09 October in the History of Psychology

On October 9:

1884 — Helene Deutch was born. Deutch was instrumental in founding the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1925 and was its director for the first 10 years.

1897 — John A. McGeoch was born. McGeoch's research in learning concentrated on phenomena of human learning such as verbal learning, transfer of training, and retroactive inhibition. His book The Psychology of Human Learning (1942) was a comprehensive summary of the field.

1900 — Joseph Zubin was born. Zubin's most significant work was in experimental psychopathology and a theory of schizophrenia that was based on statistical analysis of objective measurements. He shared in the discovery of the P300 event-related brain potential. American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Applications of Psychology, 1990.

1901 — Herman George Canady was born. Canady was an African American social psychologist who was the first to study the race of the examiner as a possible source of bias in IQ testing. He was instrumental in founding the West Virginia Psychological Association, the West Virginia State Board of Psychological Examiners, and the Charleston (West Virginia) Guidance Clinic.

1928 — Philip Teitelbaum was born. Teitelbaum's thorough work has dealt with the role of the hypothalamus in hunger, thirst, learning, and motor coordination. APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, 1978.

1943 — The U.S. Army Air Forces Psychological Film Test Unit was activated at Santa Ana (California) Army Air Base. Lieutenant Colonel James J. Gibson directed this program of developing films for personnel classification testing, aircraft recognition training, and studies of training film effectiveness.

1948 — The Maritime Psychological Association was founded at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. The first president was William Henry Dalton Vernon.

1956 — Harrison Gough's California Psychological Inventory was published.

1959 — Robert W. White's article "Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence" was published in Psychological Review.

1961 — The Montana Psychological Association was incorporated.

1968 — Roger Sperry's article "Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness" was published in the American Psychologist.

1968 — Based partially on evidence linking criminal behavior with the presence of an extra Y chromosome in men, Laurence E. Hannell was acquitted of murder in the fatal stabbing of a 77-year-old woman in Melbourne, Australia. Testimony during Hannell's trial indicated that Hannell was an XYY male. The court ruled that he had been legally insane at the time of the murder.

1974 — The first Interamerican Congress of Clinical Psychology began in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

1981 — David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won Nobel prizes for their work in visual development. They performed pioneering single-cell recordings of the visual cortex, demonstrating the presence of simple, complex, and hypercomplex feature detector cells.

1981 — Roger Sperry was awarded the Nobel prize for his split brain research that demonstrated the functional independence and differentiation of abilities of the two cerebral hemispheres.

1986 — The founding meeting of the Virginia Academy of Applied, Consulting, and Administrative Psychology was held at the Marriott Hotel in Richmond. Virginia Psychological Association president Norma Murdock-Kitt presided over the meeting until the election of William L. Dunn as the academy's first president. The organization is now named the Virginia Applied Psychology Academy.

1987 — A federal judge upheld the copyright to the MMPI held by the University of Minnesota and National Computer Systems (NCS). They had brought suit against Applied Innovations, Inc., which marketed a computer scoring system that competed with NCS's.