0.17 Social learning theory and personality development  (Page 17/30)

As a child Rotter was an avid reader, and eventually he read most of the novels in the local library. He then turned to reading books on psychology, taking a particular interest in works by Freud and Adler. During his senior year in high school he was interpreting people’s dreams and he wrote a paper based on Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1904/1995). He attended Brooklyn College, but chose to major in chemistry instead of psychology, as it seemed more likely to provide a promising career. During college, however, he learned that Adler was teaching at the Long Island College of Medicine. He began attending Adler’s seminars, became Adler’s friend, and was invited to meetings of the Society for Individual Psychology. Another well-known psychology professor who influenced Rotter was Solomon Asch. When he graduated from Brooklyn College, he actually had more credits in psychology than in chemistry.

Rotter attended the University of Iowa, where he earned a Master’s Degree in 1938, and then took a clinical internship at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts. A year later he began working on his Ph.D. at Indiana University, because a professor there, C. M Louttit, had published one of the first books advocating clinical psychology as a career. Rotter received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1941. After a short period of time at Norwich State Hospital in Connecticut, Rotter was drafted into the Army. He spent World War II working as a military psychologist. After the war he briefly returned to Norwich, but soon Rotter accepted a position at Ohio State University.

It was during his time at Ohio State University that Rotter developed his ideas on social learning theory. He and George Kelly were the two most prominent members of the psychology department, each of them having a lasting influence in the fields of social and cognitive learning theory. Rotter attracted many excellent graduate students, including Walter Mischel. Rotter was also keenly interested in the training of clinical psychologists, and he helped to outline the training model that became the basis for how doctoral level clinical psychologists are trained today.

As much as he enjoyed his time at Ohio State University, Rotter left in 1963 to direct the rebuilding of the clinical psychology training program at the University of Connecticut. He retired as professor emeritus in 1987. One year later he received an American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award , and one year after that he was recognized by the Council of University Directors of Clinical Psychology with their Distinguished Contribution to Clinical Training Award . He has also worked with the Peace Corps. Rotter included a brief autobiography in his self-edited compendium entitled The Development and Applications of Social Learning Theory (Rotter, 1982).

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Walter Mischel was born in 1930, into a comfortable home, where he enjoyed a pleasant childhood. They lived in Vienna, a short distance from Sigmund Freud’s house. However, when the Nazis invaded Austria at the beginning of World War II, the Mischel family moved to the United States, eventually settling in New York City. In college, Mischel studied to become a social worker. While working as a social worker in the Lower East Side slums, Mischel attended City College of New York and pursued a graduate degree in clinical psychology. He had been taught that Freud’s theory offered the best explanation of human behavior, but he did not find this to be true in his work with juvenile delinquents (the same practical conclusion occurred to Carl Rogers in his first clinical position).