March 15


1879  Henri Wallon was born. Wallon was a French psychopathologist and developmental psychologist. He founded an early children's clinic in 1921. His approach emphasized the effects of the social and physical environment on the individual behavior of children. 
1908  Elsa Siipola was born. Siipola's areas of concentration were personality and projective techniques. She studied the effects of time pressure on perception, coping behavior, word association, and imagination. 
1921  The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency publicly announced hiring behaviorist John B. Watson. Watson's first job was to survey the market for rubber boots along the Mississippi River. His first account was Yuban coffee. Others included Odorono deodorant, Johnson and Johnson baby powder, Pond's cold cream, Camel cigarettes, Maxwell House coffee, and Scott toilet paper. 
1938  Freud's home in Vienna was overrun by Nazis, one day after the German occupation of Austria. The Nazis destroyed Freud's private library and publicly burned all of his books found in the Vienna public library. 
1938  The first report of treatment of a mental patient by electroconvulsive shock was delivered by Italian psychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini. The use of shock was based on Ladislas Meduna's theory that schizophrenia and epilepsy were antagonistic, although Meduna induced convulsions by chemical means in his therapies. 
1950  Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford's The Authoritarian Personality was published. The book introduced the California F Scale, an instrument that made studies of authoritarianism a dominant theme of social psychology in the 1950s. In the years from 1966 to 1984, this book was cited in over 1,800 other publications and was featured as a citation classic in the journal Current Contents
1969  Indiana's psychologist certification law was passed on this date. 
1979 The Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences was first published. The editor was Amado Padilla.