Robert Sessions Woodworth

(1869–1962). American psychologist, born in Belcher Town, Massachusetts, and educated at Amherst College, where he graduated in philosophy. He proceeded to Harvard for his graduate studies, where he worked with William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana, and completed his doctoral thesis 'On the accuracy of voluntary movement'. After working for a time as assistant in physiology at Harvard, Woodworth worked briefly in Sharpey–Schäfer's laboratory in Edinburgh and returned to England two years later as a senior demonstrator in physiology and as an assistant to C. S. Sherrington at Liverpool, where he published a paper on 'The electrical conductivity of mammalian nerve'.

On his final return to America, Woodworth was appointed to an instructionship in psychology under James McKeen Cattell at Columbia University, where he collaborated with E. L. Thorndike, who shared his interest in the measurement of individual differences. He became professor of psychology in 1909 and was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1914.

Apart from his work on individual differences and his attempt during the First World War to devise objective tests of emotional stability, Woodworth's contributions to research were somewhat meagre. He was, however, a prolific writer, his Dynamic Psychology appearing in 1918 and his massive Experimental Psychology in 1938 (rev. edn. 1954). His popular, though thoughtful, Contemporary Schools of Psychology was first published in 1931 and went into several editions. Woodworth edited a monograph series from Columbia entitled Archives of Psychology from 1906 to 1948. He published one book in French, Le Mouvement, in 1903.

(Published 1987)

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