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John Dewey

John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. He graduated the University of Vermont with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1879, and received his Ph.D. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. Between undergraduate and graduate school, Dewey worked as a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania for two years and an elementary school teacher in Charlotte, Vermont for one year. Dewey gained a faculty position by way of George Sylvester Morris at the University of Michigan in 1884 (1884-88, 1889-94). While at the University of Michigan, Dewey published the first American textbook in new psychology, Psychology in 1886. The text, connecting idealism and experimental science, was very successful in both America and Europe. In 1894, Dewey began his 10 year career at the University of Chicago where he established a laboratory school, which became the cornerstone for the progressive education movement. He moved to Columbia University in 1904 where he taught philosophy until his retirement in 1930. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association in 1899 and 1905, respectively. Dewey is one of the founders of The New School in New York, New York, along with Charles A. Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblin. Dewey began the Functionalist movement with his article, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” published in the Psychological Review in 1896. In this article, Dewey criticized the reflex arc’s proposed connection between sensory stimuli and motor responses, which stated that stimuli affected behavioral responses in a linear fashion. Instead, he contended that behavioral reflex responses cannot be reduced to basic sensorimotor elements because perception and movement influence each other in a circular manner. Additionally, Dewey is also considered to be one of the major figures in American pragmatism, due to his commitment to scientific method and experimentation.

James Rowland Angell

James Rowland Angell was born on May 8, 1869 in Burlington, Vermont into a highly esteemed academic family. His grandfather, Alexis Caswell, had been president at Brown University, and his father served presidencies at both the University of Vermont and the University of Michigan. Angell earned his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Michigan in 1890, and his Master’s Degree in 1891 under the supervision of John Dewey. He earned a second Master’s Degree in 1892 from Harvard University while working closely with William James. After furthering his education at universities in Halle and Berlin, Germany, Angell returned to the U.S. to a position at the University of Minnesota. After one year, he moved to the University of Chicago to work with John Dewey, which is where he stayed for the next 25 years. While at Chicago, he authored an article entitled “Reaction Time: A study of attention and habit” with Addison W. Moore in 1896. This article laid the foundations for Functionalism through its criticisms on Edward Bradford Titchener’s and James Mark Baldwins’ theories about reaction time and the reflex arc. He went on to earn the presidency at Yale University where he helped establish the Institute of Human Relations, and as well as the fifteenth presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1906. In his APA presidential address, he laid out his three major points about functionalism which are as follows: 1. Functional psychology is interested in mental operations by way of mental activity and its relation to the larger biological forces. Angell believes that functional psychologists must consider the evolution of the mental operations in humans as one particular way to deal with the conditions of our environment. Mental operations by themselves are of little interest. Functional psychology is not conscious elements. 2. Mental processes aid in the cooperation between the needs of the organism and its environment. Mental functions help the organism survive by aiding in the behavioral habits of the organism and unfamiliar situations. 3. Mind and body cannot be separated because functionalism is the study of mental operations and their relationship with behavior. The total relationship of the organism and the environment and the minds function/place in this union is at question. Through these ideas, Angell gave functionalism the focus and recognition to transform the field into an active enterprise.

Harvey Carr

Harvey Carr was born on April 30, 1873 on a farm in Indiana. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1901 and a Master of Science in 1902 from University of Colorado where he studied under Arthur Allin. He then moved to the University of Chicago where he worked with John Dewey and John B. Watson, who introduced Carr to animal psychology. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1905, he taught at a Texas High School, the State Normal School in Michigan, and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In 1908, Carr returned to the University of Chicago to replace Watson as the head of the animal laboratory and later replaced James Rowland Angell as the head of the psychology department. While Carr was chair (1919-1938) at Chicago the psychology department awarded 150 doctoral degrees and he published Psychology: A Study of Mental Activity in 1925. His ideas elaborated on Angell’s Functionalist theories by defining the subject of psychology as mental activity (e.g. memory, perception, feeling, imagination, judgment, and will). He stated that the function of mental activity is to acquire, fixate, retain, organize, and evaluate experiences in order to determine one’s actions and called this form of action “adaptive” or “adjustive” behavior. He served as the president of the American Psychological Association in 1926 and became Professor Emeritus in 1938.

Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley

Helen Bradford Thompson was born in Englewood, Illinois on November 6, 1874. She earned a Bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1897 and 1900, respectively. She was advised by James Rowland Angell and John Dewey, and was among the first generation of women to receive a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. Her doctoral dissertation at Chicago challenged the Darwinian notion that women were biologically inferior to men by exploring the similarities between the sexes within motor abilities, sensory thresholds, intellectual abilities, and personality traits. She found no differences in emotional functioning, insignificant differences in intellect, and slightly superior memory and sensory perception abilities in women. These results were published in The Mental Traits of Sex: An Experimental Investigation of the Normal Mind in Men and Women in 1903. She completed a graduate fellowship in Paris and Berlin, and then became the director of a psychological laboratory at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She took the name Helen Thompson Woolley after marring Paul Gerhardt Woolley, MD in 1905, and together they moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where she began her work in vocational guidance. She became the director of the vocation bureau of the public school system, and helped change the state’s labor laws through her research on the effects of child labor. In 1921, she moved to Merrill-Palmer School in Detroit, Michigan and established a nursery school program to study child development and mental abilities. That same year, she became the president of the National Vocational Guidance Association and the director of the new Institute of Child Welfare Research at Columbia University. Following a serious mental breakdown triggered by series of unfortunate events including divorce, job-related stress, anxiety, and poor health, she permanently resigned from the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1930.

Harry Hollingsworth

Harry Levi Hollingworth was born in 1880 in DeWitt, Nebraska and graduated high school at the early age of 16. Due to several educational delays, Hollingworth did not enroll as a freshman at the University of Nebraska until the age of 23, and afterwards became the principal of a high school. Within months of taking that position he received an offer of assistantship from James McKeen Cattell at Columbia University, with whom he completed his Ph.D. He married Leta Stetter in New York in 1908, and the following year received his doctorate degree from Columbia. Shortly after, he accepted an instructor’s position at Barnard College where he taught psychology and logic, although the slight income forced him to take extra jobs whenever possible. However, his financial concerns were eased when the Coca-Cola Company, facing a lawsuit from the federal government under the Pure Food and Drug Act, asked him to investigate the psychological effects of caffeine on humans. Hollingworth designed three caffeine studies that included blind and double-blind conditions, a methodology that had never been employed in psychological research before. He testified at the Coca-Cola trial stating that he had found no deleterious effects of caffeine on motor or mental performance, and afterwards received a number of requests for further applied worth because of his favorable media coverage. Based on his observations of shell-shocked soldiers in World War I, Hollingworth developed a theory of functional neurosis that was published in one of the first books in clinical psychology, The Psychology of Functional Neurosis, in 1920.He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1927, published roughly one book per year between 1926 and 1935.