20 January in the History of Psychology

On January 20:

1797 — The Maryland legislature passed the first state act in the United States providing for a state mental hospital. Maryland Hospital opened in 1808 on land now occupied by Johns Hopkins University. It had mixed state, city, and private administration until the state assumed control in 1834. If the 1808 date is used, it is the second oldest state mental hospital in the United States. In 1872, its functions moved to Spring Grove Hospital in Catonsville.

1812 — Edouard O. S�guin was born. S�guin founded the world's first "school for the feeble-minded" in Paris in 1839. He used environmental stimulation and structured exercises to develop the potential of his students and introduced a standard method, the form board, for evaluating progress. He was one of the organizers of the School for Mental Defectives at Randall's Island, New York (1849).

1843 — A British mechanic named Daniel M'Naghton shot Edmund Drummond, private secretary of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, thinking Drummond was Peel. M'Naghton was later acquitted of murder because it was judged that his paranoid mental condition rendered him incapable of judging right from wrong. The M'Naghton rule is a landmark precedent of the modern insanity defense.

1857 — Vladimir M. Bekhterev was born. Bekhterev brought the extensive study of the nervous system to bear on an understanding of conditioned responses, with special emphasis on psychiatric problems. He named his science reflexology. Bekhterev founded the first psychological laboratory in Russia, at the University of Kazan in 1886.

1869 — William Healy was born. Healy was a child psychiatrist whose work with delinquent children led to founding the first American child guidance clinic, the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (1909) in Chicago. With Grace M. Fernald, Healy devised the Healy-Fernald series of performance tests for intelligence. He was one of the founders of the American Association of Clinical Psychologists in 1917.

1873 — Clara Ellen Fowler, the "Sally Beauchamp" of Morton Prince's study of multiple personalities, was born.

1962 — Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis Journal was first published.

1969 — The APA journal Developmental Psychology was first published. Boyd R. McCandless was the journal's editor.

1975 — The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance was first published by the APA. Michael I. Posner was the journal's editor. The journal was one of four created by dividing the content of the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

1975 — The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory was first published by the APA, with Lyle E. Bourne as editor. Its content had previously been part of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The title of the journal was changed to Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition in 1982.

1986 — Angela Browne and David Finkelhor's article "Impact of Child Sexual Abuse: A Review of the Research" was published in Psychological Bulletin. The article was cited often in the late 1980s.

1988 — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Honig v. Doe, that schools may not expel children with emotional disorders for more than 10 days without parental consent or court order. The judgment affected the practices of school psychologists and school counsellors.