Ninth Edition CoverGraziano & Raulin
Research Methods (9th edition)

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) was an American psychologist and educator, who was one of the most influential psychologists of his time. He received the first American Ph.D. in psychology (Harvard, 1878), founded America’s first psychological laboratory (Johns Hopkins, 1883) and the first psychological journal in the United States (American Journal of Psychology, 1887), and was the first president of the American Psychological Association (1892). Hall later established two additional psychological journals (Pedagogical Seminary, now the Journal of Genetic Psychology, and the Journal of Applied Psychology). 

Hall focused on laboratory experimentation in his early career, but later saw it as too limited. This shift away from laboratory research led to some of his greatest contributions to childhood education and studies of child development.

Hall was impressed by Darwinian evolutionary theory and applied a basic notion of evolution--specifically, developmental processes over time--to his interests in psychological functioning. This was developed into his most influential books, Adolescence: Its Psychology, and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, Volumes I and II (1904). This work included his recapitualation theory of children’s psychological development. That model described child development as the repetition or playing out of the biological history of the entire human species--that is, each child evolves from a basic, almost savage state of the infant and child to the eventual adult state of a controlled and civilized human being. 

Hall was severely criticized by many prominent psychologists, including Thorndike and Angell, for his discussions of adolescence as a period of intense sexuality. His scandalous discussions of such topics as masturbation brought scorn, even from other psychologists. One can see why Hall was one of the first psychologists to welcome Freud to this country to lecture on the new psychoanalysis (at Clark University in 1909).

Late in life, at the age of 78, Hall completed a monumental survey of the psychological factors in old age--the first such survey--publishing his findings in a book, Senescence in 1922. Productive right up to the end, Hall published three books in the last four years of his life. His final work was autobiographical--Confessions of a Psychologist, 1924. Hall was clearly in the mainstream of functionalism, and was influential, like Dewey, in leading psychology into the applications of science to practical issues of development and functioning.

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