| 1845 | Reform activist Dorothea Dix presented a memorial to the New Jersey legislature, describing the state's treatment of people with mental illness. The state had no public mental hospitals and patients were housed in county jails, private homes and the basements of public buildings. The New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton resulted in Dix's determined efforts. |
| 1875 | Katherine Cook Briggs was born. Brigg's interpretation of Jungian personality theory formed the basis of the Myer's-Briggs Type Indicator, constructed by her daughter, Isabel Myers. |
| 1904 | Harold Schlosberg was born. Schlosberg developed a theory of emotion that arranged emotions on bipolar scales of pleasant-unpleasant and attention-rejection. With R. S. Woodworth, he wrote Experimental Psychology (1954), a landmark text. |
| 1920 | Paul E. Meehl was born. His interests were in clinical psychology, especially clinical assessment, and in personality, learning, psychometrics, and the philosophy of science. APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, 1958; APA President, 1962. |
| 1923 | Wilbert E. Fordyce was born. Fordyce has implemented revolutionary treatments for pain-related suffering that are based on applied principles of operant conditioning. Suffering is viewed as a behavior that can be reduced by common principles of behavior. Pain clinics around the world employ Fordyce's techniques. APA Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions, 1986. |
| 1939 | J. Douglas Carroll was born. Carroll is known for his discovery and representation of structures underlying matrices of psychological data. He developed the individual-differences scaling model, which is used for the analysis of similarity data and has influenced perceptual and cognitive psychology. APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, 1989. |
| 1961 | George Homan's book Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms was published. |
| 1964 | Milton Rokeach's book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti was published. The book presents classic case studies of abnormal personality. |
| 1972 | Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's book Human Problem Solving was published. In 1980, this book was featured as a citation classic by the journal Current Contents. |
| 1980 | "A Feature-Integration Theory of Attention", by Anne Treisman and Gary Gelade, was published in Cognitive Psychology (12(1), pp. 97-136). Cited over 13,000 times, this paper became the foundation of feature integration theory which "was one of the most influential theories of visual information processing in the last quarter of the 20th century (Quinlan, 2003)." |
| 1992 | In its ruling on Abrahamson v. Gonzalez, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Florida's law prohibiting unlicensed practitioners form calling themselves psychologists was an unconstitutional restriction of free speech. |