Starke R. Hathaway (August 22, 1903 – July 4, 1984) was an American psychologist who co-authored the psychological assessment known as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). He was a longtime faculty member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.
Early life Hathaway was born in Central Lake, Michigan, on August 22, 1903, moved to Kansas at the age of 7, and grew up in Marysville, Ohio. As a child, Starke showed great interest in mechanical, electrical, chemical, and quantitative processes. By the time he was 8 years old, Hathaway was allowed to build his own workshop outside the family home.Butcher, J. N. (2000). Starke Rosecrans Hathaway: Biography of an empiricist. Portraits of pioneers in psychology, 4, 245-261.
Education Following his electrical interests and drive, Hathaway entered the school of engineering at Ohio University in the early 1920s. However, he was disappointed in the lack of opportunities and outlets that his talent required, and he felt that he was not being challenged. As such, Hathaway began to seek out more challenging material. He was immediately attracted to psychology and switched majors, although his approach did not waver and focused on mechanistic and quantitative methods. By 1927, he had graduated from Ohio University with his bachelor's degree in psychology, with a minor in mathematics, and stayed to continue his education. He studied under James P. Porter as a graduate student, whom he considered to be an important influence in his development as a psychologist. A year later, in 1928, he obtained his master's degree in psychology.
After graduation, Hathaway served as a research assistant in engineering with Harry Johnson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here, he developed an automatic camera that enabled researchers to record participants' movements while they slept. This invention is one of the contributions acknowledged by the American Psychological Associations in awarding him the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology in 1977.Hathaway, S. R. (1978). Distinguished Contribution for Applications in Psychology Award for 1977. American Psychologist, 63.
In 1932, Hathaway took a position as a lecturer while also pursuing his PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota under the mentorship of Richard M. Elliott. During his time there, he was influenced by the work of Karl Lashley, B. F. Skinner, Edna Heidbreder, and Donald G. Paterson. He received his PhD in psychology, with a concentration in physiology, and his dissertation was titled, "An Action Potential Study of Neuromuscular Relations during the Simple Reaction".
Academic career Hathaway stayed as an associate professor in psychology at the UMN Hospital, with a joint appointment in the department of anatomy. His chief responsibility during this appointment was to establish a division of clinical psychology in the department of psychiatry at the UMN Medical School. The concurrent training of psychologists and psychiatrists was with little conflict as Hathaway's approach incorporated rigorous quantification to mental health based on empirical principles. He believed that psychological qualities could be engineered and influenced in the same was physical matter could be. Further, Hathaway adamantly argued that biological processes underlie psychological phenomena and that anatomical and physiological education is essential to their understanding. His childhood interests continued into the development of his notable career, as much of what he had initially accomplished during these early years was engineering and mechanically focused. Hathaway was credited with designing an ideal psychiatric facility and building amplification equipment to measure neuromuscular potentials for research conducted at the hospital, the psychogalvanometer.
Hathaway was avidly interested in other languages and international collaboration. He had a working knowledge of French and German, and facile in Spanish. He often lectured or led discussions in Spanish at the National Autonomous University during his annual trips to Mexico. Although he did not view himself as a promoter of the MMPI and did not accept invitations to conduct workshops or hold lectures, he was much more interested in extending the use of the instrument to other cultures and making it available in other languages. He collaborated with and provided consultation on the translation of the MMPI into Spanish, published in Mexico in 1967, and used in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.
In 1937, Hathaway was awarded tenure as a member of the faculty of the medical school, working closely with the medical staff. Through this appointment, Hathaway began working closely with J. C. McKinley, with whom he later created the MMPI. He collaborated often with E. D. Monachesi and Whit Longstaff. Further, throughout his time at UMN, Hathaway trained several influential graduate students, including Paul E. Meehl, Harrison G. Gough, W. Grant Dahlstrom, and Howard Hunt.
In 1963, he was granted the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1959 and served as the APA President in 1963. In 1977, Hathaway received the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology.
Professional contributions
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory In the 1930s, the time when Hathaway and McKinley first began constructing their novel personality inventory, psychiatry and neurology had become established clinical specialties in the United States, yet there was little unity between both clinical fields and with psychology. Following WWI, numerous personality assessments were published, including the MMPI. However, many of these assessments that claimed to detect clinical problems or serve as aids in psychiatric diagnoses had not been validated against external criteria. Conversely, the MMPI remedied those deficits and provided the practitioner with a means of clinical diagnosis that could be used by the general medical professional within a variety of settings, as well as nonmedical professionals.Hathaway, S. R. (1964). MMPI: Professional use by professional people. American Psychologist, 19(3), 204. The MMPI was developed specifically with an empirical criterion approach to operationalize clinical phenomena derived by selecting items known to be endorsed by patients with certain pathologies.Hathaway, S. R., & McKinley, J. C. (1940). A multiphasic personality schedule(Minnesota): I. Construction of the schedule. Journal of Psychology, 10, 249-254.McKinley, J. C, & Hathaway, S. R. (1940). A multiphasic personality schedule (Minnesota): II. A differential study of hypochondriasis. Journal of Psychology, 10,255-268.Hathaway, S. R., & McKinley, J. C. (1942). A multiphasic personality schedule (Minnesota): III. The measurement of symptomatic depression. Journal of Psychology, 14, 73-84.McKinley, J. C, & Hathaway, S. R. (1942). A multiphasic personality schedule (Minnesota): IV. Psychasthenia. Journal of Applied Psychology, 26, 614-624.McKinley, J. C, & Hathaway, S. R. (1944). A multiphasic personality schedule (Minnesota): V. Hysteria, Hypomania, and Psychopathic Deviate. Journal of Applied Psychology, 28, 153-174. The difference between this approach and other test development strategies used around that time was that it was in many ways atheoretical (not based on any particular theory) and thus the initial test was not aligned with the prevailing psychodynamic theories. This measure was successful in capturing aspects of human psychopathology that were recognizable and meaningful despite changes in clinical theories.
Acceptance of the test grew steadily (Dahlstrom, 1992) until by the late 1950s, the MMPI had become the most widely used objective measure of personality and psychopathology, and the subject of both basic and applied research. In addition to extensive use in clinics and hospitals, the test was being administered to patients in general medical settings, to inmates in correctional facilities, to military personnel, and to candidates for positions involving high stress and responsibility for public safety. Furthermore, the test was being translated into foreign languages—by 1976 over 50 translations were available.
However, the MMPI had flaws of validity that were soon apparent and could not be overlooked indefinitely. The control group for its original testing consisted of a very small number of individuals, mostly young, white, and married people from rural Midwestern geographic areas. The MMPI also faced problems with a number of the items were deemed outdated or offensive because of sexual or religious content, its terminology not being relevant to the population it was supposed to measure, and it became necessary for the MMPI to measure a more diverse number of potential mental health problems, such as "suicidal tendencies, drug abuse, and treatment-related behaviors."
With graduate student Paul Meehl, Hathaway developed three validity scales embedded within the MMPI: the L, or lie, scale indicates when a client is "faking good"; the F, or infrequency, scale indicates when a client is "faking bad"; the K, defensiveness scale identifies individuals in denial about their behaviors and symptoms.McKinley, J. C., Hathaway, S. R., & Meehl, P. E. (1948). The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: VI. The K Scale. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 12(1), 20.Meehl, P. E., & Hathaway, S. R. (1946). "The K factor as a suppressor variable in the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory". Journal of Applied Psychology, 30(5), 525. The initial scales included: hypochondriasis (Hp), depression (D), hysteria (Hy), psychopathic deviate (Pd), paranoia (Pa), psychasthenia (Ps), schizophrenia (Sc), mania (Ma). Shortly after the MMPI was published, research began to be conducted on its use with adolescents, and in the mid-50s Hathaway and Monachesi, intending to expand use of the test by employing it to predict delinquency among adolescents, conducted a series of longitudinal studies and reported their findings in a book, organizing coded profiles for juveniles based on adult atlas of profiles Hathaway, S. R., & Monachesi, E. D. (1963). Adolescent personality and behavior.Hathaway, S. R., & Monachesi, E. D. (1953). Analyzing and predicting juvenile delinquency with the MMPI.Hathaway, S. R., & Monachesi, E. D. (1961). An atlas of juvenile MMPI profiles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Instrumentation Consistent with his life-long interests and background, Hathaway's early work focused on developing mechanical and electrical devices to measure psychological processes. His first publication as a graduate student in 1929, "A Comparative Study of Psychogalvanic and Association Time Measures: A New Psychogalvanic Apparatus", demonstrated his ability to conceptualize psychological and mental processes and to use biological and engineering methods to quantify them. This apparatus was used to measure galvanic skin response in a reliable manner, both at rest and during emotionally salient conditions. He patented this device as a "lie detector" and built and sold 30 devices to other psychology departments. He was henceforth noted nationwide as the inventor of a lie-detector machine and it was used to solve a murder case in Athens, Ohio.
Physiological psychology
In the early 1940s, Starke Hathaway authored two textbooks, An Outline of Neuropsychiatry (1940), which served as an indexed resource for diagnosis of nervous and mental diseases, and Physiological Psychology (1942), which summarized the central nervous system and functional subsystems and psychological and behavioral consequences of injury and disease.Arbisi, P. A. (2015). Hathaway, Starke R. (1903–84). In The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology (eds R. L. Cautin and S. O. Lilienfeld). doi:10.1002/9781118625392.wbecp540
As a clinician