized no other distinctions.”
--D. Krech, R.S. Crutchfield, E.E. Ghiselli
Tuddenham, Read D. (1915-2009) Professor Emeritus
Read D. Tuddenham, Professor of Psychology Emeritus, passed away in 2009 at the age of 93. Tuddenham was hired as a faculty member in 1946 and retired in 1983. He received an A.B. in Psychology from the University of Utah in 1935 and a Ph.D. in Psychology from UCB in 1941.
From 1944 to 1945 as Personnel Director, Personnel Research Section, Adjutant General’s Office, War Department, Tuddenham initiated some of the earliest research on the effects of combat stress on disabled World War II veterans. The findings from a 15-year follow-up study laid the foundation for much of our current understanding and treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Professor Tuddenham was best known for his career-long interest in the nature and nurturing of human intelligence and its measurement, with a particular focus on the theory of cognitive growth developed by Jean Piaget. Piaget’s method of assessment employed clinically-oriented, individual interviews with children designed to establish behavioral markers reflecting various stages of mental growth and the transitions from one stage to another. He was among the first to appreciate the rich developmental themes being tapped by Piaget’s theories and, especially, their educational implications for student readiness to learn-themes not typically assessed by traditional IQ tests. Tuddenham argued for the standardization (or ‘psychometricization’) of Piaget’s clinical approach to assessment through the establishment of developmental norms based on sampling large numbers of children, and creating objective scoring rationale. Over a period of years, Tuddenham and his graduate students successfully pioneered the development of prototype examples of this ‘psychometricizing’ process.
Tuddenham also was well known for his long-standing research program designed to study conformity and yielding behavior as a consequence of group pressure in both children and adults. One of his most significant contributions in this area concerned the willingness of many subjects to conform even if they believed the norms on which they were making their decision to conform were avowedly distorted, a finding that underscores the powerful, pervasive influence of group pressure.
Professor Read Tuddenham was an esteemed colleague of great intellectual breath and productivity, an inspired teacher both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and a steadfast friend to both staff and faculty colleagues alike, giving generously of his time, energy, and wise counsel. He is survived by a daughter, Helen, and a son, William.
--M. Covington
Wickens, Thomas Dow (1942-2012) Professor Emeritus
Thomas Dow Wickens died December 16, 2012, in San Francisco, California, of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. He was born June 30, 1942, in Madison, WI, the son of Delos D. and Carol Dow Hedberg Wickens. It seems fitting that he first saw light in a university town (where his father taught briefly), since his life was largely to be spent in the embrace of the academy. After a brief period at the University of Wisconsin, Wick (as Tom’s father was widely known) contributed to the war effort as an experimental psychologist, and then settled in Columbus, Ohio, where he was to spend the remainder of his career on the faculty of Ohio State University. Tom and his younger brother, Christopher, grew up nurtured by two psychologist parents and the greater university community.
Tom’s mother, Carol, trained in and practiced clinical psychology, but she later became a de facto experimental psychologist, as well. She often worked with Wick in the laboratory and was a frequent co-author of his papers. With such an early immersion in academic psychology, it is hardly a surprise that both Tom and Chris became eminent professors of psychology, though neither intended to do so early in their careers. When Tom completed high school at the University School of Ohio State, he headed for Harvard, intending to specialize in mathematics. His undergraduate degree was indeed in mathematics (A.B., cum laude, 1964), but he switched to psychology for his graduate training. He enrolled in Brown University, a leading center of experimental psychology. By the time he earned his Ph.D. in 1968, Tom was a fully-fledged mathematical psychologist.
Mathematical psychologists work to understand and model complex behavior using the tools of mathematics. A successful model allows not only the explanation of data collected, but also quantitative prediction of the results to be expected from future experiments. Mathematical psychologists also often work to design new approaches and algorithms to be used in analyzing complex data sets. These tools can then be applied to many areas within the larger field of psychology. Tom’s research touched on many topics, but he had particular interests in learning and memory and in the application of the theory of signal detectability to sensory processes. A brief perusal of his curriculum vitae, however, shows that his colleagues who worked in other fields often brought their problems to Tom, asking him to collaborate on one project or another. His publications thus span an exceptionally broad range of topics.
Following the completion of graduate training, Tom spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow with Richard Atkinson, then on the faculty of Stanford University. The next year (1969), Tom was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He spent the next 33 years at UCLA, progressing up the academic ladder, teaching generations of students at every level, making many individual and collaborative contributions to the literature in his field, and generally enjoying life. His colleagues appreciated not only his professional skills, but also his administrative ones. For many years, he served as Vice Chair of the UCLA Psychology Department.
During his early years at UCLA, Tom reconnected with Lucia (Cia) Bogatay, a friend and classmate from elementary and high school. Cia’s father and Tom’s were fellow professors at Ohio State, and their families were friends. Tom and Lucia married, still separated by half the length of California. While Tom was building his career at UCLA, Cia was establishing her architectural practice in San Francisco. For the next several years, the two of them commuted between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Both Tom and Cia developed a deep interest in and love of opera during this period. They became strong supporters of the Long Beach Opera Company and good friends of its director and his wife, Michael and Ellen Milenski, whom they later joined on several summer opera tours in Europe. A few years later, Tom and Cia began leading architectural tours focused on the villas of Palladio. While Cia provided the architectural expertise, Tom talked about the mathematical underpinnings of the work and historical ideas about the special character of certain mathematical relationships.
The difficulties produced by Tom and Lucia’s geographical separation were solved when the Psychology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, wanting to hire a faculty member in Tom’s area, offered him the position. I was Chair of the Berkeley Psychology Department at this time. When we began discussing what he would need to be offered to come to Berkeley, Tom’s comment was, “This will be the easiest negotiation you’ve ever carried out.” It was indeed, and he became a member of the UCB faculty in 2002. Within a couple of years of arriving on campus, he became a member of the Senate Committee on Computing, serving for 5 full years (2004-2009). He spent a year on the Task Force on UC Merced in 2008-09.
Tom’s reputation as the colleague one could readily approach for help with difficult questions of experimental design or data analysis, irrespective of the subject of the research, was greatly appreciated by the Berkeley Psychology community. His willingness to entertain graduate student questions also became widely known. One former graduate student recalls asking Tom whether the analytic method she had used on a particular data set was appropriate. He agreed with her choice but also asked whether he could have a copy of the original data. She learned a few days later that Tom had wondered whether another complex method might be more revealing. However, rather than ask her to learn and carry out another (possibly unneeded) analysis, he did the work himself, afterwards assuring the student that her initial approach was sufficient. Tom’s devotion to his teaching was well known and widely appreciated, both by students and by his colleagues.
Three years before his death on Dec. 16, 2012, Tom was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which gradually destroys motor function. Though his family and legion of friends were devastated, Tom used this dreadful fate as a way to
teach us all how one should approach adversity. Over the period of several months, he lost the ability to walk, to feed himself, to swallow and even to talk, yet his determination to live fully did not falter. When he could no longer go out, he ordered recordings of obscure operas that he and Cia could watch and listen to. He entertained the parade of friends who came to visit when he could no longer go to them. When it became clear that he would have to stop teaching and retire, he scheduled one last advanced graduate seminar on mathematical models in psychology. He spent untold hours preparing handouts and slide presentations to supplement his failing speech. He continued to give until the very end.
Tom Wickens lived life with joy and great enthusiasm. He loved good music, good food, good wine, and good friends. He climbed mountains, hiked trails, swam, and traveled, all with gusto. He enjoyed being a professor, everything from grappling with a new research problem or preparing a lecture to sharing lunch at the Faculty Club with friends. He made great contributions to his field and his University, and he enriched the lives of all of his friends. It was a privilege and a joy to know him. He is survived by his wife of 23 years, Lucia Bogatay and his brother, Christopher.
--K.K. De Valois
Wile, Daniel B. (1938-2020) Assistant Clinical Professor
Daniel B. Wile, Assistant Clinical Professor in the UC Berkeley Clinical Science Program, 2003- 19, died in his Oakland, California home on March 18, after a long struggle with heart failure.
With a B.A. from University of Chicago in 1960, and Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley in 1966, Dan went on to a distinguished career as a therapist, author, and teacher. He made memorable contributions to students in Berkeley’s Clinical Psychology program by co-teaching the primary couples therapy graduate course for three years, and participating for many years in the supervision of graduate students as they learned to do couples therapy.
Dan’s central contribution to the students, to his faculty colleagues, and to the field of couples therapy, was as a theorist, with an original approach to helping both couples and therapists recognize and deal directly with their vulnerabilities. He became known nationally and internationally as the founder and developer of Collaborative Couple Therapy. He developed a signature method he called doubling, talking for each partner in the couple as if he were that person, reframing their attack or withdrawal with words of acknowledgement and vulnerable feelings, always checking in with partners to give them the last word. His theory and practice encouraged clients to have their say about every aspect of their therapy, empowering partners and giving the therapist the benefit of each partner’s input.
Dan’s impact on the field of couples therapy in America stems in large part from three books: Couples therapy: A nontraditional approach (1981); After the fight: using your
disagreements to build a stronger relationship (1993); and After the honeymoon: how conflict can improve your relationship (revised 2008). Dan also described his approach in chapters published in the Clinical handbook of couple therapy (3rd edition, 2002), in numerous articles, and in a blog he maintained for couples therapists over the last few years. Throughout his professional life, Dan was committed to sharing his knowledge and experience. He rarely missed a morning’s writing session, revising each paragraph until it shone with clear and vivid prose.
At the time of his death, Dan had completed an advanced draft of what he saw as his most significant written legacy, “Solving the moment: a collaborative couple therapy manual,” which distilled and integrated the main principles that he evolved over his career as a therapist and teacher. The book helps therapists with specific interventions, offers the thinking behind them, and provides numerous engaging dialogues as examples. “Solving the moment” puts the focus on the therapeutic task of turning the couple’s fight or withdrawal into an intimate conversation, the primary goal of Collaborative Couple Therapy. John Gottman, a leader in the field of couples therapy, has said: “I really learned a lot from Dan’s thinking. He was just an amazing clinician, with unique insights. He went far beyond what I created therapeutically.” In accordance with Dan’s wishes, Dorothy Kaufmann, his wife and colleague, has prepared a final version of “Solving the moment” for publication.
Dan gave training workshops in the U.S. and internationally over several decades, a seminal influence on many generations of clinicians. With Dorothy Kaufmann, he also gave workshops for couples all over the country. They modeled a relationship of equality within the couple.
Mona Fishbane, a nationally known couples’ therapist and author, has written about Dan and his work: “He saw the good and the vulnerable lurking behind the difficult and the self-protective behaviors we use to defend ourselves. In his amazingly gentle and humble way, he would bring out these other voices, like releasing doves into the air.”
In his writings and his teaching, Dan shared his own self-doubts in working with couples who sought out therapy but resisted change. That humility was at the heart of his theory, his practice, and his sensibility. His desire to protect clients from “the weight of my authority” also extended to students and therapists who trained with him. Dan’s collaborative dynamic strengthened their trust and, paradoxically, his authority. He taught them that even experienced therapists have feelings of self-doubt and that those vulnerable feelings can be helpful in the therapist’s task of helping couples. If even Dan, whom they so admired, could feel that way after years of practicing, they were not alone. They, too, were entitled to feelings of confusion and uncertainty. As a person, a partner, a colleague, and a friend, Dan was a mensch, radiating a quality of goodness that could be felt by everyone in his presence. He wore his kindness and calm temperament lightly, with wry humor.
Dan Wile is survived by Dorothy Kaufmann, whom he met in 2007, her son Steven McCall, Dan’s sister and brother-in-law, Eleanor and Stephen Bulova, their children, Peter Bulova and Susan O’Donnell, and his former wife, Joanne Wile.
--C.P. Cowan, P.A. Cowan, D. Kaufmann