![[APA World Wide Web Logo]](apawldt.gif)
1796 — David Kinnebrook made his last observation at Greenwich Observatory. Kinnebrook was later fired for observations disagreeing with those of the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Repercussions of this incident led to Bessel's study of individual reaction times and the founding of the psychological field of individual differences.
1798 — Auguste Comte was born. Comte was a French social philosopher who contended that individual behavior is largely a product of social forces. Comte coined the term sociology to describe the objective study of this process.
1842 — George Trumball Ladd was born. Ladd was an early functionalist. His Elements of Physiological Psychology was the first book in English on the subject. Ladd was a founder of the APA and served as its president in 1893.
1870 — Eduard Hitzig presented the first account of electrical stimulation of the human brain in a report to the Medical Society of Berlin. Hitzig induced eye movements through brain stimulation. Nonhuman subjects were further studied by Hitzig, Gustav Fritsch, and David Ferrier. American physician Roberts Bartholow conducted further studies of human participants, first reported in 1874.
1929 — Congress founded the first federal drug treatment hospitals (then called "narcotics farms"), the U.S. Public Health Service Hospitals in Lexington, Kentucky, and Fort Worth, Texas. The Lexington hospital, opened in May 1935, was probably the world's first facility of its kind, and it created the influential Addiction Research Center in 1948. The Fort Worth hospital opened in November 1938.
1938 — The Journal of Parapsychology was first published by Duke University.
1952 — The first human test of the antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine, now marketed as Thorazine, was conducted on a manic patient at the Val de Grace military hospital in Paris by Joseph Hamon, with Jean Paraire and Jean Velluz. Chlorpromazine was first developed as an antihistamine, was later used to prevent surgical shock, and was finally widely adopted as an antipsychotic drug.
1965 — The APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was first published, with Daniel Katz as its editor. This journal assumed publication of the social psychology portion of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, which began publication in 1921, itself a successor to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, first published by Morton Prince in 1906.
1973 — David Rosenhan's article "On Being Sane in Insane Places" was published in Science. Rosenhan and seven others gained admission to mental hospitals by imitating schizophrenic behavior. Once admitted, they resumed normal behavior but found that the staff members could not detect their normalcy. The article is often cited in introductory psychology texts.
1974 — The APA Council of Representatives established a legal advocacy organization, the Association of American Psychologists, later named the Association for the Advancement of Psychology (AAP). The council had earlier declined endorsement of an existing advocacy group, the Council for the Advancement of the Psychological Professions and Sciences.
1983 — The APA Division 16 journal, Professional School Psychology, was authorized by the division's executive council. The journal began publication in 1986 and changed its title to the School Psychology Quarterly in 1990.
Choose Another Day
How to Cite This Page in APA Style