Orval Hobart Mowrer: biography of this psychologist and researcher

Psychology underwent an important development throughout the 20th century due to the proliferation of great researchers.

One of these authors was Orval Hobart Mowrer, whose life we ​​will be able to know thanks to this article. We will go through the most notable episodes of his life while we discover the contributions of greatest interest that this psychologist made during his career.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

Short Biography of Orval Hobart Mowrer

Orval Hobart Mowrer was born in the city of Unionville, state of Missouri, United States, in 1907. His upbringing took place on the family farm, although they later moved to a more urban area so that Orval could attend school and receive the education he needed.

His father passed away when he was only 13 years old, which marked his development and practically his life in general. This event was the trigger for Orval Hobart Mowrer to develop a deep depression, a pathology that, in a more or less intense way, was going to accompany him until the end of his days.

Despite how difficult his school years were, he managed to overcome his studies and access the University of Missouri, where he enrolled in 1925 to train as a psychologist.for understanding the human mind was what really interested him. While he was studying this degree, he began to practice in that same institution, collaborating in the laboratory of Max Friedrich Meyer.

Meyer was a German, doctor in physics, who had trained as a behavioral psychologist, and had emigrated to America at the end of the 19th century. This author was a great influence on Orval Hobart Mowrer, who adopted the behaviorism framework for his research.

Throughout these years, Mowrer did a study, as a job for a subject in sociology. This study involved the distribution of a questionnaire for the students in which they had to answer questions about sexual behaviors and possible causes for the deterioration of the institution of marriage in the United States United. At a time when these questions could not be dealt with in such an open way, the study turned out to be too daring.

Due, the university expelled two professors who were involved (including Meyer himself), and prevented Orval Hobart Mowrer from completing his studies at that institution. This fact prompted the American Association of University Professors to strongly criticize the decision taken by the University of Missouri.

Completion of studies and beginning of professional career

Orval Hobart Mowrer was forced to move to another location in order to complete his training. For this reason, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland. In this institution he would complete his studies as a psychologist, learning, among others, from authors such as Knight Dunlap. In addition, his stay in this institution allowed him to meet Molly, a companion who would eventually become his wife and mother of his three children.

The next step was to obtain a doctorate, a distinction that he obtained thanks to an investigation about spatial orientation in pigeons.. Throughout these years he again suffered episodes of depression, which reappeared in his life. To try to appease this disease, he underwent a therapeutic treatment based on psychoanalysis.

As early as 1932, Orval Hobart Mowrer became a doctor of psychology. From then on, he began a pilgrimage to different American universities to carry out postdoctoral work. He started at Northwestern and Princeton, until he got a scholarship to Yale University.

There he investigated learning processes, conducting conditioning experiments with electric shocks and anticipatory lights. He discovered, among other things, that the response to the conditioned stimulus of light was more powerful than to the discharge itself.. Also, that after the electric shock, the physiological conditions of the subjects experienced great relaxation.

That was how Orval Hobart Mowrer he discovered the anticipatory function of anxiety, since it acted as a form of preparation before an aversive stimulus of imminent arrival. He continued to study these phenomena at Yale, until in 1940 he was offered a position to practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

At this prestigious institution he met Henry Alexander Murray and a number of other leading researchers, with whom he founded Harvard's department of social relations. At this time he suffered another of his depressive episodes, which he again tried to alleviate through psychoanalysis, led by Hans Sachs, although he had less and less confidence in this methodology.

After the outbreak of World War II, Orval Hobart Mowrer collaborated with his country, joining the Office of Strategic Services. His job was to design tests to train intelligence agents. Therefore, the objective of these tools should be to generate a stress high enough that only those who were trained for this type of work could overcome it.

Throughout his stay in this office, he was also able to learn from psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan, which pointed out the importance of certain dysfunctions in relationships between people, such as lack of honesty, to generate certain psychopathologies, an idea that Mowrer did not would forget.

• You may be interested in: "Harry Stack Sullivan: biography of this psychoanalyst"

Stage at the University of Illinois

After the end of the war, Orval Hobart Mowrer returned to his work at Harvard, but a few years later, in 1948, He moved with his family to Illinois, because the university of this city offered him a place as investigator. Here he continued to develop the model for which he was already recognized, which was that of the bifactorial theory.

These two factors or dimensions would refer to the two forms of conditioning that would be involved in the processes that give rise to a fear or a phobia. Classical conditioning, on the one hand, would convert a neutral stimulus (a spider, an airplane, a dog or any other element) into a conditioned stimulus and since then aversive.

On the other hand, the instrumental conditioning would cause that, any element that resembles that of the original situation in which that fear was established, elicits the same conditioned response, in this case anxiety. This is one of the models used by behaviorism, which is still valid today, even though Orval Hobart Mowrer first worked on it in 1939.

But it was not the only topic this author focused on during his work as a researcher for the University of Illinois. Likewise, he worked in clinical psychology. Definitively leaving psychoanalysis behind, he took up the ideas he had learned from Harry Stack Sullivan and he studied the effect of interpersonal relationships based on honesty and integrity as a means to overcome psychopathologies.

So much so, that he tested it in the first person, being honest with his own wife for some dishonest behavior that he himself had committed. After this catharsis, he lived almost a decade free from depressive symptoms, but sadly they had not disappeared forever.

In fact, in 1953, when he was already an eminence in his field and was about to accept the position of president in the APA (American Psychological Association), he experienced the biggest relapse he had ever had in his entire life, to the point that he had to enter the hospital, where he would remain for more than three months. His depression was compounded by psychotic episodes.

Integrity groups and past years

For years to come, Orval Hobart Mowrer He continued to perfect his integrity therapy system, working with his own students and later with groups of people who had abused alcohol or drugs.. In these integrity groups, a cathartic work was carried out in which any behavior was allowed, except physical aggressions.

Some of the principles used in this type of work are maintained today to certain rehabilitation therapies for substance abuse, which is why Mowrer pioneered that sense. In any case, the work with the groups ended in the 70s.

Another of Orval Hobart Mowrer's assertions is that there was an important genetic basis in psychopathologyWhich was paradoxical, for he had spent many years of his career studying dishonest behavior as a catalyst for psychological illness.

Although he suffered from the effects of depression throughout his life, he had the prospect that it experiencing that disease had helped her do much of his research throughout his life. race.

The last years of his life were marked by a delicate state of health. Added to this was the death of his wife, in 1979. Only three years later, in 1982, he decided to kill himself. She was 75 years old.

Bibliographic references:

• Dollard, J., Miller, N.E., Doob, L.W., Mowrer, O.H., Sears, R.R. (1939). Frustration and aggression. Yale University Press.
• Hunt, J. M. (1984). Orval Hobart Mowrer (1907-1982). American Psychologist
• Kluckhohn, C., Mowrer, O.H. (1944). "Culture and Personality": A Conceptual Scheme. American Anthropologist. JSTOR.
• Mowrer, O.H., Lamoreaux, R.R. (1942). Avoidance conditioning and signal duration - a study of secondary motivation and reward. Psychological Monographs.