| 1796 |
The first executive committee meeting of The Retreat, at York, England, was held. The York Retreat was founded in 1792 by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) at the urging of William Tuke. The first patients were admitted in 1796. Tuke, his son John, Thomas Priestman, Timothy White, and John Fothergill served on the executive committee. The Retreat was one of the first institutions to provide humane treatment for people with mental illness. |
| 1851 |
Patients at the Utica State Asylum in Utica, New York, began publication of the nation's second regular newspaper produced at a mental institution. Its motto was "Devoted to Usefulness." |
| 1879 |
(Alfred) Ernest Jones was born. Jones was an early associate of Sigmund Freud, becoming a part of Freud's inner circle after the defections of Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. He introduced psychoanalysis in England and wrote the standard English-language biography of Freud's life and work. |
| 1889 |
James McKeen Cattell was made professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, becoming the first professor with that specific title in an American university. |
| 1894 |
Jean Walker Macfarlane was born. Macfarlane directed the longitudinal Berkeley Guidance Study, begun in 1928. Major themes in her work were the variety of paths of normal development, complex interactions among factors influencing adjustment, and human resourcefulness. |
| 1900 |
The Western Philosophical Association was founded in Kansas City. Philosophers and experimental psychologists were uncomfortable partners in the early APA, and this new independent philosophical association formalized the split. In 1901 the American Philosophical Association was formed in the eastern United States and merged with the western association in the 1910s. |
| 1905 |
Clifford W. Beers wrote a 15,000 word version of his autobiography in 3 days at the Yale Club in New York City. A second version was written a few weeks later at the Hartford Retreat during a brief voluntary commitment. The third version, which was to become A Mind That Found Itself, the manifesto of the mental hygiene movement, was begun on August 26, 1905. |
| 1914 |
Wolfgang Köhler assumed the directorship of the Anthropoid Research Station on the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The station was financed by the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Köhler was confined to the island for the duration of World War I because the British Navy controlled the seas around Tenerife. He carried out his famous studies of insightful problem solving in chimpanzees during this time. |
| 1925 |
Psychologist John B. Watson was named vice president at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. |
| 1925 |
The APA made its first payment toward purchase of Howard C. Warren's Psychological Review Company. Warren's journals (Psychological Review, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Psychological Index, Psychological Monographs, and Psychological Bulletin) became the first to be published by the APA. The transfer was completed in 1929 by Warren's gift of his remaining 46% share. |
| 1926 |
Jack G. Wiggins was born. Wiggins has conducted research on depression, selective perception, and projective techniques. He helped found the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology and the Council for the Advancement of the Psychological Practices and Sciences and has advocated public funding of psychological services. APA President, 1992. |
| 1927 |
The journal Psychological Abstracts began publishing abstracts of psychological literature, previously published in Psychological Bulletin. |
| 1967 |
Robert A Rescorla published his first of two articles in Psychological Review. In this paper, Rescorla suggested that the nature and extent of conditioning is dependent upon the contingency between the CS and UCS, not their temporal contiguity. |
| 1979 |
The APA Office of Ethnic and Cultural Affairs first opened. Esteban Olmedo, former associate director of the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Spanish-Speaking Mental Health Research Center, was the first director. |
| 1979 |
The APA Monitor announced that the American Psychologist and the APA Monitor would be available in tape-recorded editions, primarily for use by blind persons. |
| 1980 |
The clinical classification system of the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) officially replaced the second edition (DSM-II) system. |
| 1981 |
The first issue of the Journal of Neuroscience was published. Maxwell Cowan served as Editor-in-Chief. The five section editors included Solomon Snyder (molecular neuroscience), Michael Bennett (cellular neuroscience), Gerald Fischbach (developmental neuroscience), Eric Kandel (behavioral neuroscience), and Edward Evarts and R.W. Guillery (neural systems). |
| 1984 |
Donald T. Stuss and D. Frank Benson published "Neuropsychological Studies of the Frontal Lobes" in Psychological Bulletin. The paper provided a comprehensive overview and conceptualization of the prefrontal cortex and frontal lobe processes. |
| 1986 |
The California legislature enacted the nation's first "duty to protect" law, limiting the liability of psychotherapists whose clients harm other people when the therapist may have prior knowledge of the client's intent to harm. The law was a response to the Tarasoff case, in which a psychotherapist was found liable for damages when his client murdered an ex-girlfriend. |
| 1994 |
James R. Flynn published his study of 60 years of IQ test scores in the Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence (edited by Robert J. Sternberg). He found that IQ scores increased from generation to generation in every country with existing data. This increasing trend in scores has become known as the Flynn effect. |
| 1997 |
"Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD" (doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.121.1.65) was published in Psychological Bulletin by Russell A. Barkley. Based on a bibliometric analysis by Zhang, Xiong, Cai, Zheng, and Zhang (2020), this is the fourth most cited paper in neuropsychology. |
| 2006 |
The last update to the NICHD Study on Early Child Care was published. The study began in 1991 and included a diverse sample of 1000 children to explore possible differences between maternal and non-maternal child care. The main findings were that children (1) in higher quality non-maternal child care exhibited slightly better language and cognitive development during the first 4.5 years, (2) with more non-maternal care hours had slightly more behavioral problems, and (3) in child care centers had somewhat better language and cognitive development but more behavior problems than children in other non-material child care settings. |
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Chris Koch said
at 7:51 pm on Mar 21, 2022
22 (2/21/2022)
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