APA Historical Database: Selected Entries

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On February 7:

1870 — Alfred Adler was born in Rudolfsheim, Austria. Adler was an early associate of Sigmund Freud, but broke with Freud in 1911 and founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912. His theory of individual psychology stressed the need for superiority. His terms inferiority complex and style of life have become part of everyday language.

1906 — The first university psychiatric teaching hospital in the United States received its first patients. The hospital was the State Psychopathic Hospital at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, begun by a 1901 act of the Michigan legislature. The first patients were 37 patients from the state mental hospitals at Kalamazoo and Pontiac. Albert M. Barrett was the hospital's first faculty member.

1958 — Abram Amsel's article "The Role of Frustrative Nonreward in Noncontinuous Reward Situations" was published in Psychological Bulletin. In 1979, this article was featured as a "citation classic by the journal Current Contents.

1962 — The APA filed its first amicus curiae brief in a legal case, Jenkins v. U.S., heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The original trial judge had ruled that psychologists were not competent to testify about the defendant's sanity. The Court of Appeals on June 7, 1962, found expert testimony by psychologists acceptable and ordered a new trial.

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