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A Founder of the Cognitive Revolution
As one of the most influential cognitive psychologists of the 20th century, Jerome S. Bruner changed the public discourse - and policy - regarding education and how children learn. He is one of the founders of the "cognitive revolution" that transformed not only psychology but other fields related to the mind, such as anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. Many of his ideas, which may seem intuitive now, ran counter to the prevailing wisdom of the time, primarily his belief that learning is an active process.
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Busting Myths on Autism, Dyslexia
Autism was once thought to be the result of detached parenting rather than a condition of the brain. Internationally renowned developmental psychologist Uta Frith was among the first scientists to debunk that myth. Frith found that autistic people have trouble understanding mental states and find it hard to intuit what others may be thinking. She has also suggested that individuals with autism are highly capable of processing details but worse than other individuals at integrating information from many sources. And Frith has been a major force in destigmatizing dyslexia, showing it to be separate from environment and intelligence.
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Cross-cultural Personality and Gender Equality
Fanny Cheung's research underscores the importance of cultural context in assessing personality: much of her early work has involved translating, adapting, and refining one of the most widely used personality assessments, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), for the Chinese population. While the MMPI has been found to be generally valid across cultures, there has been a push in some Eastern Asian countries for indigenous assessments, which are designed to incorporate personality constructs that are more culturally relevant to the local people than some of those found in the imported western measures.
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Treating Anxiety
Many of us battle with fear and anxiety in our daily lives, but David Barlow was one of the first clinical psychologists to take this fight into the laboratory. Not only did he conduct much of the research characterizing the etiology of anxiety, but Barlow also can be credited with many of the breakthroughs in the treatment of anxiety disorders. His use of situational and interoceptive exposure as a treatment for panic disorders laid the foundation for the wider development of empirically validated cognitive behavioral therapies that have come to replace less scientifically sound treatment methodologies.
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Building Emotions
Emotions like anger, sadness, and fear have traditionally been thought of as innate, discrete entities, each with its own biological core: An event (seeing a snake) triggers a particular hardwired emotion (fear) and its corresponding behavioral and physiological responses (an adrenaline surge, screaming, running away). As Lisa Feldman Barrett has found, however, this view is not well supported by the scientific literature, and so she has developed a model that is more in line with the data.
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Children As Eyewitnesses
Would you believe a child witness? When Gail Goodman first posed this question in 1981, she found that most judges and juries didn’t have an answer, so she conducted much of the early research in the now robust fields of child memory and children as eyewitnesses. She showed that many children are quite capable of accurately recounting witnessed events, but that their accuracy is strongly affected by factors like the type of questions asked and the amount of intimidation or comfort the child experiences while being interviewed.
