January 17 in Psychology

APA Historical Database: Selected Entries

On January 17:

1866 — English physician William Wythe Gull interviewed the first of several female patients brought to him in conditions of self-induced emaciation. The patient was "5 st. 12 lbs. Height, 5 ft. 5 in." (82 lb or 37 kg, 165 cm). After seeing other similar patients, Gull presented the first thorough paper on anorexia nervosa, or apepsia hysterica, to the British Medical Association on October 24, 1872.

1880 — Max Freidrich collected the first publishable data in Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory. G. Stanley Hall was one of the participants in Freidrich's study.

1909 — Writing to Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud predicted that once Americans "discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great." On January 19, 1909, Jung replied, "I have noticed this prudishness, which used to be worse than it is now; now I can stomach it; I don't water down the sexuality any more."

1949 — Quinn McNemar's Psychological Statistics was published. The book served as a standard text for many years.

1966 — Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn's book The Social Psychology of Organizations was published. By 1980, this book had been cited in over 960 other publications and was chosen as a "citation classic" by the journal Current Contents.

1968 — Allan Paivio and Stephen Madigan's article "Imagery and Association Value in Paired-Associate Learning" was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

1969 — The National Medal of Science was presented to B. F. Skinner by President Lyndon Johnson. The date of the announcement of the award was January 2, 1969.

1973 — The journal Memory & Cognition, edited by George E. Briggs, was first published by the Psychonomic Society.

1985 — The APA and the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology were found by a federal court in Virginia to be not guilty of antitrust law violations in a suit brought by four psychologists.

Copyright © 1995, American Psychological Association. Web version by permission. Source: Street, W. R. (1994). A Chronology of Noteworthy Events in American Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. The American Psychological Association and Central Washington University have supported the development of the APA Historical Database.

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