APA Historical Database: Selected Entries

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On April 30:

1777 — Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss was born. Gauss formulated the theory of the normal curve and established its ubiquity in measurements of natural phenomena. He is also responsible for the least squares method of curve fitting.

1857 — (Paul) Eugen Bleuler was born. Bleuler introduced Freudian thought to psychiatry and coined the word schizophrenia in 1908. Carl Jung, Karl Abraham, A. A. Brill, and Ernest Jones all received their psychiatric training from Bleuler.

1873 — Harvey A. Carr was born. Carr is best known as the standard-bearer of American functionalism in the 1920s. Psychology was to be the study of the functions that connected psychological antecedents to their consequences. Carr's experimental work focused on comparative psychology, learning, and visual space perception. APA President, 1926.

1886 — Graduation ceremonies were held for students of the first American training course for mental institution attendants. The course was conducted at Buffalo State Hospital, New York.

1888 — Maud Merrill James was born. As Maud Merrill, she was the coauthor, with Lewis Terman, of the 1937 revision of the Stanford-Binet test, an 11-year project. The test had two forms, initialed L and M after the first names of the collaborators. She was a child clinical psychologist, juvenile court consultant, and expert on delinquency.

1888 — John Dashiell was born. Dashiell began the psychology laboratories at the University of North Carolina and Wake Forest University. His own work was on perception, fatigue and efficiency, and learning. APA President, 1938; American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal, 1960.

1898 — Morton Prince discovered a second personality of "Sally Beauchamp."

1904 — The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, commonly called the St. Louis World's Fair, opened in St. Louis, Missouri. The fair featured an exhibit of psychological instruments assembled by Hugo Mόnsterberg, lending credence to the common nickname, "brass instrument psychology." In September 1904, the fair sponsored five days of addresses by psychologists during the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences.

1917 — John W. Thibaut was born. Thibaut was a specialist in conflict resolution, procedural justice, fairness, and, with H. H. Kelley, author of a comprehensive social exchange theory of interpersonal relations called interdependence theory. He founded the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 1965. APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, 1983.

1917 — George Ellery Hale, astronomer and chairman of the National Research Council (NRC), named APA President Robert Yerkes to be chairman of the NRC Psychology Committee. The committee, charged with coordinating psychology's response to World War I, held its first meeting at Columbia University on May 18, 1917, and its second meeting on June 28, 1917.

1920 — A 3-day conference on relations between psychology and psychiatry began. The conference was sponsored by the National Research Council, and little progress was made toward establishing mutually respectful relations between the two professions.

1924 — Raymond Dodge became the ninth psychologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

1953 — Janet Taylor's article "A Personality Scale of Manifest Anxiety" was published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

1953 — The APA Education and Training Board approved the first evaluations of doctoral programs in counseling psychology. Seventeen programs were selected for this first list of APA-approved programs.

1965 — The American Association for Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care held its organizational meeting in Des Plaines, Illinois. The member organizations of the association, including the APA, promote humane animal care in research laboratories through accreditation of laboratories conforming to its standards.

1969 — The first West Virginia University Conference on Life-Span Developmental Psychology was held in Morgantown, West Virginia. Don C. Charles was the first of 19 speakers addressing the research and theory theme of the conference.

1979 — In Addington v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a person may not be civilly committed to a mental institution unless the state presents "clear and convincing" evidence they require hospitalization. This standard of evidence is greater than the "preponderance of evidence" rule for civil cases but not as strong as the "beyond reasonable doubt" rule for criminal cases.

1984 — Edward N. Pugh won the first National Academy of Sciences Leonard Troland Award. The award is given annually to a psychologist who advances research on the relation between the physical world and conscious experience. Pugh's award cited his work on the eye's mechanisms of color adaptation, receptor transduction, and sensitivity control.

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