Orval Hobart Mowrer (January 23, 1907 – June 20, 1982) was an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Illinois from 1948 to 1975 known for his research on behaviour therapy. Mowrer practiced psychotherapy in Champaign-Urbana and at Galesburg State Research Hospital. In 1954 Mowrer held the position of president of the American Psychological Association. Mowrer founded Integrity Groups (therapeutic community groups based on principles of honesty, responsibility, and emotional involvement) and was instrumental in establishing GROW groups in the United States. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mowrer as the 98th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life and education Mowrer spent his early years on the family farm near Unionville, Missouri. His father retired from farming and moved the family to town when Hobart reached school age. The death of the elder Mowrer when Hobart was 13 changed his life radically. A year later he suffered the first in a series of major depressions which would recur throughout his life. Nevertheless, he did well in high school and entered the University of Missouri in 1925. Having decided on psychology as a career, he became laboratory assistant to the university's first and only psychology professor, Max Friedrich Meyer. Meyer had earned a PhD in physics before emigrating from Germany in the 1890s and was a rigorous behaviorist. Although Mowrer's initial hope was that psychology would help him to understand himself and his own problems, he readily adapted to Meyer's behavioral approach. Mowrer began his college years as a conservative Christian, but lost his faith as he adopted progressive and scientific views prevalent in academia.
In his senior year, as a project for a sociology course, Mowrer composed a questionnaire to investigate sexual attitudes among students. It was distributed anonymously and the responses were to be returned anonymously. The questionnaire was accompanied by a letter from a non-existent "Bureau of Personnel Research" which began:
Dear University Student: During the last several decades it has become increasingly apparent that there is something seriously wrong with the traditional system of marriage in this country. But, unfortunately, the whole matter has been so inextricably bound up with religious dogmas, moral sentiments, and all manner of prudish conventionalities as to make it exceedingly difficult to ascertain with any degree of accuracy the precise reasons for this situation.
There were slight differences in wording between the questionnaires sent to women and those sent to men, but each contained 11 groups of questions requesting the student's opinions about illicit sexual relations, whether the student would marry a person who had engaged in sexual relations, how s/he would react to unfaithfulness in marriage, whether s/he had engaged in sex play as a child or sexual relations as an adult, and whether s/he would favor the legal establishment of "trial marriage" or "companionate marriage."
Some of the students sent the questionnaires on to their parents, who complained to the administration. Two faculty members were aware of the questionnaire and allowed it to be distributed, sociology professor Harmon O. DeGraff and psychology professor Max Friedrich Meyer, although neither had read the cover letter. Ultimately both men lost their jobs, and Meyer never held an academic position again. The American Association of University Professors censured the University for violation of academic freedom, in the first such action taken by the AAUP.
The scandal had little impact on Mowrer's career. He left the university without a degree in 1929 (the degree was granted a few years later), entering Johns Hopkins University, where he worked under Knight Dunlap. Mowrer's PhD research involved spatial orientation as mediated by vision and the vestibular receptors of the inner ear, using pigeons as subjects. During his time at Johns Hopkins he also underwent psychoanalysis for the first time, in an attempt to resolve another episode of depression. After completing his doctorate in 1932 he continued his work on spatial orientation as a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern University and then Princeton University.
Yale, then Harvard Academic positions were scarce during the Great Depression, so in 1934 Mowrer began a Sterling Fellowship at Yale University researching learning theory. Yale psychology was then dominated by the stimulus-response approach of Clark Hull. Mowrer's wife, Willie Mae (Molly) had been a fellow student at Hopkins and remained there as an instructor for several years after Mowrer left. When she moved to New Haven, Connecticut, the couple served as houseparents at a residential home for infants and children. Mowrer used the home as an informal behavioral science laboratory. He and his wife developed the first bedwetting alarm while working there.
In 1936, Mowrer was hired by the Yale Institute of Human Relations, then a relatively new project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as an instructor. The institute was designed to integrate psychology, psychoanalysis and the social sciences. One product of the institute's unique approach was a detailed study of aggression by sociologist John Dollard with psychologists Mowrer, Leonard Doob, Neal Miller and Robert Sears. Each of the five contributors had training in psychoanalysis or had been individually psychoanalyzed, but the language of the book reflected the objective behaviorism of the day.
During the late 1930s Mowrer began experimenting with the use of electric shock as a conditioning agent. At the time, most psychologists agreed with William James that fear (in this usage, synonymous with anxiety) was an instinctive response. Mowrer suspected fear was a conditioned response and designed a way to create fear in the laboratory. The unusually generous funding available at the institute allowed him to use human subjects for the first time. The subjects were attached to galvanic skin response recorders and to electrodes which could deliver an electric shock. They were then exposed to a light stimulus which was sometimes (randomly) followed by a shock. Mowrer discovered two unexpected phenomena. There was a substantial galvanic stress response to the first presentation of the light stimulus, before any shock had been administered. The anticipation was apparently more aversive than the shock, which would not have been predicted by traditional behavioral theory. Mowrer also noticed that after each shock the subjects experienced a marked degree of relaxation. Together with fellow psychologist Neal Miller, Mowrer gives his name to the "Miller-Mowrer Shuttlebox" apparatus.N., Pam M.S., "MILLER-MOWRER SHUTTLEBOX," in PsychologyDictionary.org, April 7, 2013, https://psychologydictionary.org/miller-mowrer-shuttlebox/ (accessed February 20, 2019).
Using animals in similar experiments, he found that a cycle could be produced in which the subject became more and more responsive to conditioning. He concluded that anxiety was basically anticipatory in nature and ideally functions to protect the organism from danger. However, because of the circumstances of conditioning, the degree of fear is often disproportionate to the source. Anxiety can be created artificially, and relief of anxiety can be used to condition other behaviors. Mowrer's term for the state of expectancy produced by carefully timed aversive stimuli was the "preparatory set," and it was foundational to his later thinking in both learning theory and clinical psychology.
In 1940 Mowrer became Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While there, he became involved with Henry A. Murray and his group at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Mowrer, Murray, Talcott Parsons, Gordon Allport and others formed a group which eventually led to the formation of the Harvard Department of Social Relations, partially in response to the success of the Yale Institute of Human Relations.
During this time Mowrer's faith in Freudian theory was fading. His primary professional loyalty had always been to learning theory, but he continued to assume that neurotic symptoms and depression were best addressed through analysis. His first psychoanalyst had treated him for only a few months. When his depression returned he underwent a second, much lengthier analysis and felt that he was much improved. His symptoms soon returned, leading him to question Freud's premises. In spite of his doubts he underwent a third analysis during the time he was at Harvard, this time with the prominent Freudian disciple Hanns Sachs.
War work
In 1944 Mowrer became a psychologist at the Office of Strategic Services developing assessment techniques for potential intelligence agents. Mowrer's experience with the laboratory induction of psychological stress, along with the work of other psychologists, was utilized to construct an environment in which recruits could be assessed for their ability to withstand highly stressful situations.
As part of his work there, he participated in a seminar led by Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan's theories on the role of disturbances in interpersonal relationships with "significant others" in the etiology of mental disorders had a profound effect on Mowrer's thinking. When Mowrer returned to Harvard, he began counseling students in addition to his faculty duties. He used the principles he had learned from Sullivan, questioning them about their interpersonal relationships and confronting them when he felt they were being dishonest.
Move to Illinois
In 1948, Hobart Mowrer accepted a research-only position at the University of Illinois and moved to Urbana, Illinois with Molly and their three young children. He was now involved with two essentially separate lines of work, learning theory and clinical psychology. Mowrer's primary achievements in learning theory followed from his work with aversive conditioning or avoidance learning. He formulated a two-factor learning theory, arguing that conditioning (sign learning) is distinct from habit formation (solution learning). This theory was initially described in a 1947 paper. In the 1950s he modified the theory to allow for only one type of learning but two types of reinforcement.
Mowrer's interest in clinical psychology was primarily a hobby during the 1950s, but it would eventually eclipse his work as a learning theorist. He had given up on psychoanalysis after 1944, partially as a result of the failure of his own analysts to cure his problems. Most importantly, Harry Stack Sullivan had persuaded him that the key to mental health lay in healthy, scrupulously honest human relationships, not in intrapsychic factors. Mower took Sullivan's ideas to heart and confessed to his wife some guilty secrets concerning his adolescent sexual behavior, and that he had had an affair during the marriage. She was upset, but convinced (as was Mowrer) that those secrets might explain his bouts of depression. The depressive symptoms did remain in remission for eight years.
In 1953, at the height of his career and on the eve of accepting the presidency of the American Psychological Association, he suffered the worst psychological collapse of his life. He was hospitalized for three and a half months with depression complicated by symptoms resembling psychosis. Few effective treatments were available. A few years later, Mowrer was successfully treated with one of the first tricyclic antidepressants.
Religious views