23 January in the History of Psychology

On January 23:

1774 — The first public ordinance providing for hospitalization of people with mental illness was enacted in Tuscany, Italy, as part of the reforms instituted by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold I. In 1785, he ordered construction of a new Hospital of St. Bonifacio, where the director, Vincenzo Chiarugi, instituted humane standards of care. The first patients were admitted on March 19, 1788.

1907 — Orval Hobart Mowrer was born. Mowrer was a learning researcher and theorist who extended a unified learning theory into interpretations of the phenomena of psychoanalysis. APA President, 1954.

1917 — APA President Robert Yerkes wrote to President Wilson to offer his services in the event of war. The United States entered World War I on April 6, and by April 22 the APA Council had approved the association's involvement.

1924 — Floyd Allport's Social Psychology was published. This book was the first to present an experimental view of social psychology.

1934 — Ladislas Meduna used first used camphor injections to induce a seizure in a mental hospital patient. Meduna observed that epileptic seizures tended to reduce schizophrenic symptoms in patients and sought to induce seizures for their potential therapeutic effect. After seven treatments, Meduna's first patient was sent home. Meduna's methods led to Cerletti and Bini's later use of electricity as a means of inducing therapeutic seizures.

1948 — Ernest R. Hilgard's book Theories of Learning was first published. A second edition appeared in 1956. Gordon Bower joined Hilgard as second author of two editions (1966, 1975) and as senior author of one (1981) before the book was chosen as a "citation classic" by the journal Current Contents in 1984. By that time, the book had been cited in over 655 other publications.

1962 — Keller Breland and Marian Breland's article "The Misbehavior of Organisms" was published in the American Psychologist.

1964 — The 1964 Conference on the Professional Preparation of Counseling Psychologists, commonly referred to as the Grayston Conference, began at the Grayston Conference Center of Teachers College, Columbia University, in Riverdale, New York. Albert S. Thompson and Donald E. Super chaired the conference. The Grayston Conference provided the first major definition of the field of counseling psychology after the Northwestern Conference of 1951.

1970 — The journal Cognitive Psychology was first published by Academic Press. Walter Reitman was the editor of the journal.

1981 — The APA Council of Representatives approved creation of Division 42 (Psychologists in Independent Practice).