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Lois Barclay Murphy
Lois Barclay Murphy (1902-2003) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to the field of child development. She conducted some of the earliest studies in experimental social psychology, sympathy in young children, personality development in childhood, and childhood coping. She was a progressive educator and researcher with a passion for shifting the focus away from pathologizing children to emphasizing positive aspects of development.

Early Life
Lois Barclay Murphy was born in Lisbon, Iowa on March 23, 1902; she was the eldest of five children. In 1907, her family moved from rural Iowa to urban South Chicago until 1909 and then temporarily moved to Evanston, Illinois, moves that stimulated Barclay Murphy’s interests in neglected children (Young, 2011). Her father, Wade Crawford Barclay, was first a pastor before becoming an international church official and her mother, May (nee Hartley), was a teacher. Both parents valued education highly and expected their children to demonstrate academic engagement and contribute to society. As a child, Barclay Murphy exhibited an interest and skill in taking care of her four younger siblings, an interest in nurturing children that carried forth for the duration of her life (Sommer, 2004). When Barclay Murphy reached the age of 16, her family had already moved around the United States thirteen times (Young, 2011). Barclay Murphy considered herself a pioneer, as noted in her autobiographies, and attributed her self-assurance to her paternal side, as her father was a Methodist minister and pioneer in religious education and his parents were farmers in rural Iowa. She developed fond memories of spending time on her grandparents’ farm while her mother was preoccupied with her siblings, noting that she “learned more from her visits to the farm than she ever did in school” (Murphy, 1978, p. 168). As this farm work made her feel appreciated, adept, and understood by her grandparents, the extensive influence of this rural upbringing and how it shaped her identity is evident in her future scholarship as an advocate for children, studying the positive development of children in their environments. Her strong connection to her family is also reflected in her enduring use of the middle name Barclay on all publications (Johnston, 2012).

Academics
Barclay Murphy attended Vassar College in 1920, the same year American women were granted the right to vote (Johnston, 2012). While at Vassar, Barclay Murphy studied psychology under the president of the American Psychological Association at that time, Margaret Floy Washburn (Scarborough & Furumonto, 1987). Washburn, along with many other Vassar faculty members, contested the implementation of a home economics curriculum and Washburn even refused to move her laboratory to accommodate this potential new curriculum (Johnston, 2012). Barclay Murphy recounted the discouraging comments several faculty at Vassar proclaimed to students. For example, she recalled many faculty stating, “Oh well, you’re so intellectual now, but you’ll forget all these exciting ideas and settle down and get married and this will all be part of the past” (Murphy, 1978, p. 173). Despite these gender stereotypical comments that were common for the time, she recognized her ambition and indeed achieved a commendable and rare work-life balance that incorporated her scholarship, academic instruction, and roles as both a wife and mother. Barclay Murphy graduated in 1923 from Vassar College as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, majoring in economics and minoring in religion and psychology. During her time at Vassar, she was also a member of the debate team and chronicled the punitive environment of a reform school for girls for her senior honors thesis, which contributed to future reform for the institution (Sommer, 2004).

Barclay Murphy’s curiosity about and exploration of many prominent psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, conflicted with Washburn’s minimization of their impact within the field (Johnston, 2012). While discovering these forbidden writers, Barclay Murphy was especially influenced by Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death by F.W.H. Myers. In this book, she found the phrase “subliminal uprush” particularly applicable to her own experiences (Murphy, 1983). This interest in parapsychology prompted her disengagement from Washburn’s instruction and temporarily postponed her academic path in psychology, as she enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City after graduating from Vassar and completed a master’s in theology in 1928, specializing in the religions of India (Sommer, 2004; Young, 2011). However, this academic transition would provide the foundation for her emotional connection with her future husband.

Marriage and Partnership with Gardner Murphy
Lois met a man by the name of Gardner Murphy through a close friend and roommate, Ruth Monroe, a student from France who was enrolled in the History of Modern Psychology course Gardner Murphy instructed at Columbia University from 1924-1925. Lois worked as the assistant to the director at the Psychological Laboratory of the Vocation Bureau of the Board of Education in Cincinnati for a brief period of time before pursuing graduate work at Union Theological Seminary. At this point in time, her career goal was to use collegiate instruction to foster student discussion of religion and she taught in Baltimore the following year after completing her graduate work (Johnston, 2012). Lois and Gardner shared strong interests in education, clinical psychology, and comparative religion and were married in 1926. These interests were deepened further during their visit to Europe in the summer of 1929, particularly the challenges in expanding the psychical research field. In June 1931, Lois and her husband published the first edition of Experimental Social Psychology, where Lois contributed the child research and Gardner integrated the adult literature for their shared interest in social development (Murphy & Murphy, 1931). While Gardner received the Butler Medal at Columbia for this publication the following year, he was inspired by his wife’s keen identification of maladjusted personality due to her background in child and clinical psychology (Murphy, 1967). Lois's forced leave from Sarah Lawrence gave her a significant amount of time to draft the text and in an autobiography she commented, “So I stayed home next year, got pregnant, produced a baby, and wrote a book” (Murphy, 1969, p. 2).

The Murphy’s first child, their son named Alpen, was born in 1930 and they adopted a German baby named Margaret two years later. Shortly thereafter, Lois shifted her teaching and research interests to developmental psychology as her own children encouraged her to pursue study in children’s social development and continuing the study of religion would require participation in distant field work (Johnston, 2012). The Murphys resided in New York until 1935 and after two years in Tuckahoe, they moved to Bronxville in 1937, the same year Lois completed her Ph.D. at Columbia Teachers College and was offered a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence to teach comparative religion (Murphy, 1967). Lois’s dissertation was published as the book Social Behavior and Child Personality (Young, 2011).

The Murphys read aloud to one another from child development books and this shared intellectual passion was also a strong influence on redirecting Lois back to the field of psychology. Gardner believed in a broad, progressive psychological framework that complemented Lois’s interests in adaptive personality development and individual adjustment (Murphy, 1968). Lois was appreciative and attuned to her husband’s extensive support that was very rare for the time when she noted, “[Gardner] was really dedicated to supporting the productivity of a wife. He was, without thinking of himself that way, a pioneer feminist. He was very intense about his feeling” and recalled her husband once stating, “I want my wife (this was before we got married) to use her brain, I don’t want her picking up bits off the carpet” (Murphy, 1988, p. 9).

Liberal Educator
In 1928, when Sarah Lawrence first opened as a two-year women’s college, Lois was one of the young faculty members interested in establishing a more intellectual foundation as opposed to an academic institute that prepared women for their future homemaker roles as wives and mothers. While the president, Marion Coats, took a leave of absence during the college’s opening year due to illness, she urged faculty that they were not allowed to engage students in any type of intellectual conversations throughout this period of time. During this absence, Lois continued to stimulate intellectual discussions among students and was subsequently fired upon Coat’s return, however Coats was fired the following year as a result of her financial incompetence. Constance Warren, the next president of the college, invited Lois to return as an instructor after discovering that students who were captivated by her courses continued to meet for discussions. For the next 22 years, Lois established herself as a prominent faculty member at Sarah Lawrence (Johnston, 2012).

Sympathy in Childhood
Gardner’s humanistic framework was highly influential in Lois’s focus on positive aspects of typical child development. Lois believed that a prominent behaviorist of the time, John B. Watson, neglected to adequately understand children and associated him with other “rigid hardnosed psychologists” who “were not really interested in people and human life” (Murphy, 1983, p. 95). After World War I, many studies examining aggression, conflict, and hostility emerged in the field of psychology. The Murphys were extremely impressed by a book they read aloud to one another by W. Boeck entitled Das Mitleid bei Kindern, which chronicled a 1909 study of compassion in children, both novel and refreshing for the field (Murphy, 1968).

Lois soon conducted her own research project exploring the relatively unknown field of sympathy in young children at the Speyer School of the Teachers College at Columbia, funded by the president of the Josiah May Foundation, Ludwig Kast. Kast was exceptionally intrigued by this innovative area of work, which ended up contributing greatly to Lois’s Ph.D. in psychology that she received from the Teachers College in 1937. Despite Kast’s enthusiasm, the director of the Speyer School initially responded to the research with skepticism, as he believed that children needed to be socialized over time in order to develop sympathy and nursery school children would not have this capacity (Johnston, 2012). In fact, Lois recalls the director exclaiming, “You’re crazy. Everybody knows that you can’t expect three-year-olds to be sympathetic. You won’t get any data. You’ll waste your time” (1980, p. 5). Lois also highlighted her husband’s support by commenting, “Gardner was the major part, supporting with characteristic enthusiasm each new undertaking, regardless of the ridicule I encountered, for instance, in studying sympathy in three-year-olds” (Murphy, 1978, p. 175).

Regardless of initial challenges beginning this research, her work proved fruitful. Lois uniquely utilized eclectic data collection techniques including observational data from the playground and nursery school, data from other investigators’ research using the same child sample, parent interviews and reports, and framed situations using animals and children as sympathy stimuli. Once analyzed, the data compellingly revealed that preschool children indeed exhibited spontaneous sympathetic behavior (Johnston, 2012). She disseminated these findings in several papers and books, emphasizing how children are attuned to the feelings of others early in development, which provides strong support for the time frame when children develop theory of mind (Murphy, 1936, 1937, 1942). She also recognized that these behaviors were largely overlooked as they very rarely occurred relative to more oppositional or aggressive behaviors (Johnston, 2012).

Early Childhood Center
As the large majority of her sympathy research in children used projective testing techniques, Lois co-authored the first article on projective tests with her friend and fellow developmental psychologist, Ruth Horowitz, which summarized the possibilities in using open-ended toy and picture methods to study children’s conscious and unconscious motivations, personality, attitudes, and needs (Horowitz & Murphy, 1938). With funding from a research grant provided by the Macy Foundation, Lois set up a laboratory preschool at Sarah Lawrence to study children’s personality using a new research method with a group of young researchers, including L. Joseph Stone, Eugene Lerner, Evelyn Beyer, who directed the school, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, the consulting pediatrician (Johnston, 2012). At this time, Lois was greatly influenced by Kurt Lewin and Freudian concepts such as the unconscious and conflict that child analysts including Anna Freud and Erik Erikson assessed. Lois also gained further knowledge about projective tests, including the Thematic Apperception Test and the Rorschach, as a result of visits to Henry Murray’s clinic at Harvard. At the newly established experimental preschool, Lois used more open-ended activities, such as Rorschach inkblots, miniature life toys, paints, dough, and cold cream, which enabled children to behave spontaneously and naturally. This free-flowing experimental design, where the children were instructed to play with the materials however they wished, sharply contrasted with common anxiety-provoking structured psychological tests that undermined potential strengths (Johnston, 2012).

This novel developmental approach paved the way for reformed attitudes about children to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, attitudes that emphasized the importance of children’s emotional needs (Mintz, 2004). At the Sarah Lawrence Early Childhood Center, Lois exhibited great respect for the emotional experiences of children and used her new methodological approach to access intense feelings within very young children who could not use language to communicate emotions. Through this new experimental center, Lois aspired to expand the science of child development in the 1930s and 1940s, as she believed the rigid notion of science restricted the growth of child development (Murphy, 1978). Her progressive beliefs were very well-suited for the radical educational environment Sarah Lawrence embodied (Johnston, 2012). While she also strived to advance education at the preschool and college level, she remained relatively inactive in the psychological community and did not think she had the appropriate level of authority within psychological organizations to speak her mind (Murphy, 1980).

Educational Research and Feminism
During the 1930s, Lois contributed significantly to research evaluating education at Sarah Lawrence, which was funded by a grant from the General Education Board (Johnston, 2012). She served as a co-author on two self-study publications (Raushenbush, Murphy, Lerner, Judge, & Grant, 1942; Murphy & Ladd, 1944) and used similar research methodology to collect data that she used at the childhood center, more specifically, detailed case studies. One book examined potential emotional factors that contributed to learning and data showed that students’ needs, interests, and emotional responses were all pertinent to their intellectual development. While Lois did not compare herself to more radical feminists present at Sarah Lawrence, she did emphasize individual growth and aspired to broaden the possibilities for privileged young female students along with her other socially progressive colleagues. In this respect, she can be viewed as a progressive, particularly within the feminist movement. While she devoted much of her time to teaching and research in progressive education as well as her family, she surprisingly never joined the first organized group of American women psychologists known as the National Council of Women Psychologists (Johnston, 2012).

Childhood Coping at the Menninger Foundation
In the mid-1940s, Lois’s research productivity declined as she became increasingly involved in teaching. She felt particularly distraught by the loss of three close colleagues and friends, Henry Ladd, Eugene Lerner, and Anna Hartoch (Murphy, 1969). She was able to further explore her interests in cross-cultural psychology through her sabbatical from 1949 to 1950 and traveled to India with her husband where she helped set up an Institute of Child Development and Mental Health in Ahmadabad. This travel led to a future collaboration on a volume focused on Asian Psychology (Murphy & Murphy, 1968).

Further evidence of Gardner’s continual support for his wife’s endeavors is apparent when he was offered the position of director of research in the early 1950s at the Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and made clear that he would only consider taking the position if his wife would also be offered a meaningful job. Conceding his request, Lois was allowed to set up a research program of her choice and the previous director of research even offered Lois the opportunity to use her longitudinal data collected on infants. At the Menninger Foundation, Lois decided to expand on her prior studies of positive social development by investigating coping, a term that did not appear in the Psychological Abstracts Index during this time. Despite initial skepticism from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) when she submitted her first grant proposal, her persistence and confidence in studying coping eventually convinced the NIMH to fund her research from 1953 until 1969 (Johnston, 2012). Thus, Lois became co-director of the Coping Project, a longitudinal study examining different coping strategies children used when confronted with various stressors (Young, 2011). Through this work, she investigated emotional adjustment by extensively studying individuals ranging from preschoolers to college students and presented these longitudinal results in Vulnerability, Coping and Growth published in 1976 (Murphy & Moriarty, 1976). During her time at the Menninger Foundation, she also participated in training analysis with a former student and colleague of Anna Freud, Ishak Ramzy, at the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute (Johnston, 2012; Sommer, 2004).

Near the end of her time at the Menninger Foundation in the mid-late 1960s, Lois became a major contributor to the design of the Head Start educational program under President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that intended to provide early education programs for underserved children. She specifically assisted with national planning, including a presentation at a congressional committee hearing in 1969, creating training booklets, planning and reporting on Parent-Child centers, and work involving more direct contact one morning each week for three years at the Head Start located in Topeka. When confronted with many mothers disliking the parent education provided, she compassionately inquired about how they would like to spend their time and discovered that their curiosity was most related to her expertise in fostering adaptive emotional growth in children (Johnston, 2012). Lois noted that the mission of Head Start “touched all her deepest interests in the needs of children” (Murphy, 1983, p. 101).

Later Years
After Gardner acquired a position at George Washington University, the Murphys moved from Topeka to Washington, D.C., where Lois worked as a research consultant at the Children’s Hospital. She also worked as a guest scientist at the National Institutes of Health and studied children in India, Tashkent, and the United States. Lois’s husband sadly lost his battle with Parkinson’s disease in 1979, which prompted Lois to publish a book chronicling his work in the field. Lois also wrote frequently for “Zero to Three,” a periodical of the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs and as an avid photographer, she also published some of her photos in this journal (Sommers, 2004; Squires, 1989). Even at the age of 87, Lois continued to pursue her work and either spent time in an apartment in Washington, D.C. or a house she designed in New Hampshire (Squires, 1989). Lois died on December 24, 2003 in Washington, D.C. from congestive heart failure at the age of 101 (Sommer, 2004).

Legacy
Lois Barclay Murphy was a pioneer in child development research and education. She was one of the first developmental psychologists to focus on positive aspects of typical child development and shifted prevalent psychological views of children by encouraging colleagues to focus on children’s inner capabilities and strengths. This positivistic view of children that emphasized adaptive adjustment sharply contrasted with the strict scientific and pathologizing approach of the time (Magai & McFadden, 1995). While Lois was a progressive researcher who often deviated from predominant views, she still received constant support from her husband and professional relationships with other psychologists. Due to her strong-willed persistence in what she believed in which was embraced by fellow colleagues, historian Katherine Pandora (1997) proclaimed her to be a rebel “within the ranks.” In addition to her noteworthy contributions, she also maintained an impressive dedication to and balance among her academic work, marriage, and family. In one of her autobiographies, Lois proclaimed, “I hope that insofar as I am remembered, it would be as a person who tried to conceptualize and communicate positive aspects of children’s development in integrated terms” (Murphy, 1978, p. 175). It is without question that she achieved this goal and established a novel framework for conceptualizing children that persists in current psychological work today.

Honors
In 1981, Lois received a G. Stanley Hall Award from the American Psychological Association for her academic contributions to the field of child development. During her acceptance speech for this award, she announced, “I am happy to accept this award not only on my behalf but on behalf of the gifted colleagues who joined me over the years, in a commitment to studying positive aspects of development in terms of the process of the child’s responses to stress affecting others and themselves, and on behalf of those special people who supported my ‘different’ approach” (Murphy, 1981). She also received the Distinguished Alumna Award from Columbia University as well as the Dolly Madison Award from the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs (Sommer, 2004; Young, 2011).

Publications
Barclay Murphy's publications were located by searching psychological databases through EBSCO host, including PsychInfo, PsycArticles, PsycExtra, ERIC, and Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, as well as using the Google Scholar search engine. "LB Murphy" was entered as a search term and the results were refined by entering a publication date range from 1930 to 1990. Only publications that included the author name "L.B. Murphy" were examined to ensure that the author affiliations matched institutions where Barclay Murphy made scholarly contributions. Forty-six publications authored by Lois Barclay Murphy were identified through this search strategy, including eighteen journal articles (sixteen first author), seventeen books (nine first author and four editor/co-editor), ten book chapters (all first author), and one review book. These publications are categorized by decade, specific year, authorship, and publication type in the tables below.

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s