Orval Hobart Mowrer: biography of this psychologist and researcher

This was the life of Orval Hobart Mowrer, famous psychologist and creator of the Bifactor Theory.

Psychology experienced 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 review the most remarkable episodes of his life while discovering the most interesting contributions that this psychologist made during his career.

Brief biography of Orval Hobart Mowrer

Orval Hobart Mowrer was born in the city of Unionville, 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 to accompany him until the end of his days.

In spite of the difficulties of his school years, he managed to overcome them in his studies and to enter the University of Missouri, where he enrolled in 1925 to train as a psychologist, since the understanding of the human mind was a key factor in his life.He was interested in understanding the human mind. While pursuing this degree, he began to work at the same institution, collaborating in the laboratory of Max Friedrich Meyer.

Meyer was a German, a doctor of physics, who had been 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 framework of behaviorism for his research. adopted the framework of behaviorism for his research..

During these years, Mowrer conducted a study as part of a sociology course. This study involved the distribution of a questionnaire to 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. At a time when such questions could not be discussed so openly, the study turned out to be too bold.

As a result, the university expelled two professors the university expelled two professors who were involved (among them Meyer himself), and prevented Orval Hobart Mowrer from completing his studies at that institution.. This prompted the American Association of University Professors to strongly criticize the University of Missouri's decision.

Completing his studies and starting his professional career

Orval Hobart Mowrer was forced to move elsewhere in order to complete his education. 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 at this institution allowed him to meet Molly, a colleague who would later become his wife and mother of his three children.

The next step was to obtain his doctorate, a distinction he achieved thanks to his research on spatial orientation in pigeons.. Throughout these years he again suffered episodes of depression, which reappeared in his life. In order to try to alleviate this illness, he underwent a therapeutic treatment based on psychoanalysis.

In 1932, Orval Hobart Mowrer became a doctor in psychology. Thereafter, he began a pilgrimage to different American universities for postdoctoral work. He started at Northwestern and Princeton, until he got a fellowship at Yale University.

There he did research on learning processes, conducting conditioning experiments with electric shocks and anticipatory lights. He found, among other things, that the response to the conditioned stimulus of light was stronger than to the shock itself.. Also, that after the electric shock, the physiological conditions of the subjects experienced a great relaxation.

It was in this way that Orval Hobart Mowrer discovered the anticipatory function of anxietyHe continued to study these phenomena at Yale until 1940, when he was offered a position at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He continued studying these phenomena at Yale until 1940, when he was offered a position at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

At this prestigious institution he met Henry Alexander Murray and a number of other important 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, directed 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 for the training of intelligence agents. Therefore, the objective of these tools should be to generate a stress high enough to be overcome only by those who were trained for this type of work.

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

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, as the university of this city offered him a position as a researcher. Here continued to develop the model for which he was already recognized, which was that of the bifactor 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 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 and henceforth aversive stimulus.

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

But it was not the only subject on which this author focused during his work as a researcher for the University of Illinois. He also worked on clinical psychology. Leaving psychoanalysis definitively behind, he took up the ideas he had learned from Harry Stack Sullivan and studied the effect of interpersonal relationships based on honesty and integrity as a means of overcoming psychopathologies..

So much so, that he tested it in first person, coming clean to his own wife about some dishonest behaviors he himself had committed. After this catharsis, he lived almost a decade free of depressive symptoms, but unfortunately 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 of the APA (American Psychological Association), he experienced the greatest relapse of his life, he experienced the greatest relapse he had ever had in his life.He was so depressed that he had to be admitted to the hospital, where he remained for more than three months. His depression was aggravated by psychotic episodes.

Integrity groups and final years

In the years to come, Orval Hobart Mowrer continued to refine his system of integrity therapy, working with his own students and later with groups of people who had abused alcohol or drugs.. In these integrity groups, cathartic work was done in which all behavior was permitted except physical aggression.

Some of the principles used in this type of work are maintained today for certain rehabilitation therapies for substance abuse, so Mowrer was a pioneer in this sense. In any case, the work with groups ended in the 1970s.

Another of Orval Hobart Mowrer's assertions was that there was an important genetic basis in psychopathology, which was paradoxical, since he had spent many years of his career studying dishonest behavior as a catalyst for psychological illness.This was paradoxical, since he had devoted many years of his career to the study of dishonest behavior as a catalyst for psychological illness.

Although he suffered the effects of depression throughout his life, he had the perspective that experiencing that illness had helped him to conduct much of his research throughout his career.

The last years of his life were marked by a delicate state of health.. This was compounded by the death of his wife in 1979. Only three years later, in 1982, he decided to take his own life. He was 75 years old.

Bibliographical 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.