By Charles L. Brewer, Furman University
B.C.
431-404—Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta end with Sparta’s victory.
387—Plato, who believed in innate ideas, suggests that the brain is the seat of mental processes.
367—Plato establishes the Academy.
350—Aristotle writes The Anima and On Memory and Reminiscence.
335—Aristotle establishes the Lyceum.
335—Aristotle, who denied the existence of innate ideas, suggests that the heart is the seat of mental processes.
A.D.
1066—William, Duke of Normandy, conquers England.
1211—Genghis Kahn invades China.
1264—Thomas Aquinas publishes Summa Theologica.
1447—Johann Gutenberg invents movable type for the printing press.
1462—Copernicus refutes geocentric theory of the universe.
1492—Christopher Columbus reaches the New World.
1504—Leonardo da Vinci creates a wax model of human ventricles.
1517—Martin Luther posts his 95 theses, starting the Protestant Reformation.
1543—Belgian physiologist Vesalius dissects cadavers.
1604—Johannes Kepler describes inverted image on the retina.
1605—Francis Bacon publishes The Proficiency and Advancement of Learning.
1607—Captain John Smith establishes the first permanent English settlement in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia.
1616—English physiologist William Harvey proposes an explanation for blood circulation.
1632—Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World.
1636—Harvard College is founded.
1637—René Descartes, French philosopher and mathematician who proposed mind-body interaction and the doctrine of innate ideas, publishes A Discourse on Method.
1651—Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan.
1690—John Locke, British philosopher who rejected Descartes’ notion of innate ideas and insisted that the mind at birth is a “blank slate” (tabula rasa), publishes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that stresses empiricism over speculation.
1709—George Berkeley publishes An Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision.
1710—George Berkeley publishes A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in which he maintains that perception is the only basis of knowledge, a position later called mentalism.
1739—David Hume publishes A Treatise of Human Nature in which he prefers experience and observations over metaphysical speculation and proposes two laws of association (similarity and contiguity).
1748—David Hume publishes An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
1749—David Hartley publishes Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations that includes the law of repetition.
1762—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Swiss philosopher and writer, publishes Émile, a treatise on education in which he stresses subjective spontaneity over routinized instruction.
1769—James Watt invents the steam engine in Scotland, initiating the Industrial Revolution.
1774—Franz Mesmer, Austrian physician, performs his first supposed cure using “animal magnetism” (later called Mesmerism and hypnosis).
1774—The first U. S. state mental hospital opens in Williamsburg, Virginia.
1776—The American colonies declare independence from England.
1777—Franz Mesmer is expelled from the practice of medicine in Vienna.
1782—Immanuel Kant, German philosopher, publishes Critique of Pure Reason in which he opposes extreme empiricism.
1789—The French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille.
1791—Luigi Galvani, Italian researcher studying muscles of frogs, suggests that neural activity is electrical in nature.
1793—Philippe Pinel releases the first mental patients from their chains at the Bicêtre asylum and advocates more humane treatment of such patients.
1802—Thomas Young publishes A Theory of Color Vision (his theory was later called the trichromatic theory).
1807—Robert Fulton invents practical steam engine.
1808—Franz Joseph Gall, a German physician, describes phrenology, the belief that conformation of a person’s skull reveals mental faculties and character traits
1810—Pierre LaPlace presents the central limits theorem, the cornerstone of modern inferential statistics, to the French Academy of Sciences.
1810-1819—Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Caspar Spurzheim publish work on phrenology.
1815—Napoleon is defeated at Waterloo.
1817—Thomas Gallaudet establishes the first school for deaf persons in the United States in Hartford, Connecticut.
1824—Pierre Flourens, professor of natural history in France, describes extirpation techniques for studying brain function and related behavior.
1824—The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) is founded in London.
1826—Johannes Müller proposes a theory called the “specific energies of nerves.”
1829—James Mill publishes Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind in which he insists that the mind is best studied by analyzing its basic elements.
1830-42—Auguste Comte publishes several volumes outlining positivism that embraces empiricism and rejects speculation.
1833-1840—Johannes Müller publishes Handbook of Human Physiology.
1834—Ernst Heinrich Weber publishes The Sense of Touch in which he discusses the just noticeable difference (jnd) and the law-like way we perceive stimuli (now called Weber’s Law).
1836—Charles Darwin returns to England after a 5-year voyage on the Beagle.
1837—Samuel Morse invents the magnetic telegraph.
1839—Edouard Séguin establishes the first school for the “feeble-minded” in Paris.
1843—John Stuart Mill publishes A System of Logic.
1846—Pierre Flourens publishes research, using extirpation techniques, that discredits phrenology.
1848—Phineus Gage suffers massive brain damage when a large iron rod accidentally pierces his brain leaving his intellect and memory intact but altering his personality.
1848—The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is founded.
1848—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish Communist Manifesto.
1850—Gustav Theodor Fechner has insight concerning the quantitative relationship between a physical stimulus and a mental sensation.
1851—Hermann von Helmholtz invents the ophthalmoscope.
1853—Japan opens trade to the West after Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Tokyo Bay.
1854—Hermann von Helmholtz publishes research on the speed of neural impulses.
1855—Herbert Spencer publishes The Principles of Psychology in which he emphasizes the importance of evolution.
1855—Alexander Bain publishes The Emotions and the Will.
1855—First U.S. federal mental hospital opens in Washington, DC (beginning in 1916, called St. Elizabeth’s Hospital).
1856-66—Hermann von Helmholtz publishes three-volume Handbook of Physiological Optics.
1859—Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,synthesizing much previous work on the theory of evolution, including that of Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase survival of the fittest.
1859—John Stuart Mill, James Mill’s son who disagreed with this father’s mechanistic position and advocated “mental chemistry,” publishes On Liberty, a benchmark for modern liberal political thought.
1860—Gustav Theodore Fechner publishes Elements of Psychophysics in which he demonstrates systematic relations between mental (mind) and physical (body) events.
1861-65—Civil War in the United States
1861—Paul Broca, a French physician, discovers an area in the left frontal lobe of the brain that is critical for the production of spoken language (now called Broca’s area).
1861—Louis Pasteur advocates germ theory.
1863—Hermann von Helmholtz publishes Sensations of Tone.
1863—I. M. Sechenov publishes Reflexes of the Brain.
1865—U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D. C., and Vice President Andrew Johnson becomes President.
1866—Henry Bergh establishes the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
1868—The Meiji restoration in Japan empowered oligarchy intent on Westernizing the country.
1869—Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, publishes Hereditary Genius in which he claims that intelligence is inherited.
1869—The Suez canal is opened.
1870—Gustav Theodore Fritsch and Julius Eduard Hitzig, German physicians and physiologists, use electrical stimulation to discover a motor area of the dog and support localization of function in the brain.
1871—Charles Darwin publishes Descent of Man.
1872—Charles Darwin publishes The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
1872—Physician George Huntington publishes a description of the degenerative disorder that is now called Huntington’s disease or Huntington’s chorea.
1873-74—Wilhelm Wundt publishes Principles of Physiological Psychology.
1874—Franz Brentano publishes Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in which he opposes many of Wilhelm Wundt’s views.
1874—Carl Wernicke, German neurologist and psychiatrist, shows that damage to a specific area in the left temporal lobe disrupts the ability to comprehend or produce spoken or written language (now called Wernicke’s area).
1876—Alexander Bain starts Mind, the first philosophical psychology journal.
1876—Francis Galton uses the expression “nature and nurture” to correspond with “heredity and environment.”
1876—Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.
1877—Charles S. Pierce is the first psychologist elected to the National Academy of Science.
1878—G. Stanley Hall receives from Harvard University the first Ph.D. degree in psychology awarded in the United States.
1879—Wilhelm Wundt establishes at the University of Leipzig, Germany, the first psychology laboratory, which becomes a Mecca for students from all over the world.
1879—Thomas Edison invents the incandescent lamp.
1882—William Preyer, German physiologist, publishes Die Selle des Kindes (later translated into English as The Mind of the Child), which was the first book devoted specifically to child psychology.
1882—George John Romanes, English biologist, publishes Animal Intelligence, whichrelies on anecdotal evidence but presents the possibility of more rigorous methods for studying animal behavior.
1883—G. Stanley Hall, student of Wilhelm Wundt, establishes the first formal U.S. psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
1883—Carl Stumpf, who feuded with Wilhelm Wundt, publishes first volume of Psychology of Tone, a pioneering work in the psychology of music.
1883—Emil Kraepelin, German psychiatrist, coins the terms neurosis and psychosis.
1884—Francis Galton establishes the Anthropometric Laboratory in which he records numerous measurements from thousands of people.
1884—William James publishes journal article titled “What is an Emotion?” in Mind.
1885—Hermann Ebbinghaus publishes On Memory, summarizing his extensive research on learning and memory, including the “forgetting curve.”
1885—Sigmund Freud studies with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris.
1886—Vladimir Bekhterev establishes the first psychology laboratory in Russia at the University of Kazan.
1886—Ernst Mach publishes The Analysis of Sensations, which foreshadows aspects of Gestalt psychology.
1886—John Dewey publishes Psychology, the first U. S. textbook on the subject.
1887—James Mark Baldwin publishes Elementary Psychology and Education.
1887—G. Stanley Hall begins American Journal of Psychology, the first psychology journal in the United States.
1887—George Trumbull Ladd, Yale University philosophy professor, publishes Elements of Physiological Psychology, the first book in English on the subject.
1888—James McKeen Cattell establishes the psychology laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.
1889—Franz Müller-Lyer introduces what is now called the Müller-Lyer illusion.
1889—Harry Kirke Wolfe establishes an experimental psychology laboratory at the University of Nebraska; several of his students later become outstanding psychologists, including three who were president of the American Psychological Association.
1889—The first psychology laboratory in France is established at the Sorbonne, and the first International Congress of Psychology meets in Paris.
1890—William James, Harvard University philosopher and psychologist, publishes The Principles of Psychology, describing psychology as “the science of mental life”
1890—James McKeen Cattell, Columbia University, publishes Mental Tests and Measurements, coins the term mental tests, and later administers numerous such tests to his students.
1890—Christian von Ehrenfels, an Austrian philosopher, publishes the article, “On Gestalt Qualities” that laid the groundwork for Gestalt psychology.
1891—James Mark Baldwin establishes the first psychology laboratory in the British Commonwealth at the University of Toronto.
1891—Mary Whiton Calkins establishes the psychology laboratory at Wellesley College.
1892—G. Stanley Hall spearheads the founding of the American Psychological Association and becomes its first president. (The first annual budget is $63.)
1892—William James entices Hugo Münsterburg from Germany to become director of Harvard University’s psychology laboratory. Munsterburg later makes important contributions to several aspects of applied psychology.
1892—The Sierra Club is founded.
1893—Mary Whiton Calkins and Christine Ladd-Franklin are the first women elected to membership in the American Psychological Association at its second annual meeting held at Columbia College.
1893—Oswald Külpe publishes Outline of Psychology.
1894-1895—Japan wins Sino-Japanese War, putting Formosa and Korea in its power bloc.
1894—Margaret Floy Washburn is the first woman to receive a Ph.D. degree in psychology (Cornell University).
1894—James McKeen Cattell and James Mark Baldwin, Johns Hopkins University, establish the journal, Psychological Review.
1894—Conway Lloyd Morgan, in An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, proposes the principle of parsimony. (“Morgan’s canon” directs psychologists to prefer the simplest adequate explanation of behavior.)
1894—Mary Whiton Calkins is refused admission to doctoral candidacy by Harvard University because of her gender, despite Hugo Münsterberg’s claim that she was the best student he ever had at Harvard.
1895—Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer publish Studies on Hysteria that many consider the formal inception of psychoanalysis.
1895—Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen, German physicist, invents the X-ray.
1895—Guglielmo Marconi invents the radio.
1896—John Dewey publishes “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which helps to formalize the school of psychology called functionalism.
1896—Maria Montessori is the first woman to receive the M.D. degree from an Italian university.
1896—Lightner Witmer, University of Pennsylvania, opens the first psychological clinic.
1897—Ivan Petrovich Pavlov publishes research on the physiology of digestion.
1898—Edward L. Thorndike, Columbia University, publishes an article titled “Animal Intelligence” in which he describes his learning experiments with cats in “puzzle boxes.”
1899—William James publishes Talks to Teachers.
1900—Willard S. Small, Clark University, introduces the rat maze that becomes widely used in psychological research
1900—Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams, his major theoretical work on psychoanalysis.
1901—Sigmund Freud publishes The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
1901—Willard S. Small publishes an article in the American Journal of Psychology, which is the first article to report a study of maze learning in the rat and to use the term psychobiology.
1901-1905—Edward B. Titchener, Cornell University, publishes the four-volume Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice.
1901—The British Psychological Society is founded.
1902—Michigan beats Stanford (49-0) in the first Rose Bowl football game.
1903—Helen Bradford Thompson Wooley publishes The Mental Traits of Sex.
1903—Walter Dill Scott, a pioneer in applied psychology at Northwestern University, publishes The Theory and Practice of Advertising.
1903—Orville and Wilbur Wright complete the first successful flight in a mechanically propelled airplane.
1904—The Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology is founded, and James Mark Baldwin is elected its first president.
1904—James Mark Baldwin and Howard C. Warren edit and publish the first issue of Psychological Bulletin.
1904—G. Stanley Hall publishes Adolescence, his most influential book.
1904—Ivan Petrovich Pavlov receives the Nobel Prize.
1904—James Rowland Angell, University of Chicago, publishes Psychology, in which he champions functionalism.
1904—Max Wertheimer receives a Ph.D. degree with Oswald Külpe at the University of Würzburg. Wertheimer later became one of the founders of Gestalt psychology.
1905—Mary Whiton Calkins is the first woman to be president of the American Psychological Association.
1905—Ivan Petrovich Pavlov begins publishing studies of conditioning in animals.
1905—Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon publish the first intelligence test while studying abilities and academic progress of school children in Paris.
1905—Edward L. Thorndike, Columbia University, publishes The Elements of Psychology in which he proposes the “law of effect.”
1905—E. B. Twitmyer publishes article on conditioning of the knee-jerk response in humans, an early example of what is now called classical or Pavlovian conditioning.
1906—Charles Sherrington publishes The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, which describes the synapse and lays the foundation for modern neurophysiology.
1906—Morton Prince establishes the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
1906—Harvard University formally opens Emerson Hall, the first academic building in the United States planned as a psychology facility. (It also houses the departments of philosophy and sociology.)
1907—Alfred Adler publishes A Study of Organic Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation.
1907—James Rowland Angell publishes an article titled “The Province of Functional Psychology.”
1907—Clifford Beers publishes A Mind That Found Itself: An Autobiography, which becomes the clarion call for the mental hygiene movement.
1907—Vladimir Bekhterev publishes Objective Psychology, in which he rejects mentalistic terms and concepts.
1907—Lightner Witmer establishes a journal, The Psychological Clinic, and coins the term clinical psychology in the first issue.
1908—Henry Ford introduces the Model T automobile.
1908—The American Psychological Association appoints its first Committee on Methods of Teaching Psychology.
1908—William McDougall publishes Introduction to Social Psychology.
1908—Margaret Floy Washburn, the first women to receive a Ph.D. degree in psychology from an American university, publishes a comparative psychology book, The Animal Mind.
1908—Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist, coins the word schizophrenia.
1909—Sigmund Freud introduces psychoanalysis to the United States during lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
1909—The U.S. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded.
1910—Emil Kraepelin, German psychiatrist, names “Alzheimer’s disease” to honor Alois Alzheimer, who first described the syndrome of degeneration in aging adults.
1910—Max Wertheimer conducts research on “apparent motion” and calls this visual illusion the phi phenomenon.
1911—Walter Pillsbury publishes Essentials of Psychology, in which he describes psychology as the “science of behavior.”
1912—Carl Jung, who championed analytical psychology, publishes The Psychology of the Unconscious.
1913—John B. Watson outlines the tenets of behaviorism in a Psychological Review article titled “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.”
1914—Henry H. Dale isolates the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.
1914—John B. Watson publishes Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology.
1914—Assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand precipitates World War I.
1914—The Panama Canal is opened.
1914—During World War I, Robert Yerkes and his staff develop a group intelligence test for evaluating U.S. military personnel that increases the U.S. public’s acceptance of psychological testing.
1915—Walter Van Dyke Bingham establishes the first university department of applied psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
1915—Walter B. Cannon publishes a book on the physiology of emotions, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage.
1915—The Journal of Experimental Psychology is established with John B. Watson as its first editor.
1915—Lillian Moller Gilbreth receives the first Ph.D. degree in industrial/organizational psychology (Brown University).
1916—Lewis Terman publishes The Measurement of Intelligence.
1917—Revision and extension of Binet and Simon’s original intelligence scale is published and is commonly called the Stanford-Binet Test of Intelligence.
1917—Wolfgang Köhler publishes The Mentality of Apes in which he describes insight (“ah-ha”) behavior in chimpanzees.
1917—In a violent coup, the Bolsheviks abolish the monarchy and take power in Russia.
1918—Jacques Loeb, German physiologist and zoologist teaching at the University of Chicago, publishes Forced Movements, Tropisms, and Animal Conduct, which influences the development of comparative psychology.
1918—Robert S. Woodworth publishes Dynamic Psychology, which emphasizes motivation by putting the O in S-O-R (stimulus, organismic, response).
1919—John B. Watson publishes Psychology From the Standpoint of a Behaviorist.
1919—League of Nations Covenant is created at the Paris Peace Conference that produces the Treaty of Versailles, which redraws the map of Europe after World War I, but the U. S. Senate refuses to ratify the document in 1920.
1920—Phyllis Blanchard publishes The Adolescent Girl.
1920—Leta Stetter Hollingworth publishes The Psychology of Subnormal Children, an early classic.
1920—Henri Piéron establishes the Institute of Psychology at the University of Paris.
1920—Francis Cecil Sumner receives a Ph.D. degree in psychology from Clark University, becoming the first African-American to earn a psychology doctorate
1920—John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner report conditioning a fear reaction in a child called “Little Albert.”
1920—American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is founded.
1920—League of Women Voters is founded.
1921—Leta Stetter Hollingworth is cited in American Men of Science for her research on the psychology of women.
1921—Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, introduces the Rorschach inkblot test.
1921—John Augustus Larsen and Leonard Keeler develop the polygraph, which is sometimes called a “lie detector.”
1921—The Communist Party is founded.
1923—Jean Piaget publishes The Language and Thought of the Child.
1924—Floyd Allport’s Social Psychology is published; it was the first book to present social psychology as an experimental science.
1924—Mary Cover Jones reports reconditioning a fear reaction in a child (Peter), which is a forerunner of systematic desensitization developed by Joseph Wolpe.
1925—John T. Scopes is arrested for teaching evolution in a Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology class.
1925—Harvey Carr, who had been John B. Watson’s laboratory assistant at the University of Chicago, publishes Psychology, which describes the final form of functionalism.
1927—Percy W. Bridgman publishes The Logic of Modern Physics, in which he proposes operational definitions for scientific concepts.
1927—Anna Freud publishes Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, in which she discusses psychoanalysis in the treatment of children.
1927—Morton Prince establishes the Harvard Psychological Clinic.
1927—Bluma Zeigarnik reports a study indicating that uncompleted tasks are better remembered than completed tasks (now called the Zeigarnik effect).
1927—Babe Ruth, New York Yankees outfielder, hits 60 home runs, a single-season record.
1928—John B. Watson publishes Psychological Care of Infant and Child, in which he presents advice on child-rearing practices.
1928--Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
1929—Edwin G. Boring publishes A History of Experimental Psychology.
1929—The Institute of Human Relations is founded at Yale University to promote interdisciplinary research.
1929—Wolfgang Köhler publishes Gestalt Psychology, which criticizes behaviorism and outlines essential elements of the Gestalt position and approach.
1929—Karl Lashley publishes Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence, in which he describes “equipotentiality” and “mass action.”
1929—Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology in the U.S., is established.
1929—The U.S. stock market crashes to begin the Great Depression.
1930—The journal Child Development is published by the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD).
1931—Margaret Floy Washburn is elected to the National Academy of Sciences,
becoming the first female psychologist and only the second female scientist in any discipline to be so honored.
1931—Edward L. Thorndike publishes Human Learning.
1932—Walter B. Cannon publishes The Wisdom of the Body, in which he coins the term homeostasis, discusses the flight-or-flight response, and identifies hormonal changes associated with stress.
1932—Edward C. Tolman publishes Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, which emphasizes intervening variables and is a precursor of contemporary cognitive psychology.
1932—Frederic Charles Bartlett publishes Remembering, a forerunner of contemporary cognitive psychology.
1932—Edgar Adrian and Charles Sherrington win the Nobel Prize for their research on neuronal physiology.
1933—Edna Heidbreder publishes Seven Psychologies, an influential history book.
1933—Adolph Hitler assumes power in Germany.
1933—Frances Perkins becomes the first women to serve in the U. S. cabinet after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appoints her to be Secretary of Labor.
1933--Inez Beverly Prosser is the first African-American woman to receive a doctoral degree in psychology from a U.S. institution (Ed.D., University of Cincinnati).
1934—Lev Vygotsky publishes Thought and Language, in which he emphasizes social aspects of thinking and language, anticipating certain emphases of later cognitive psychologists.
1935—Edwin R. Guthrie publishes The Psychology of Learning, which emphasizes stimulus-response contiguity and one-trial learning.
1935—Kurt Koffka publishes Principles of Gestalt Psychology, a systematic summary of the Gestalt position and approach.
1935—Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray introduce the Thematic Apperception Test to elicit fantasies from people undergoing psychoanalysis.
1935—The Social Security Act is passed by the U. S. Congress.
1936—Kurt Lewin, pioneer of Gestalt psychology, publishes Principles of Topological Psychology, which applies field theory to understanding behavior in social contexts.
1936—Egas Moniz, Portugese physician, publishes work on the first frontal lobotomy with humans.
1936—Anna Freud publishes The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
1936—African-American Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the Berlin summer Olympics.
1937—Gordon Allport, who emphasized motivation, publishes Personality: A Psychological Interpretation.
1937—John Dollard publishes Caste and Class in a Southern Town.
1937—Psychologist Heinrich Klüver and neurosurgeon Paul Bucy report research on bilateral temporal lobectomies.
1938—Henry Murray, whose approach was called personology, publishes Explorations in Personality.
1938—B. F. Skinner publishes The Behavior of Organisms, which describes operant conditioning of animals.
1938—Robert S. Woodworth, Columbia University, publishes Experimental Psychology, in which he espouses “dynamic psychology” and stresses stimulus, organismic, and response (S-O-R) variables that affect behavior and emotions.
1938—Louis L. Thurstone publishes Primary Mental Abilities in which he proposes seven such abilities.
1938—Ugo Cerletti and Lucino Bini use electroshock treatment with a human patient.
1939—David Wechsler publishes the Wechsler-Bellevue intelligence test, forerunner of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS).
1939—Mamie Phipps Clark receives a master’s degree from Howard University. Research for her thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Preschool Children,” was extended in collaboration with Kenneth B. Clark, and their work was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end racial segregation in public schools.
1939—John Dollard, Leonard W. Doob, Neal E. Miller, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears publish Frustration and Aggression, in which they propose the frustration-aggression hypothesis.
1939—The Canadian Psychological Association is established.
1939-1945—World War II provides many opportunities for psychologists to enhance the popularity and influence of psychology, especially in applied areas
1940—Edward Alexander Bott is a founder and becomes the first president of the Canadian Psychological Association.
1940—Ernest Hilgard and Donald Marquis publish Conditioning and Learning.
1941—Neal Miller and John Dollard publish Social Learning and Imitation, which influences Albert Bandura’s social learning theory.
1941—The journal Educational and Psychological Measurement is first published.
1941—The National Council of Women Psychologists (NCWP) is founded.
1941—Japanese attack U. S. Forces in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, propelling the United States into World War II.
1942—Albert Camus publishes The Stranger.
1942—John A. McGeoch publishes The Psychology of Human Learning.
1943—Jean-Paul Sartre publishes Being and Nothingness.
1943—Psychologist Starke Hathaway and physician J. Charnley McKinley publish the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).
1943—Clark L. Hull, the drive theorist who stressed primary and secondary reinforcement, publishes Principles of Behavior, in which he advocates the hypethetico-deductive approach to research and theory.
1943—Clifford Morgan publishes the textbook titled Physiological Psychology.
1943—Edward K. Strong, Jr. publishes the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB).
1944—Edward L. Thorndike and Irving Lorge publish Teacher’s Word Book of 30,000 Words.
1944—Kurt Lewin becomes Director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1944—Allied troops land in Normandy on D-day.
1945—The first version of the Kuder Preference Record is published.
1945—The United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hastening the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.
1945—Fifty nations sign the United Nations charter in San Francisco.
1945—Karen Horney, who criticized Freud’s theory of female sexual development, publishes Our Inner Conflicts.
1945—Max Wertheimer’s Productive Thinking is published two years after his death.
1946—The first issue of American Psychologist is published.
1946—Leonard Carmichael publishes Manual of Child Psychology.
1946—Benjamin Spock publishes The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care, which influences child rearing in North America for several decades.
1946—U.S. President Harry S. Truman signs the National Mental Health Act.
1947—Arthur H. Riesen publishes a journal article concerning the development of visual perception in humans and chimpanzees.
1947—Leona Tyler publishes The Psychology of Human Differences.
1947—The U.S. Educational Testing Service (ETS) is founded with Henry Chauncey as its first president.
1947—African-American Jackie Robinson joins the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier in major league baseball.
1948—Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues publish Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
1948—B. F. Skinner publishes Walden Two, a novel that describes a Utopian community based on positive reinforcement, which becomes a clarion call for applying psychological principles in everyday living, especially communal living.
1948—Ernest R. Hilgard publishes Theories of Learning, which was required reading for several generations of psychology students.
1948—Kenneth MacCorquodale and Paul Meehl publish the article titled “On a Distinction Between Hypothetical Constructs and Intervening Variables” in Psychological Review.
1948—Robert W. White publishes The Abnormal Personality.
1949—The People’s Republic of China is established, after the defeat of Nationalist forces.
1949—The Colorado Conference on Graduate Education in Clinical Psychology produces the Boulder scientist-practitioner model of clinical training.
1949—Horace Winchell Magoun describes the reticular activating system (RAS).
1949—The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is formally established in the U.S.
1949—Raymond B. Cattell publishes the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF).
1949—Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb publishes The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, in which he outlines a new and influential conceptualization of how the nervous system functions.
1949—The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) is published.
1949—Lee J. Cronbach publishes Essentials of Psychological Testing.
1949—Quinn McNemar publishes Psychological Statistics.
1950-1953—Korean War
1950—Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford publish The Authoritarian Personality, in which they introduce the California F Scale for measuring authoritarianism.
1950—The first Annual Review of Psychology is published with Calvin P. Stone as its editor.
1950—Solomon Asch publishes studies of the effects of conformity on judgments of line length.
1950—John Dollard and Neal E. Miller publish Personality and Psychotherapy.
1950—Erik Erikson publishes Childhood and Society, outlining stages of psychosocial development.
1950—Frieda Fromm-Reichmann publishes Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, in which she explains her neo-Freudian theory and therapy for treating psychotic patients.
1950—James J. Gibson publishes The Perception of the Visual World.
1950—Clifford T. Morgan and Eliot Stellar publish Physiological Psychology.
1950—Norman L. Munn publishes Handbook of Psychological Research on the Rat.
1950—First forms of the U.S. Graduate Record Examination (GRE) are published.
1950—The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is created.
1950—The first U.S. White House Conference on Aging is held.
1951—George Miller publishes Language and Communication.
1951—Carl Rogers publishes Client-Centered Therapy.
1951—S. Smith Stevens publishes Handbook of Experimental Psychology.
1951—The Kuder Preference Record, a popular measure of occupational interest, is published.
1951—The first U.S. national conference on undergraduate instruction in psychology is held at Cornell University.
1952—James Deese publishes Psychology of Learning.
1952—Clark L. Hull publishes A Behavior System, which emphasizes the hypothetico-deductive approach to experimentation and theory.
1953—Eugene Aserinski and Nathaniel Kleitman describe rapid eye movements (REM) that occur during sleep.
1953—B. F. Skinner publishes Science and Human Behavior, which applies his functional analysis to understanding human behavior.
1953—David McClelland, John Atkinson, Russell Clark, and Edgar Lowell publish Th Achievement Motive.
1953—Carl Hovland, Irving Janis, and Harold Kelley publish Communication and Persuasion.
1953—The first Nebraska Symposium on Motivation is held.
1953—James Watson and Francis Crick publish the first accurate model of the DNA molecule.
1953—Janet Taylor publishes her Manifest Anxiety Scale in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
1954—Rudolph Arnheim publishes Art and Visual Perception.
1954—Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter publish When Prophesy Fails.
1954—Robert S. Woodworth and Harold Schlosberg publish a revision of Woodworth’s Experimental Psychology, which becomes a landmark textbook.
1954—Abraham Maslow publishes Motivation and Personality, in which he proposes a hierarchy of motives ranging from physiological needs to self-actualization.
1954—James Olds and Peter Milner, McGill University neuropsychologists, describe the rewarding effects of electrical stimulation of the hypothalamus in rats.
1954—Anne Anastasi publishes Psychological Testing
1954—Gordon Allport publishes The Nature of Prejudice.
1954—The U. S. Food and Drug Administration approves chlorpromazine (Thorazine).
1954—Following nationally televised hearings, the U. S. Senate condemns Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-Communism abuses.
1954—In Brown v. Board of Education, the U. S. Supreme Court rules unanimously that racially-segregated public schools are illegal.
1954—Frank Selvy, NCAA basketball player of the year at Furman University, scores a record-setting 100 points against Newberry College.
1955—Solomon Asch publishes the Scientific American article, “Opinions and Social Pressure,” summarizing his research on conformity.
1955—George A. Kelly publishes The Psychology of Personal Constructs.
1955—The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is published.
1955—Rosa Parks refuses to relinquish her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery Alabama, prompting boycotts and protests that foreshadow the civil rights movement.
1956—Anne Roe publishes The Psychology of Occupations, which is the first thorough treatment of the topic.
1956—George Miller publishes the Psychological Review article titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” in which he coins the term chunk for memory researchers.
1956—Jerome Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow, and George Austin publish A Study of Thinking, an important impetus for contemporary cognitive psychology.
1956—Sidney Siegel publishes Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral
Sciences.
1956—Kenneth W. Spence, University of Iowa, receives the American Psychological Association’s first Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
1956—Soviets quell Hungarian revolution.
1957—Corbett Thigpen and Hervey Cleckley publish Three Faces of Eve.
1957—Calvin Hall and Gardner Lindzey publish Theories of Personality.
1957—B. F. Skinner publishes Verbal Behavior.
1957—Leon Festinger publishes A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
1957—Charles Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum publish The Measurement of Meaning, which describes the semantic differential technique for measuring the meanings of words.
1957—Robert Sears, Eleanor Maccoby, and Harry Levin publish Patterns of Child
Rearing.
1957—Charles Ferster and B. F. Skinner publish Schedules of Reinforcement.
1957—Soviets launch first satellite (“Sputnik”) into orbit.
1958—Donald Broadbent publishes Perception and Communication.
1958—Joseph Wolpe publishes Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, in which he outlines progressive relaxation and systematic desensitization.
1958—The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior is first published by the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, with Charles Ferster as the editor.
1958—Psi Chi, the U.S. national honor society in psychology, becomes affiliated with the American Psychological Association.
1959—Noam Chomsky publishes a critical review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in the journal titled Language.
1959—Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk publish the article, “The Visual Cliff,” in which they report their research on infants’ depth perception.
1959—Harry Harlow publishes an article titled “The Nature of Love,” outlining his work on attachment in monkeys.
1959—Sigmund Koch publishes the first volumes of Psychology: A Study of a Science.
1959—Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson publish the Journal of Experimental Psychology article, “Short-term Retention of Individual Verbal Items,” which highlights the importance of rehearsal in memory.
1959—Stanley Schachter publishes The Psychology of Affiliation.
1959—John Thibaut and Harold Kelley publish The Social Psychology of Groups.
1959—Louis L. Thurstone publishes The Measurement of Values, an influential book on attitude scaling.
1960—Jerome Bruner and George Miller establish the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University.
1960—Daniel Berlyne publishes Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity.
1960—Donald O. Hebb, McGill University in Montreal, Canada, becomes the only president of the American Psychological Association who was not a U. S. citizen.
1960—George Sperling publishes “The Information Available in Brief Visual Presentations.”
1960—John F. Kennedy is elected President of the United States.
1961—Georg von Békésy receives the Nobel Prize for research on the physiology of hearing.
1961—Donald Broadbent publishes Behavior.
1961—Arnold Buss publishes The Psychology of Aggression.
1961—Carl Jung publishes Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
1961—Rensis Likert publishes New Patterns of Management.
1961—David McClelland publishes The Achieving Society.
1961—Alan Shepard, Jr. is the first American on a spaceflight.
1961—An anti-Castro invasion of Cuba (Bay of Pigs), supported by the United States, is crushed.
1961—East Germany erects the Berlin wall to curb the exodus of citizens from East to West.
1961—Roger Maris hits 61 home runs for the New York Yankees to break Babe Ruth’s record of 60 set in 1927.
1961—Keller Breland and Marian Breland publish “The Misbehavior of Organisms” in American Psychologist.
1962—Jerome Kagan and Howard Moss publish Birth to Maturity.
1962—Howard Kendler and Tracy Kendler publish “Vertical and Horizontal Processes in Problem Solving” in Psychological Review
1962—Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer publish findings that support the two-factor theory of emotion (a stimulus produces arousal, and subjective emotion depends on how the stimulus is labeled).
1962—Abraham Maslow publishes Toward a Psychology of Being.
1962—John Paul Scott publishes “Critical Periods in Behavioral Development” in Science.
1962—Endel Tulving publishes “Subjective Organization in Free Recall of ‘Unrelated’ Words” in Psychological Review.
1962—Thomas Kuhn publishes The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
1962—Benjamin Winer publishes Statistical Principles in Experimental Design.
1962—Jackie Robinson is inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
1962—Albert Ellis publishes Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, a milestone in the development of rational-emotive therapy (RET).
1963—Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila Ross publish “Imitation of Film-Mediated Aggressive Models” in which they describe research using the Bobo doll.
1963—Albert Bandura and Richard Walters publish Social Learning and Personality Development.
1963—Donald Campbell and Stanley Julian publish Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research.
1963—Raymond B. Cattell distinguishes between fluid and crystallized intelligence.
1963—Erik Erikson publishes Childhood and Society, in which he outlines stages of psychosocial development from infancy through late adulthood.
1963—John H. Flavell publishes The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget.
1963—William Hays publishes Statistics for Psychologists.
1963—Stanley Milgram publishes “Behavioral Study of Obedience” in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.
1963—U.S. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson becomes President.
1963—Betty Friedan publishes Feminine Mystique.
1964—Charles Cofer and Mortimer Appley publish Motivation, a widely used textbook.
1964—The Psychonomic Society publishes the first issue of its journal, Psychonomic Science, with Clifford T. Morgan as its first editor.
1964—The U. S. Senate passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is intended to desegregate public accommodations and public schools and to eliminates racial discrimination in voting and employment.
1964—Project Head Start is funded by federal legislation.
1964—Fred N. Kerlinger publishes Foundations of Behavioral Research: Educational and Psychological Inquiry.
1965—Roger Brown publishes the classic textbook, Social Psychology.
1965—Fred Keller plans the technique called the personalized system of instruction (PSI).
1965—Canadian researcher Ronald Melzack and British researcher Patrick Wall propose the gate control theory of pain.
1965—Stanley Milgram publishes controversial research on compliance.
1965—John Popplestone and Marion White McPherson orchestrate establishment of The Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron, Ohio.
1965—John Thibaut is the first editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
1965—The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences is established, with Robert I. Watson as its first editor.
1965—Nancy Waugh and Donald Norman publish “Primary Memory” in Psychological Review.
1965—Robert Zajonc’s “Social Facilitation” is published in Science.
1965—The Society of Experimental Social Psychology is founded in Chicago.
1965—Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City.
1966—Nancy Bayley is the first woman to receive the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
1966—Jerome Bruner and colleagues at Harvard University’s Center for Cognitive Studies publish Studies in Cognitive Growth .
1966—William Masters and Virginia Johnson publish results of their research in Human Sexual Responses.
1966—James J. Gibson publishes The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
1966—Frances Graham and Rachel Clifton publish “Heart-Rate Change as a Component of the Orienting Response” in Psychological Bulletin.
1966—Allen Gardner and Beatrix Gardner begin training a chimpanzee (Washoe) in American Sign Language at the University of Nevada, Reno.
1966—John Garcia and Robert Koelling publish study on taste-aversion in rats.
1966—Eleanor Maccoby publishes The Development of Sex Differences.
1966—David M. Green and John A. Swets publish Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics.
1966—Robert Rosenthal publishes Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research.
1966—Julian Rotter publishes research on locus of control.
1966—National Organization of Women (NOW) is founded.
1967—Ulric Neisser publishes Cognitive Psychology, which helps to steer psychology away from behaviorism and toward cognitive processes.
1967—Joy P. Guilford publishes The Nature of Human Intelligence.
1967—Martin Luther King, Jr., presents an invited address (“The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement”) to a large audience at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association.
1967—Robert Rescorla publishes “Pavlovian Conditioning and its Proper Control Procedures” in Psychological Review.
1967—Martin Seligman and Steven Maier publish results of their research with “learned helplessness” in dogs.
1967—Richard F. Thompson publishes a widely used textbook, Foundations of Physiological Psychology.
1967—Green Bay Packers win the first U.S. Super Bowl football game, beating the Kansas City Chiefs (35-10).
1968—The Association of Black Psychologists is established.
1968—Richard Atkinson and Richard Schiffrin publish their influential three-stage model involving sensory memory (SM), short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM).
1968—Roger Kirk publishes the widely used textbook, Experimental Design: Procedures for the Behavioral Sciences.
1968—Walter Mischel publishes Personality and Assessment.
1968—Neal E. Miller publishes an article in Science describing instrumental conditioning of autonomic responses, which stimulates research on biofeedback.
1968—First meeting of the Council of Undergraduate Psychology Departments (CUPD) is held in San Francisco; the organization changed its name to the Council of Teachers of Undergraduate Psychology (CTUP) in 1986.
1968—Cheiron, the International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, is established
1969—Albert Bandura publishes Principles of Behavior Modification.
1969—George Miller publishes his APA presidential address, “Psychology as a Means Promoting Human Welfare,” in which he emphasizes the importance of “giving psychology away.”
1969—Joseph Wolpe publishes The Practice of Behavior Therapy.
1969—The Society for Neuroscience is founded.
1969—Neil Armstrong is the first person to walk on the moon.
1970—James Deese publishes Psycholinguistics.
1970—Robert Bolles publishes “Species-Specific Defense Reactions and Avoidance Learning” in Psychological Review.
1971—Kenneth B. Clark is the first African-American president of the American Psychological Association.
1971—Albert Bandura publishes Social Learning Theory.
1971—The first meeting of the Society for Neuroscience is held in Washington, DC, with Neal Miller serving as president.
1971—Allan Paivio publishes Imagery and Verbal Processes.
1971—B. F. Skinner publishes Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
1972—Elliot Aronson publishes The Social Animal.
1972—Allen Newell and Herbert Simon publish Human Problem Solving.
1972—Godfrey Hounsfield develops the CAT scan and is the first to use it with a human patient.
1972—Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart publish “Levels of Processing: A Framework for Memory Research” in Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior.
1972—Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner publish their associative model of Pavlovian conditioning.
1972—The Asian American Psychological Association is founded.
1973—The American Psychological Association’s Vail, Colorado, Conference was the first to advocate a professional model, rather than a scientist-practitioner model, for graduate training and to endorse the Psy.D. degree.
1973—Division 35 (Psychology of Women) officially becomes part of the American Psychological Association.
1973—Albert Bandura publishes Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis.
1973—Ethologists Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Nikolaas Tinbergen receive the Nobel Prize for their research on animal behavior.
1973—Daniel Kahneman publishes Attention and Effort
1973—In Roe v. Wade, the U. S. Supreme Court rules that a woman has the constitutional right to have an abortion in certain circumstances.
1974—After lengthy hearings on the Watergate scandal, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon resigns and Vice President Gerald Ford becomes President.
1974—The American Psychological Association’s Division 2 (Teaching of Psychology) first publishes its journal, Teaching of Psychology, with Robert S. Daniel as editor.
1974—Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin publish The Psychology of Sex Differences.
1974—Stanley Milgram publishes Obedience to Authority.
1974—The New Jersey School of Applied and Professional Psychology is established at Rutgers University as the first independent, university-related program.
1975—Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving publish the article, “Depth of Processing and the Retention of Words in Episodic Memory” in Journal of Experimental Psychology:General.
1975—Martin Seligman publishes Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death.
1975—Richard F. Thompson publishes Physiological Psychology.
1975—After the Communist takeover of South Vietnam, U. S. citizens are evacuated.
1976—Psychologist Richard C. Atkinson becomes director of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
1976—Ralph Nader presents an invited address, “Bringing Psychology into the Consumer Movement,” at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC.
1976—Ulric Neisser publishes Cognition and Reality.
1976—Gordon F. Derner is the founding president of the National Council of Schools of Professional Psychology.
1976—Sandra Wood Scarr and Richard A. Weinberg publish “IQ Test Performance of Black Children Adopted by White Families” in American Psychologist.
1976--Marvin Dunnette publishes Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
1977—The American Psychological Association publishes “Guidelines for Nonsexist Language in APA Journals” in American Psychologist.
1977—Missouri becomes the 50th state to adopt a law regulating the licensure of psychologists.
1978—The American Psychological Association adopts Guidelines for Specialty Training and Certification of High School Teachers of Psychology.
1978—Psychologist Herbert A. Simon, Carnegie-Mellon University, wins the Nobel Prize for pioneering research on computer simulations of human thinking and problem solving.
1978—Gloria Steinem presents an invited address to the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto.
1978—The first Institute on Teaching Psychology to Undergraduates is held at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
1978—The Society for Behavioral Medicine is founded in Chicago.
1978—The American Psychological Association opens its Office of Ethnic and Cultural Affairs, with Esteban Olmedo as its director.
1978—Lev Vygotsky publishes Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes.
1979—Ayatollah Khomeini leads a revolution that deposes the secular shah of Iran.
1979—A major nuclear reactor accident occurs at Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pennsylvania.
1979—Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, holds a symposium celebrating the centennial of John B. Watson’s birth; participants include B. F. Skinner, Fred S. Keller, and James V. McConnell.
1979—President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating the U. S. Department of Education.
1979—James J. Gibson publishes The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
1979—Elizabeth Loftus publishes Eyewitness Testimony.
1980—Psi Beta, the national honor society in psychology for two-year colleges, admits its first chapter.
1980—The American Psychological Association dedicates its Arthur W. Melton Library.
1980—The American Psychological Association’s first G. Stanley Hall lecture is presented by Walter Mischel in Montreal.
1980—The U. S. ice hockey team wins the Olympic gold medal in a major upset of the USSR.
1981—Ellen Langer is the first woman to be granted tenure in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
1981—David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel receive the Nobel Prize for research on single-cell recordings in the visual cortex that identified feature detector cells.
1981—Roger Sperry receives the Nobel Prize for research on split-brain patients.
1981—The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, reports the first case of AIDS in the United States.
1982—Albert Bandura publishes an article on self-efficacy.
1983—John Anderson publishes The Architecture of Cognition.
1983—Jerry Fodor publishes The Modularity of the Mind.
1983—Sally Ride is the first American woman on a spaceflight.
1984—Lillian Moller Gilbreth is the first psychologist to appear on a U. S. postage stamp.
1984—Jerome Kagan publishes The Nature of the Child.
1984—The American Psychological Association creates Division 44 (The Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian and Gay Issues).
1984—Joseph Palladino organizes the first Mid-America Conference for Teachers of Psychology at Indiana University in Evansville.
1984—Florence Denmark, Carolyn Payton, and Laurie Eyde receive the first American Psychological Association Committee on Women in Psychology Leadership Awards.
1986—Albert Bandura publishes Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, in which he emphasizes the importance of modeling and self- Efficacy.
1986—George Mandler receives the first William James Book Award for Mind and Body.
1986—Robert Sternberg publishes Intelligence Applied, in which he proposes the triarchic theory of intelligence.
1987—Elizabeth Scarborough and Laurel Furumoto publish Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychologists.
1987—Margaret Thatcher becomes the first British Prime Minister in the 20th century to be elected for three consecutive terms
1987—Fluoxetine (Prozac) is introduced as a treatment for depression.
1987—The National Conference on Graduate Education in Psychology is held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and recommends full recognition of the Psy.D. and Ed.D. degrees as well as greater diversity in clinical personnel.
1987—Wilbert J. McKeachie, University of Michigan, receives the first American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Career Contributions to
Education and Training in Psychology.
1988—The American Psychological Society is founded.
1988—First use of a fetal tissue transplant to relieve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease is reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
1988—The American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) is established.
1989—U. S. President George Bush declares the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain.”
1989—The Council of Undergraduate Psychology Programs (CUPP) is founded in New Orleans, Louisiana.
1989—After Marxist economies fail in several European countries, the Berlin Wall comes down, marking the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
1989—Demanding political reform in China, students stage massive demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
1989—For advancing our understanding and treatment of psychopathology, including pivotal contributions to the development of cognitive therapy, psychiatrist Aaron Beck receives the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology.
1990—B. F. Skinner receives the first Citation for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association and presents his last public address, “Can Psychology Be a Science of Mind?” (He dies a few days later at age 86.)
1990—The National Conference on Scientist-Practitioner Education and Training for the Professional Practice of Psychology is held in Gainesville, Florida, to reexamine the model created by the Boulder Conference in 1949.
1990—The Hubble Space Telescope is launched.
1991—The National Conference on Enhancing the Quality of Undergraduate Education in Psychology is held at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and suggestions from participants produce many salutary changes in numerous psychology programs.
1991—Martin Seligman publishes Learned Optimism.
1992—Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools (TOPSS) is established as part of
the American Psychological Association.
1992—About 3,000 U.S secondary school students take the first Advanced Placement Examination in Psychology, hoping to earn exemption from an introductory psychology course at the post-secondary level.
1992—The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is signed into law.
1993—Psychologist Judith Rodin is elected president of the University of Pennsylvania, becoming the first female president of an Ivy League school.
1994—Nelson Mandela, Black nationalist leader, is elected president of Africa after apartheid ends.
1997—A sheep (Dolly) is the first mammal cloned from an adult animal’s cell.
1998—U.S. President Bill Clinton is impeached by the House of Representatives on charges related to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he is acquitted by the Senate in 1999.
1998—Mark McGwire hits 70 home runs for the St. Louis Cardinals to break the single-
season record of 61 set by Roger Maris in 1961.
2000-2009 is declared the “Decade of Behavior” by U. S. President Bill Clinton.
2001—Tiger Woods becomes the youngest player to win all four major golf tournaments, called a grand slam.
2001—Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center in New York City; damage the U.S. Defense Department’s Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia; and cause a commercial airliner to crash in Pennsylvania.
2002—U.S. President George W. Bush declares war on terrorism; the U.S. Congress approves a resolution giving the President authority to wage war without the backing of the United Nations Security Council.
2002—Former President Jimmy Carter receives the Nobel Peace Prize.
2002—New Mexico becomes the first state to allow qualified clinical psychologists to prescribe certain drugs.
2002—The first International Conference on Education in Psychology is held in St. Petersburg, Russia, with Wilbert J. McKeachie and Charles L. Brewer as keynote speakers.
2002—Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, receives the Nobel Prize for research on decision making.
2002—Raymond D. Fowler retires as Chief Executive Officer of the American Psychological Association, after serving in that position for 13 years; Norman B. Anderson is selected to replace him.