Paul Thomas Young

Paul Thomas Young (1892-1978) was an American experimental psychologist and inventor.^[1]

Young originally studied at Occidental College and Princeton, and subsequently at Cornell, where his doctoral adviser was Edward Titchener. For most of his career, he was a faculty member at the University of Illinois. In 1928, he constructed the pseudophone, an acoustic device that induced a form of auditory illusion by distorting the direction from which an audible sound appeared to originate.^[2][3]

Young's primary area of research interest was motivation and emotion, in both humans and animals. He received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1965.^[4]

Key publications

• Emotion in man and animal: Its nature and relation to attitude and motive. Oxford, England: Wiley, 1943.
• The role of affective processes in learning and motivation. Psychological Review 66 (2), 1959, S. 104-125.
• Motivation and emotion: a survey of the determinants of human and animal activity. Oxford, England: Wiley, 1961.

References

1. O'Kelly, L. I., Paul Thomas Young: 1892-1978, American Journal of Psychology 92 (3), 1979, p. 551-553.
2. Perina, Kaja. Auditory Illusion, Psychology Today, Nov 1 2001
3. Roeckelein, J. E., Elsevier's Dictionary of Psychological Theories, Elsevier 2006, p. 655.
4. Paul Thomas Young: Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. American Psychologist 20 (12), 1965, S. 1084–1088.

External links

• Archival register of P.T. Young papers Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, University of Akron.