Psychologists

Jean Piaget

believed that a child's mind develops through a series of stages, in an upward march from the newborn's simple reflexes to the adults' abstract reasoning power. He also thought that the maturing brain built concepts known as schemas.

Sigmund Freud

"Father of psychoanalysis "Proposed many theories including the Oedipus complex, the influence of childhood on personality, the conscious and unconscious mind, sexuality and the stages, and the importance of dreams; As well as his beliefs in the id, the ego and the superego and their influence on people's behaviors and perspectives.

Erik H. Erikson

A German American psychoanalytic; this Neo-Freudian expanded on Freud's five stages of development. He added three stages and renamed the genital stage to adolescence. Erikson is also accredited for his research and analysis on the ego being more than just a servant of the id. Additionally, he coined the term identity crisis.

Lewis M. Terman

A U.S. psychologist, noted as a pioneer in cognitive psychology in the early 20th century at Stanford University. He is best known as the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

David Wechsler

A psychologist best known for his intelligence tests. The most widely used adult intelligence test is the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) which was developed first in 1939. Then in 1949 he derived an intelligence test for children called The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). His philosophy that intelligence is "the global capacity to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with one's environment"

Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958)

American psychologist and behaviorist well-remembered for his influential contributions to the study of learning and memory. A Study of rats led him to conclude that memories are not localized but widely distributed across the cortex

Stanley Schachter (1922-1997)

American psychologist most noted for his for his proposal of the two-factor theory of emotion. The two factors are physical arousal combined with a cognitive label. This proposal was a combination of both the James-Lange and Canon-Bard theories of emotion.

Jerome S. Bruner: (1915 - ?)

American psychologist who contributed to cognitive psychology, cognitive learning theory, and the general philosophy of education. He suggested two primary modes of thought: the narrative mode and the paradigmatic mode. He also promoted three modes of representation in his research on the development of children - enactive (action-based), iconic (image-based), and symbolic (language-based).

Abraham Maslow

American psychologist. He's known for his conceptualization of the hierarchy of human needs. He's considered the father of humanistic psychology. He was mentored by Alfred Adler. Maslow saw human beings' needs arranged like a ladder. The most basic needs, at the bottom, were physical -- air, water, food, sleep. Then came safety needs -- security, stability -- followed by psychological or social needs -- for belonging, love, and acceptance. Then came esteem needs -- to feel achievement, status, responsibility, and reputation. At the top of it all were the self-actualizing needs -- the need to fulfill oneself, to become all that one is capable of becoming. Maslow felt that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder would inhibit the person from climbing to the next step. Someone dying of thirst quickly forgets their thirst when they have no oxygen, as he pointed out. People who dealt in managing the higher needs were what he called self-actualizing people.

William James

American psychologist/philosopher, spent most of his career as a professor at Harvard. Developed the James-Lange theory of emotion; mind's perception develops from a stimulus. Wrote books on educational psychology, young science in psychology, and pragmatism.

Neal E. Miller (1909-2002)

American psychologists who discovered that the automatic nervous system could be classically conditioned. He discovered using a method called biofeedback, a process in which a person is given specific information about current and specific body functions thus raising patient awareness. Miller set the framework in our understanding of behavior and motivation that later became the basis of neuroscience.

Roger N. Shepard-(January 30, 1929- present)

An American cognitive scientist and is seen as a father of research on spatial relations. He has won the National Medal of Science and Rumelhart Prize for his contributions.

Michael I. Posner-(September 12, 1936-present)

An American editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations and is an eminent researcher in the field of attention. He studied the role of attention in high-level human tasks such as visual search, reading, and number processing. More recently he investigated the development of attentional networks in infants and young children.

S. S. Stevens

An American psychologist who founded Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory and is credited with the introduction of Stevens' power law. Steven's power law is a proposed relationship between the magnitude of a physical stimulus and its perceived intensity or strength. In 1946 he introduced a theory of levels of measurement often used by statisticians.

Lawrence Kohlberg

An American psychologist who served as a professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard. Kohlberg specialized in research on moral education and reasoning and most well known for his theory of stages in moral development. Follower of Piaget's theory of cognitive development.

Ulric Neisser

An American psychologist who was born in Germany and a current faculty member at Cornell University. He promoted the growth of cognitive psychology with his book "Cognitive Psychology" in 1967. However in 1976 he wrote Cognition and Reality with which he began to criticize the methodology of a lot of cognitive psychology. He said it was ecologically invalid.

Martin E.P. Seligman

An American psychologist who wrote self-help books and is a world renowned authority on depression and abnormal psychology. He developed the theory of learned helplessness and is considered the father of positive psychology. He is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in UPENN's department of psychology.

D.E. Broadbent-(May 6, 1926-April 10, 1993)

An English experimental psychologist. His research helped to develop cognitive psychology. He also developed new ideas about implicit learning from consideration of human performance in complex industrial processes

William K. Estes

centered in animal learning and behavior, was marked by the development, with B. F. Skinner, of a still widely used method of measuring emotional reactions (the "CER").

Solomon E. Asch (1907-1996)

Asch was a Jewish psychologist who came from Poland and later became famous in the US in the 1950s for his finding that social pressure can make a person say something that is entirely incorrect. This discovery was made following his social experiments which featured the famous line length test, in which the only task was to choose which of three lines matched the length of a standard line.

Alexander R. Luria

Born in 1902 Luria lived in the Soviet Union. He was a neuropsychologist and developmental psychologist. He was one of the founders of cultural-historical psychology and psychological activity theory. He died in 1977.

Carl G. Jung

Carl Jung was one of the creators of modern depth psychology, which seeks to facilitate a conversation with the unconscious energies which move through each of us. He contributed many ideas which continue to inform contemporary life: complex, archetype, persona, shadow, anima and animus, personality typology, dream interpretation, individuation, and many other ideas. He had a deep appreciation of our creative life and considered spirituality a central part of the human journey. His method of interpretation of symbolic expression not only deepens our understanding of personal material, opening the psychodynamics of our personal biographies and dreams, but the deeper, collective patterns which develop within culture as well.

Edward Thorndike

Edward Lee Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts in 1874. He attended Wesleyan University, where he graduated from in 1895. He then continued his education at Harvard University. In 1897 he left Harvard and began graduate work at Columbia University. Thorndike studied learning in cats, and earned PhD in psychology 1898. Thorndike observed trial and error learning in cats. He placed a cat in a small cage and observed it manipulate the environment to escape. Thorndike called this learning instrumental learning, the individual is instrumental to produce a response.

B. F. Skinner

Father of Behaviorism, known for the "Skinner box"; or the operant chamber. He described operant behavior which is when the learner "operates on" the environment to produce a reward or punishment.

Margret Washburn

First women to get a PhD in psychology, best known for experimental work in animal behavior and motor theory development.

Wolfgang Köhler

German psychologist with Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, founded Gestalt psychology. Theory of mind and brain that says the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different from the sum of its parts.

Harry F. Harlow

Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys between 1957 and 1963. These experiments showed the importance of affection in social and cognitive development.

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989)

He discovered Imprinting which is the primary formation of social bonds in infant animals (Hess, 1973). It is also considered to be a special type learning. Lorenz discovered this phenomenon quite unexpectedly. Observing newly hatched ducklings and goslings, he discovered that they behaved in peculiar ways if they were exposed to abnormal environments during a few critical hours after hatching.From his initial analysis of imprinting, Lorenz went on to identify the essential components of innate behavior and developed the central constructs of releasers and fixed action patterns which serve as the foundation of the study of animal behavior. Throughout his career he argued against the position of extreme behaviorism that rejected the relevance of instinct. Lorenz was instrumental in establishing an understanding that innate behaviors play a central role in the adaptations of organisms and the evolutionary process underlies the development of behavior.

Donald T. Campbell

He had as a major focus throughout his career the study of false knowledge -- the biases and prejudices that poison everything from race relations to academic disciplines where those with vested interests in them perpetuate erroneous theories. Dr. Campbell argued that the sophisticated use of many approaches, each with its own distinct but measurable flaws, was required to design reliable research projects.

Ernest R. Hilgard: (1904-2001)

He is an American psychologist who is well known for his research on hypnosis. He was also involved in developing the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales. Theory that a 'hidden observer' is created in the mind during hypnosis. Furthermore, he is known for his neodissociationist theory, which held that a person undergoing hypnosis can still undergo sensation/feeling without consciously experiencing any suffering.

Joseph Wolpe

He is best known for developing what is now called systematic desensitization. Systematic desensitization involves the imaginary exposure to a feared stimulus while simultaneously applying relaxation. He is considered one of the fathers of behavior therapy.

Wilhelm Wundt

He was a German medical doctor, psychologist, physiologist, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology".[

J.P. Guilford: (1897-1987)

He was a U.S. psychologist mostly remembered for his psychometric study of human intelligence, including the distinction between convergent and divergent production. He also came up with the Structure of Intellect theory, which discusses how an individual's performance on intelligence tests can be traced back to underlying mental abilities or factors of intelligence. Three dimensions of Operations, Content, and Products.

Amos Tversky

He was a cognitive and mathematical psychologist, and a pioneer of cognitive science, a longtime collaborator of Daniel Kahneman, and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. He addressed ambiguity aversion, the idea that people do not like ambiguous gambles or choices with ambiguity, with the comparative ignorance framework.

Roger Brown

He was social psychologist. He was also gay. He concentrated upon studying specific familiar experiences such as that of "flashbulb memories" (for example: What were you doing the moment you heard of JFK's assassination?), and the "tip of the tongue phenomenon."

Walter Gary Cannon

coined the term fight or flight to describe an animal's response to threats. Cannon-Bard theory of emotion with physiologist Philip Bard to try to explain why people feel emotions first and then act upon them. These actions include changes in muscular tension, perspiration, etc.

Herbert A. Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon was an American psychologist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science and sociology. Simon was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, creating with Allen Newell the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (GPS) (1957) programs.

Herman A. Witkin

Herman Witkin in the 1940-1950 showed that several cognitive controls were relatively stable over a class of situations and intentions. He researched and investigated cognitive styles as integrative process in personality development. He had theories of cognitive and learning styles. Witkin preferred to diagnose by projective tests, task-solving test.

George A. Miller

In 1956, Miller (American-born psychologist) suggested that seven (plus or minus two) was the magic number that characterized people's memory performance on random lists of letters, words, numbers, or almost any kind of meaningful familiar item. Working memory is generally considered to have limited capacity. The earliest quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term memory was the "magical number seven" introduced by Miller (1956). He noticed that the memory span of young adults was around seven elements, called chunks, regardless whether the elements were digits, letters, words, or other units.

Irving L. Janis

Irving L. Janis was a research psychologist at Yale University and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley most famous for his theory of "groupthink" which described the systematic errors made by groups when taking collective decisions. He retired in 1986. He also collaborated with Carl Hovland on his studies of attitude change, including the sleeper effect.

Edward E. Jones (1927-1993)

Jones was an American psychologist who is famous for having helped found the attribution theory, which was concerned with the ways in which people explain (or attribute) the behavior of others or themselves (self-attribution) with something else. It explores how individuals "attribute" causes to events and how this cognitive perception affects their usefulness in an organization. He also focused in the field of person perception in order to explore how perceivers and targets interact, leading to his writing of a book about ingratiation (a strategic attempt to get someone to like you in order to obtain compliance with a request).

Julian B. Rotter (1916- present)

Julian Rotter discovered the Social Learning Theory: His Social Learning Theory proposes that behavioral potential (BP), expectancy (E), and reinforcement value (RV) can be combined into a predictive formula for behavior BP=f(C + RV). This short article includes an overview of the theory, a biographical sketch, and comment on contemporary views and criticisms of the theory. He also discovered the Locus of Control when he observed people in therapy and noticed that: Different people, given identical conditions for learning, learn different things, Some people respond predictably to reinforcement, others less so, and some respond unpredictably, Some people see a direct and strong connection between their behavior and the rewards and punishments received

Richard S. Lazarus

Lazarus stressed the study of cognition. His position eventually won out. He conducted experiments on the role of unconscious processes in perception - studies which were years ahead of their time and confirmed in recent studies in affective neuroscience. He also helped keep alive the concept of emotion during a time when it was ignored by psychology. His theory of emotion centered on the concept of appraisal - how an individual evaluates the impact of an event on his or her self or well-being. Lazarus synthesized empirical and theoretical arguments to show how patterns of appraisal enter into the generation of at least 18 emotions. He also showed how appraisal explains the meaning of a person's emotional behavior; how a single response, like a smile, can be in the service of many different emotions; and how totally different responses, like retaliation or passive aggressiveness, can be in the service of the same emotion.

Leonard Berkowitz

Leonard Berkowitz examines the findings of behavioral research about conditions and circumstances that promote anger and aggression. Emphasizing that aggression takes numerous forms and has many causes; Berkowitz distinguishes between instrumental aggression (assaults carried out to benefit the attacker in some way) and emotional (impulsive or expressive) aggression

Eleanor E. Maccoby

Maccoby was born in 1917 an American psychologist who studied social development, especially the impact of parenting on children's psychological growth, gender differences, and the impact of divorce on children. Worked at Stanford University for many years.

Mary D. Ainsworth

Mary Ainsworth in the 1950s worked in assessing the security of infant attachment and linking attachment security to aspects of maternal care giving. Mary created a method called "The Strange Situation". The method is used to examine the child playing while the parent and the person who is unknown to the child enters and exits the room. The method creates familiar and unfamiliar situation for the child. It examines the behavior and attachment of the child. Ainsworth was fascinated with the attachment a child has with its parents.

Walter Mischel

Mischel is an American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. His work began in the early 1960s. Mischel's analyses showed that an individual's behavior is dependent upon situational cues, rather than expressed consistently across diverse situations.

Morton Deutsch (1920- present)

Morton Deutsch, one of the world's most respected scholars of conflict resolution, is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education and founder of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) at the Teachers College at Columbia University. In a research career spanning more than 50 years, he has conducted pioneering studies on cooperation and competition, intergroup relations, conflict resolution, social conformity, and the social psychology of justice.Research Interests: Conflict Resolution, Helping/Pro-Social Behavior, Intergroup Relations, Interpersonal Processes, Political Psychology, Prejudice/Stereotyping.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author. Well known as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. Known for Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power.

Orval Hobart Mowrer

Orval Hobart Mowrer in the 1950s researched on behavior therapy. Mowrer practiced psychotherapy. He founded Integrity Groups such as therapeutic community groups based on honesty, and responsibility. Sessions lasted three hours no body could leave unless the time was up. People in integrity groups were allowed to yell and use profanity to express their feelings. Mowrer stated that people who come to integrity groups "have dirty minds and we just try to clean them up a bit".

Charles E. Osgood (1916-1991)

Osgood was an American psychologist who developed a technique for the measurement of the connotative meaning of concepts known as the semantic differential. Semantic differential was a type of rating scale designed to measure the connotative meaning of objects, events, and concepts. The connotations are used to derive the attitude towards the given object, event, or concept.

Ivan P. Pavlov

Pavlov was a Russian psychologist famous for describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning (conducted research involving salivary conditioning of dogs in the early 1900s). Classical conditioning is a form of associative learning; it includes conditioned stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned response, and unconditioned response.

Albert Bandura

Pioneered research of observational learning. Explained that imitation is learned through reinforcement and punishments and that we are likely to imitate people we perceive as similar to us.

Robert Plomin

Plomin was born in the US in 1948. He studied behavioral genetics, and was involved in the nature vs. nurture debate. Plomin theorized that both genetics and especially children's environment influenced their behavior. Has conducted numerous twin studies and is currently studying all twins born in England from 1994 to 1996, focusing on developmental delays in early childhood and their association with behavioral problems

Leon Festinger

Proposed the cognitive dissonance theory, social comparison theory and social network theory; all relating to people's behavior.

Eleanor J. Gibson

This American psychologist was best known for studying perception in infants with her husband JJ Gibson. Her best known experiment is the visual cliff experiment where she tested infant's depth perception.

G. Stanley Hall

This American psychologist was instrumental in educational psychology and coined the term "Storm and Stress", which had to do with adolescence in learning. He created the American Journal of Psychology and was appointed first president of the American Psychology Association.

Hans J. Eysenck

This German psychologist is most remembered for his work in personality and individual differences. He studied IQ differences in racial groups, He researched the genetics of personality and their effects on mental diseases; Eysenck was one of the first psychologist to medically treat behavior disorders. Finally, he created the 3 factor model using the big five traits.

LL Thurstone: (1887-1955)

USA, He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis. Early opponent of Spearman's "g-factor," have 56 different "cluster" intelligence tests as well as identified 7 separate yet intertwined clusters of primary mental abilities.

David Rumelhart: (1942-)

USA, made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.

Paul E. Meehl

University of Minnesota. Known for the null hypothesis and the evaluation of Scientific Theory. Worked to make psychology more scientific and objective, not SOFT science! President of APA.

John Bowlby

a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and his pioneering work in attachment theory. A psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory that provides a descriptive and explanatory framework for understanding interpersonal relationships between human beings. Attachment theorists consider children to have a need for a secure relationship with adult caregivers, without which normal social and emotional development will not occur.

Kurt Zadek Lewin (September 9, 1890 - February 12, 1947)

a German-born psychologist, is one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology. Lewin suggested that neither nature nor nurture alone can account for individuals' behavior and personalities, but rather that both nature and nurture interact to shape each person.

Gordon H. Bower- (b. 1932)

an American cognitive psychologist at Stanford University studying conditioning, learning, memory, language comprehension, mathematical models, computer simulation of memorial processes, emotion, and behavior modification. He did some of the earliest work investigating the effect of mood states on memory.

Lee J. Cronbach

an American educational psychologist who made significant contributions to psychological testing and measurement. Cronbach is most famous for the development of Cronbach's alpha, a method for determining the reliability of educational and psychological tests. His work on test reliability reached an acme with the creation of generalizability theory, a statistical model for identifying and quantifying the sources of measurement error.

Roger W. Sperry: (1913-1994)

an American neuropsychologist and neurobiologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1981 for his work on split-brain research. He performed his most important work at Caltech, demonstrating that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness in split-brain patients. This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function.

Harold H. Kelley- (1921-2003)

an American social psychologist at UCLA best noted for his contributions of the attribution theory, social exchange theory, and the social psychology of personal relationships. He developed an operational definition of a close interpersonal relationship as "one of strong, frequent and diverse interdependence that lasts over a considerable period of time."

Michael Rutter

early epidemiologic studies (Isle of Wight and Inner London); studies of autism involving a wide range of scientific techniques and disciplines, including DNA study and neuroimaging; links between research and practice; deprivation; influences of families and schools; genetics; reading disorders; biological and social, protective and risk factors; interactions of biological and social factors; stress; longitudinal as well as epidemiologic studies, including childhood and adult experiences and conditions; and continuities and discontinuities in normal and pathological development. Rutter is also recognized as contributing centrally to the establishment of child psychiatry as a medical and biopsychosocial specialty with a solid scientific base.

Edwin G. Boring

established an independent Department of Psychology and separated if from the Department of Philosophy. He emphasized use of the experimental method to investigate psychological questions rather than tools of philosophy.

John Garcia

grew up in America in the early 20th century. He is most known for his research on taste aversion learning (an example of classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning). Garcia's discovery is considered a survival mechanism because it allows an organism to recognize foods that have previously been determined to be poisonous, hopefully allowing said organism to avoid sickness. As a result of Garcia's work, conditioned taste aversion has been called the "Garcia Effect."

Robert Woodworth

introduced the expression Stimulus-Organism-Response to describe his functionalist approach to psychology and to stress its difference from the strictly Stimulus- Response

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky

investigated child development and how this was guided by the role of culture and interpersonal communication. He observed how higher mental functions developed historically within particular cultural groups, as well as individually through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults. Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of her/his culture, including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge through which the child derives meaning and affected a child's construction of her/his knowledge. This key premise of Vygotskian psychology is often referred to as cultural mediation. The specific knowledge gained by children through these interactions

Endel Tulving

is a Canadian neuroscientist, specialty is episodic memory. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. One of his main contributions is his theory of "encoding specificity." The theory emphasizes that memories are retrieved from long-term memory by retrieval cues.

Arthur Jensen (born August 24, 1923)

is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen is known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, which is concerned with how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.

Paul Ekman (born 1934)

is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. The character Cal Lightman of the television series Lie to Me is loosely based on him and his work.

Robert Jeffrey Sternberg (born December 8, 1949)

is an American psychologist and psychometrician and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. Sternberg (2003) categorizes intelligence into three parts, which are central in his theory, the triarchic theory of intelligence: Analytical intelligence, creative or synthetic intelligence, and practical intelligence.

Eliot Aronson

is best known for his Jigsaw Classroom experiments, cognitive dissonance research, and bestselling Social Psychology textbooks. One of Aronson's key areas of interest and research has been the theory of cognitive dissonance. Aronson is credited with refining the theory.

Raymond B. Cattell

is known for identifying dimensions of personality, and his work on cognitive ability. With respect to his work in personality, Cattell identified the sixteen primary traits and designed the Cattell 16PF Questionnaire. With respect to his work on cognitive ability, he conceived the notion of the existence of the fluid and crystallized intelligences. He also designed the Culture Fair Intelligence Test which attempts to reduce the influence of cultural differences in intelligence testing. Cattell was also a proponent of utilizing statistical methods when analyzing intelligence. He was a British and American. He was active in the field of psychology during the 1940s through the 1960s.

John B. Watson

is most known for the "Little Albert" experiment. This involved the conditioning of a young child to be fearful of fluffy, white objects. The experiment raised some questions regarding the ethics of psychological practices. He was a behaviorist. Watson was an American. He was active in the field during the early 20th century.

David C. McClelland

is noted for his study of achievement motivation. To some extent, he assisted in the creation of the Thematic Apperception Test. He was an American and published most of his work between the 1950s and 1970s.

Jerome Kagan: (born 1929)

is one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology. He has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence Kagan rejects "attachment theory", British psychiatrist John Bowlby's notion that the bond between caregiver and infant is crucially influential in later emotional and even intellectual growth. He has also criticized the theory that peer groups matter more than parents in influencing the personality of children. He believes that both sides in the nature/nurture debates were too rigid, and that the development of personality is still not well understood.

Carl R. Rogers (1902-1987)

most well-known for his creation of the humanistic approach to psychology. He believed as people we develop self-concepts or relationships directed with the "me" and "I". He also emphasized a person-to-person relationship between therapist and patient. He believed that most people could solve their own mental problems but that it is the therapist's job to loosen their patient's natural mental defenses and roadblocks. Believed that people, sometimes with a therapist's help, can achieve self-actualization to overcome their problems.

Gordon W. Allport

one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often went too deep, and a behavioral approach, which he thought often did not go deep enough. He emphasized the uniqueness of each individual, and the importance of the present context, as opposed to past history, for understanding the personality.

John Dewey

one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.[1] He is considered one of the three central figures in American pragmatism.

R.B. Zajonc

social psychologist who studied social and cognitive processes. "Mere exposure effect" He focused on processes involved in social behavior, with an emphasis on the relationship between affect, or emotion, and cognition. He was also known for his studies on social facilitation.

Anna Freud

was Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter and was interested in and influenced greatly by his work on child psychology and on psychoanalysis. She created child psychoanalysis and also helped psychologists understand child psychology better. Anna Freud began her children's psychoanalytic practice in Austria in 1923.

Donald Olding Hebb (July 22, 1904 - August 20, 1985)

was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks.

Kenneth Wartenbe Spence (May 6, 1907 - January 12, 1967)

was a prominent American psychologist. His most prominent work was discovering Spence's Theory of Stimulus Control.

Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 - December 20, 1984)

was a social psychologist at Yale University, Harvard University and the City University of New York. While at Harvard, he conducted the small-world experiment which is the source of the six degrees of separation concept. At Yale, he conducted the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority. He also introduced the concept of familiar strangers.

James Gibson: (1904-1979)

was an American psychologist who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology. He is best known for his work in visual perception. He rejected the fashionable behaviorism for a view based on his own experimental work, which pioneered the idea that animals 'sampled' information from the 'ambient' outside world. He also coined the term 'affordance', meaning the interactive possibilities of a particular object or environment.

Edward Chace Tolman (1886 - 1959)

was an American psychologist. He was most famous for his studies on behavioral psychology.

Clark Leonard Hull: (1884 - 1952)

was an influential American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Hull conducted research demonstrating that his theories could predict and control behavior. Hull's formula for determining motivation, was sEr = sHr * D sEr = excitatory potential (likelihood that the organism would produce response r to stimulus s), sHr = habit strength (derived from previous conditioning trials), D = drive strength (determined by, e.g., the hours of deprivation of food, water, etc.)

Allen L. Edwards

was an outstanding teacher, researcher, and writer who is credited with changing the way modern psychological research is conducted by introducing modern statistical techniques into the science. Edwards is also known for developing personality tests, in particular the Edwards Personality Inventory, which was designed to eliminate the test-taker's bias toward socially desirable answers.

Theodore M. Newcomb

was born July 24, 1903 in Rock Creek, Ohio. He was a social psychologist. He attended the Tuffs University and Columbia University and was an assistant professor at Yale University. It was thanks to him that social psychology grew.

Elizabeth F. Loftus

was born in 1944 in Los Angeles. Her mother was a librarian and her father a doctor. Her interests include both mathematics and psychology, which helps to explain her double major at the University of California at Los Angeles. Then she went on to obtain a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1970. Elizabeth Loftus is professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She has written several books with her husband, Geoffrey Loftus. Her interests continue to focus on understanding how human memory is shaped by perception and experience

Robert Rosenthal

was born in Germany in 1933 and graduated from the University of California in 1956 where he currently teaches. He started in clinical psychology but moved onto social psychology. Much of his work has focussed on nonverbal communication, particularly its influence on expectations: for example, in doctor-patient or manager-employee situations. The many awards he has won include the 2003 Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology of the American Psychological Foundation.

Milton Rokeach

was born in Poland but grew up and attended school in the US. In the Rokeach Value Survey (outlined in his influential book The Nature of Human Values (1973)), he posited that a relatively few Terminal Human Values are the internal reference points that all people use to formulate attitudes and opinions, and that by measuring the relative ranking of these values one could predict a wide variety of behavior, including political affiliation and religious belief. This theory led to a series of famous experiments in which changes in values led to measurable changes in opinion for an entire small city in the state of Washington.

Benton J. Underwood

was one of the preeminent leaders in the postwar development of research on the acquisition and retention of verbal materials. Over four decades he did groundbreaking work in associative learning, verbal discrimination, transfer of training, distribution of practice, interference and forgetting, and the composition of memory

Alfred Adler

was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory. Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures as the ideal ethos for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative compensations.