75 Events in the Course of Psychology

# Start Date Person Action
1 1596 René Descartes Born and would later propose the doctrine of interactive dualism—the idea that mind and body are separate entities that interact to produce sensations, emotions, and other conscious experiences.
2 1795 Ernst Weber Born and would later propose Weber's law-for each sense, the size of a just noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the size of the initial stimulus
3 1821 Hermann von Helmhotz Born and would later propose the trichromatic theory
4 September 13, 1848 Phineas Gage Had a pole impaled through his frontal lobe
5 1859 Charles Darwin Added to Herbert Spencer's belief of gradual evolutionary change by publishing On the Origin of Species
6 1861 Phineas Gage Died 13 years after being impaled
7 1861 Paul Broca Discovered Broca's area
8 1867 Edward B. Titchener Born and would later propose structuralism—the belief that even our most complex conscious experiences could be broken down into elemental structures of sensations and feelings.
9 1874 Wilhelm Wundt Published Principles of Physiological Psychology, outlining the connections between physiology and psychology
10 1874 Karl Wernicke Discovered Wernicke's area
11 1878 G. Stanley Hall Received the first Ph.D. in psychology in the United States
12 1879 Wilhelm Wundt Opened the first psychology research laboratory at the University of Leipzig
13 1880 Max Wertheimer Born and would late establish Gestalt psychology
14 1883 G. Stanley Hall Founded the first psychology research laboratory in the United States at Johns Hopkins University
15 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus Published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology and his ideas on the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
16 1890 William James Published Principles of Psychology, which would later lead to his idea of functionalism—the importance of how behavior functions to allow people and animals to adapt to their environments
17 1890 Mary Whiton Calkins Assigned the task of teaching experimental psychology at a new women's college-Wellesley College
18 1891 Mary Whiton Calkins Established a psychological laboratory at Wellesley College
19 1892 Edward B. Titchener Became a psychology professor at Cornell University
20 1892 G. Stanley Hall Founded the American Psychological Association and elected first president
21 1892 William James Described consciousness as a "stream" or "river"
22 1898 Edward Lee Thorndike Did his "puzzle boxes"
23 1900 Sigmund Freud Published The Interpretation of Dreams
24 1902 Carl Rogers Born and would later develop the actualizing tendency-the innate drive to maintain and enhance the human organism
25 1904 Sigmund Freud Published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and proposed the concept of "Freudian slips"
26 1904 Sigmund Freud Believed that dreams had a manifest content and latent content
27 1904 Ivan Pavlov Did his classical conditioning tests on dogs
28 1904 Charles Spearman Believed that a factor called general intelligence, or the g factor, was responsible for people's overall performance on tests of mental ability
29 1905 Mary Whiton Calkins Elected first female president to APA
30 1905 Sigmund Freud Proposed the five psychosexual stages of development
31 1908 Margaret Floy Washburn Published the influential text The Animal Mind, summarizing research on sensation, perception, learning, and other "inner experiences" of different animal species
32 1909 Sigmund Freud Delivered five lectured on psychoanalysis at Clark University's 20th anniversary celebration in Worcester, Massachusetts
33 1913 John B. Watson Published "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," starting behaviorialism
34 1913 Roger Sperry Born and would later do experiments to split-brain patients
35 1916 Lewis Terman Published the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, which became the standard for intelligence tests in the United States
36 1919 John B. Watson Identified fear, rage, and love as the three instinctual emotions
37 1920 Francis C. Sumner Became first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, awarded by Clark University
38 1920 John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner Performed the Little Albert tests
39 1921 Margaret Floy Washburn Elected second female president to APA
40 1921 Hermann Rorschach Developed his famous Rorschach Inkblot Test
41 1933 Alfred Adler Proposed superiority and inferiority complexes
42 1935 Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray Developed a test to measure human motives called the Thematic Apperception Test
43 1936 Carl Jung Proposed the concept of the collective unconscious, which contains archetypes
44 1945 Karen Horney Stressed the importance of cultural and social factors in personality development
45 1948 Edward C. Tolman Stated his idea of a cognitive map, the layout of a familiar environment
46 1953 B. F. Skinner Coined the term operant to describe "any behavior that operates upon the environment to generate consequences"
47 1953 Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman Discovered REM sleep
48 1953 B. F. Skinner Identified positive and negative punishment
49 1953 H.M. His doctors located the brain area where the seizures seemed to occur, but removed portions of his hippocampus, causing memory loss
50 1955 David Wechsler Designed the intelligence test Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
51 1955 Solomon Asch Performed his experiment on conformity
52 1956 Benjamin Whorf Developed the linguistic relativity hypothesis that contended we see things through language
53 1961 M. C. Escher Created Waterfall, a visual illusion similar in absurdity to his other drawings
54 1962 Eugene Galanter Provided absolute thresholds for each sense
55 1964 George Wald Confirmed the trichromatic theory by showing rods are color-specific
56 1966 John Garcia and his colleagues Discovered taste aversion
57 1967 Steven F. Maier and Martin Seligman Discovered learned helplessness
58 1968 Robert A. Rescorla Discovered the reliability part of classical conditioning
59 1968 Erik Erikson Formulated his idea of psychosocial development
60 1970 Kenneth Bancroft Clark Elected first African American president to APA
61 1970 Abraham Maslow Finished his hierarchy of needs model
62 1972 Amos Tversky Proposed the decision-making model called the elimination by aspects model
63 1972 Jean Piaget Finished his theory of cognitive development
64 1973 Candace Pert and Solomon Snyder At John Hopkins University, discovered receptor sites for opiates
65 1974 Albert Bandura Did his famous Bobo Doll experiment
66 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John C. Palmer Performed their classic automobile accident explaining how memories can be altered
67 1977 J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley Proposed the activation-synthesis model of dreaming, stating that dreaming is our subjective awareness of brain's internally generated signals during sleep
68 1981 Roger Sperry Won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
69 1986 Ernest R. Hilgard Stated his neodissociation theory of hypnosis, that a hypnotized person consciously experiences one stream of mental activity that is responding to the hypnotist's suggestion while the other is unconscious
70 1993 Thomas Bouchard and Matt McGue Collected data on more than 100,000 pairs of relatives to see the importance of nature and nurture
71 1995 Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell Performed their famous lost-in-the-mall study
72 1997 Robert Sternberg Proposed the conception of intelligence as successful intelligence that contains analytic, creative, and practical intelligence
73 1997 Claude Steele Documented the effect known as stereotype threat
74 1998 Elizabeth Gould and her colleagues Showed that neurons were continuously generated in the hippocampus due to neurogenesis
75 2000 Eric Kandel Won the Nobel Prize for his discoveries on the neural basis of memory