HALL, G(RANVILLE) STANLEY

born Feb. 1, 1844, Ashfield, Mass., U.S. died April 24, 1924, Worcester, Mass. psychologist who gave early impetus and direction to the development of psychology in the United States. Frequently regarded as the founder of child psychology and educational psychology, he also did much to direct into the psychological currents of his time the ideas of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and others. Originally intending to enter the ministry, Hall left Union Theological Seminary, New York City, after a year (186768) to study philosophy in Germany (186871). He became a lecturer at Antioch College in Ohio in 1872. His decision to adopt psychology as his life's work was inspired by a partial reading of Physiological Psychology (187374), by Wilhelm Wundt, generally considered the founder of experimental psychology. He resigned his post at Antioch in 1876 and returned to Germany for further study, becoming acquainted there with Wundt and the German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz. There Hall discovered the value of the questionnaire for psychological research. Later he and his students would devise more than 190 questionnaires, which were largely instrumental in stimulating the upsurge of interest in the study of child development. Upon his return to the United States, Hall in 1878 earned from Harvard the first Ph.D. degree in psychology granted in America. He then gave special lectures on education at Harvard, and he utilized questionnaires from a study of the Boston schools to write two significant papers; one dealt with children's lies (1882) and the other with the contents of children's minds (1883). A lectureship in philosophy (1883) and a professorship in psychology and pedagogics (1884) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, followed. There he was given space for one of the first psychological laboratories in the United States. The philosopher-psychologist-educator John Dewey was one of the first to use it. In 1887 Hall founded the American Journal of Psychology, the first such American journal and the second of any significance outside Germany. Hall was entering the most influential period of his life. The following year (1888), he helped to establish Clark University, Worcester, and, as the university's president and professor of psychology, he became a major force in shaping experimental psychology into a science. A great teacher, he inspired research that reached into all areas of psychology. By 1893 he had awarded 11 of the 14 doctorates in psychology granted in the United States. The first journal in the fields of child and educational psychology, the Pedagogical Seminary, later the Journal of Genetic Psychology, was founded by Hall in 1893. Hall's theory that mental growth proceeds by evolutionary stages is best expressed in one of his largest and most important works, Adolescence (1904). Despite opposition, Hall, as an early exponent of psychoanalysis, invited Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to the conferences celebrating Clark University's 20th anniversary (1909). A leading spirit in the founding of the American Psychological Association, he was its first president (1892). He published 489 works covering most of the major areas of psychology, including Senescence, the Last Half of Life (1922) and Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1917). Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (1923) was his autobiography.