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H. J. Eysenck: Scientist, psychologist and family man
Personality and Individual Differences 103 (2016) 8–10
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid
H. J. Eysenck: Scientist, psychologist and family man Sybil B. Eysenck Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, Kings College London, United Kingdom
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 4 January 2016 Accepted 18 March 2016
a b s t r a c t I am absolutely delighted that Elsevier and the journal Personality and Individual Differences have produced a Special Issue devoted to my late husband, Professor H. J. Eysenck! As founding Editors, we have a special interest and allegiance to this journal and I am sure Hans would have been pleased at the prospect of this issue conceived, suggested and edited by Philip Corr. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
I think it may be fitting for me to try to describe my late husband, Professor H. J. Eysenck, in three parts. The most usual and well-known sides were his scientific work and the psychological aspects but the more personal parts may be of interest and rather less well-known. Thus, I have divided my article into three parts: Scientist, Psychologist and Family man.
1. Scientist Science and scientific methodology were Hans's passion. Everything he wanted to study came under scientific scrutiny and if the facts did not confirm the theory that ended there or a suitable change of the hypotheses was tried until there was enough evidence to convince him of the veracity of the theory. That was why Hans was always doubly sure of all his facts before putting forward, and defending, some of his controversial views. As his basic psychological theory encompassed Extraversion, Neuroticism and Psychoticism he was able to apply these to describe many phenomena found in people all over the world. However the controversial topics he broached were widely different but all were subject to the rules of science and rigorous scientific proof. There were too many of these for a systematic mention of them all but I will cover those that were of particular interest. Probably the two that caused the most ‘feathers to fly’ were intelligence and smoking. The first was because Hans took a largely genetic side in the ‘nature– nurture’ debate and the latter was based mainly on a misinterpretation of what he had maintained. As far as intelligence was concerned, he was in agreement with psychologists like Art Jensen and Phil Rushton who were vilified in their respective countries of America and Canada for maintaining that all were not created equal in intelligence. What was of particular annoyance to those who thought people had equal potential intelligence was that the facts did not bear this out and hence a very heated controversy ensued. The London School of Economics' physical attack on Hans as he tried to lecture there was a sad example of the frustration felt by these
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.03.051 0191-8869/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
idealists! Yet, characteristically, he put it down to “student ignorance” and refused to prosecute. Turning to the smoking issue, the medical opinion was that smoking caused cancer and this is what they still maintain to this day. However, what Hans said and wrote was that cancer was ONE of the possible causes of cancer but was probably linked to many other causes like pollution and psychological habits. There are too many cases of people who smoke but are very placid with healthy diets and exercise who live to a ripe old age to condemn smoking per se without specifying all those other contributing elements carefully. He spelt this view out in all his writings on the subject but was always accused of maintaining that smoking does not cause cancer. Incidentally, he himself gave up smoking when he felt it was interfering with his tennis playing! Then there was the controversy about psychotherapy. His stance over such supposed therapies as psychoanalysis caused great ill feeling especially, and predictably among psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. His point was that ‘spontaneous remission’ accounted for many of the claimed successes of the usual therapies. However, Hans did not criticise those clinical methods without suggesting a viable alternative in behaviour therapy which he declared was based on learning theory and, thus, complied with his scientific outlook. From the time his 1952 article on the matter was published until he retired his Department had students experimenting on best practices in behaviour therapy notably under instruction from Jack Rachman who was on our Institute of Psychiatry staff at the time. Joe Wolpe, a psychiatrist from South Africa, had developed this form of therapy so with Jack and Hans's help much research was undertaken to hone the methods for practical use. In fact, in spite of the ill feeling among psychiatrists about this form of therapy, the most recalcitrant patients such as obsessional compulsives were referred to behaviour therapists as the methods used were the only ones that seemed to work! Eventually, several other Psychology Departments took up behaviour therapy and it was even recognised by the NHS as a legitimate treatment form although it was later developed into cognitive therapy with similar treatment methods.
S.B. Eysenck / Personality and Individual Differences 103 (2016) 8–10
Altogether Hans was adamant in his need for scientific rigour in all his researches, which included the work of all students who came to our Department, where research was ‘program research’ meaning the topics all had to be in the personality field. As this was all coordinated to expand the main aims of the Department it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle to which we all contributed. 2. Psychologist As a psychologist, Hans travelled the world lecturing but what he loved best was to lecture to schoolchildren in this own country whom he regarded as ‘open minded’. They asked very searching and unbiased questions which he appreciated. He once opined that if one addressed a large audience and just one person got the message and acted on the correct path it was worth while having given that lecture. His researches centred largely around his personality theories to do with the various personality factors and this is where our work overlapped as he entrusted me with the development of the questionnaires we used in so many of the researches. At first I found the work easy as all it needed was to contact various groups and persuade them to get sufficient numbers of subjects to complete our questionnaires. Then as we went through any number of such trial groups with intricate statistical methodologies devised and carried out so efficiently by Paul Barrett, several versions of the personality inventories ensued until we were happy with the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) revised version. After Extraversion and Neuroticism were largely refined and clearly measurable the thorny task of getting to grips with Psychoticism was attempted. The main problem with this dimension is that those who score high on it are difficult characters who have no interest in cooperating, are psychopathic and have a “what's in it for me” attitude thus making it hard to establish. As they are proud of their eccentricity they have low lie scores and admit to all sorts of socially unacceptable tendencies but as they are also unwilling to help by filling in the form most bin the questionnaires resulting in very J-shaped distributions when any analyses are attempted. So, many criticisms arose and some maintained that what we were measuring was really psychopathy which was partially true but after careful consideration of all the features we still felt there were sufficient reasons to stick with the term Psychoticism. Interestingly, after perfecting our three factor questionnaire we were approached by some American psychologists who presented us each with a list of adjectives and asked us independently to allocate each word to either Extraversion, Neuroticism or Psychoticism. This we duly did and the Five-Factor Model of personality was subsequently developed, including of course the two extra factors. Our final questionnaire arose because the Psychoticism factor clearly needed better measurement and so we undertook more analyses again with the expert help of our statistician Paul Barrett. This was duly achieved and was published as the Eysenck Personality Scales (EPS). It may not be widely known that we also devised and published a criminality scale, an impulsiveness scale and the Eysenck–Withers scale for those with an IQ under 70. It will be obvious that I dwell on the questionnaire aspect of Hans's work because, of course, this was where our interests coincided. His other areas of research were numerous including intelligence, astrology, criminal behaviour, health issues like coronary heart failure and cancer as connected with personality, genetics, social attitudes and many more. As many of these will be dealt with by other articles in this issue, I will attempt no more on these. After Hans's death in 1997, we established the H.J. Eysenck Memorial Trust in his honour and to fund this initially were contributions from those at the Memorial lecture given at the Maudsley Hospital. To boost these we approached Max Brengelman, who spent much time in our Department but was subsequently at the Max Plank Institute, to see if he could suggest who might be interested to buy Hans's awards and general collection of pictures of psychologists, etc. He responded
9
readily and we were duly paid for this collection by a clinic in Germany although they soon said they had either given or sold these on to the local university. This seemed a good idea to us as more students would be able to access the trophies and reprints in a university setting. Sad to relate however, everything got lost in transit somehow and despite our best efforts and even the help of the German psychologist Petra Netter the whole collection was untraceable and remains a sinister mystery to this day! What a sad loss of all his memorabilia!! On a happier note, I have to report that the H.J. Eysenck Memorial Trust has been very successful under the Trustees' guidance. We recruited Gisli Gudjonsson, Adrian Furnham, Irene Martin (extremely sadly now deceased) and Darrin Evans as Trustees with myself and so far we have managed to support many psychologists from all over the world by an annual grant. A report of their results has been posted on Darrin Evans's website, The Official H.J. Eysenck website. This web construct is very informative and is skilfully designed, written and maintained by Darrin. One of our loyal donators has been Elsevier Publishers and we are all truly grateful for their continued support. While editing articles for Personality and Individual Differences it struck me that, sadly, it seems psychologists nowadays forget to follow the literature back far enough to include Hans's work and so I detected a fair bit of “re-inventing the wheel”. That is probably bound to happen with time, but maybe the appearance of this Special Issue on Hans may reawaken interest in his undoubtedly influential work in helping to put psychology on a firm scientific basis. 3. Family man Hans was married to Margaret, a speech therapist and psychologist, and they had a son, Michael, now a well-known psychologist in his own right. However the marriage did not work out and they divorced. Later we got married. When we were first married we spent some time in America where Hans wanted to observe the clinical courses set up there in various departments with a view to starting the first clinical psychology course in Britain. It was an interesting time and seemed like a honeymoon as it was timed soon after our wedding. This was when some American clinical psychologists confessed to their agreement with Hans but added that they could not say so openly for fear of losing their jobs. Once home we settled into a very comfortable routine and eventually completed our family of four children, Gary, Connie, Kevin and Darrin. Hans was a model father who came home from work at 5 o'clock for tea and relaxed with the children, then usually reading biographies or detective novels, and never bringing work home. Thus he was always available for the family and we all regarded him as our rock. While bringing up our children we started our At Homes which were a great success even though I often cradled one or other of our babies while being hostess! Once in a fortnight we were ‘at home’ to our staff and students for them to come and talk over problems they had encountered and wanted to discuss. At that time we had a Danish au pair who used to prepare lovely Danish open sandwiches and coffee prompting one or two to complain that they could not sleep because of the coffee but we suspected that it was more likely the stimulating conversation! One of our best decisions was to buy a holiday home in the Isle of Wight. The family, including two cats, went there every holiday and it was a great way for Hans to relax away from the Department and the telephone and mentally prepare for his next book or theory. This he managed because we developed a routine by which I walked to a cafe in the morning doing some shopping on the way and Hans would meet me there by car bringing the children. After coffee I drove the children home and prepared lunch while he would walk home on the beach thinking of future plans and theories as well as mentally preparing the next book uninterrupted by anything. I think maybe that routine allowed him to be so prolific as well, of course, as the fact that he was a remarkably tidy thinker who could concentrate without being disturbed by any irrelevant thoughts.
10
S.B. Eysenck / Personality and Individual Differences 103 (2016) 8–10
Once a week Hans and I arranged cover to look after the children and drove down to Brighton. There we walked along the beach talking over future work plans and theories with a leisurely lunch and then home. However, this idyllic state was interrupted by all the controversy Hans encountered and which inevitably encroached onto our family life. There were newspaper reports, often quite hostile, and it all came to a head when the Animal Rights group got the wrong end of the stick and presumed that we mishandled the rats in our Bethlem rat laboratory. In fact we simply trained different strains of rats to run mazes thus replicating some human trends with never a thought of harming them in any way! But with the wrong conclusion they drove up to our house in the early evening and painted derogatory messages on our walls such as ‘Scum’. When our daughter came home after a night out she was rightly frightened and puzzled by what she saw. Clearly something had to be done to protect the children as at that time we wondered whether teachers might be influenced by media hype and take it out on them. There were only two choices: either we had to muzzle Hans or change our name to obtain anonymity for the children. As the first was unthinkable, we followed the second course and though we changed our name back in due course our sons remained with the name they had got used to. Our daughter recalls that at university she had to endure seminars during which her dad was criticised for one or other of his theories though in that setting it was normally the
intelligence controversy. As she was there incognito, as it were, nobody realised that she was related to him. However, she took it in good humour and hopefully realised that the name change was done to protect them all as best we could. Incidentally, she was the only one of our children who changed her name back, as we did, when we felt the climate had changed and went back to our original name. Our sons retained their assumed name and there was considerable merit in that too. Throughout his life Hans loved sport and played tennis or squash every day at lunchtime. Some believed that on interviewing prospective students his question as to whether they played tennis was of consequence but this was probably an exaggeration! However, he also followed other sports on TV and football was of particular interest for him. In fact, he introduced all our children to football at various matches until he and Darrin went regularly to watch games at Manchester United where they had season tickets. It was a very, very sad day when Hans was driven home, after a game of tennis, by our son-in-law because he had seen double. This was caused by his brain tumour from which he died in 1997. I believe his ground breaking researches and resolute scientific outlook had a profound influence on personality psychology which he gave a firm basis for others to build on in the future.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid
H. J. Eysenck: Scientist, psychologist and family man Sybil B. Eysenck Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, Kings College London, United Kingdom
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 4 January 2016 Accepted 18 March 2016
a b s t r a c t I am absolutely delighted that Elsevier and the journal Personality and Individual Differences have produced a Special Issue devoted to my late husband, Professor H. J. Eysenck! As founding Editors, we have a special interest and allegiance to this journal and I am sure Hans would have been pleased at the prospect of this issue conceived, suggested and edited by Philip Corr. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
I think it may be fitting for me to try to describe my late husband, Professor H. J. Eysenck, in three parts. The most usual and well-known sides were his scientific work and the psychological aspects but the more personal parts may be of interest and rather less well-known. Thus, I have divided my article into three parts: Scientist, Psychologist and Family man.
1. Scientist Science and scientific methodology were Hans's passion. Everything he wanted to study came under scientific scrutiny and if the facts did not confirm the theory that ended there or a suitable change of the hypotheses was tried until there was enough evidence to convince him of the veracity of the theory. That was why Hans was always doubly sure of all his facts before putting forward, and defending, some of his controversial views. As his basic psychological theory encompassed Extraversion, Neuroticism and Psychoticism he was able to apply these to describe many phenomena found in people all over the world. However the controversial topics he broached were widely different but all were subject to the rules of science and rigorous scientific proof. There were too many of these for a systematic mention of them all but I will cover those that were of particular interest. Probably the two that caused the most ‘feathers to fly’ were intelligence and smoking. The first was because Hans took a largely genetic side in the ‘nature– nurture’ debate and the latter was based mainly on a misinterpretation of what he had maintained. As far as intelligence was concerned, he was in agreement with psychologists like Art Jensen and Phil Rushton who were vilified in their respective countries of America and Canada for maintaining that all were not created equal in intelligence. What was of particular annoyance to those who thought people had equal potential intelligence was that the facts did not bear this out and hence a very heated controversy ensued. The London School of Economics' physical attack on Hans as he tried to lecture there was a sad example of the frustration felt by these
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.03.051 0191-8869/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
idealists! Yet, characteristically, he put it down to “student ignorance” and refused to prosecute. Turning to the smoking issue, the medical opinion was that smoking caused cancer and this is what they still maintain to this day. However, what Hans said and wrote was that cancer was ONE of the possible causes of cancer but was probably linked to many other causes like pollution and psychological habits. There are too many cases of people who smoke but are very placid with healthy diets and exercise who live to a ripe old age to condemn smoking per se without specifying all those other contributing elements carefully. He spelt this view out in all his writings on the subject but was always accused of maintaining that smoking does not cause cancer. Incidentally, he himself gave up smoking when he felt it was interfering with his tennis playing! Then there was the controversy about psychotherapy. His stance over such supposed therapies as psychoanalysis caused great ill feeling especially, and predictably among psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. His point was that ‘spontaneous remission’ accounted for many of the claimed successes of the usual therapies. However, Hans did not criticise those clinical methods without suggesting a viable alternative in behaviour therapy which he declared was based on learning theory and, thus, complied with his scientific outlook. From the time his 1952 article on the matter was published until he retired his Department had students experimenting on best practices in behaviour therapy notably under instruction from Jack Rachman who was on our Institute of Psychiatry staff at the time. Joe Wolpe, a psychiatrist from South Africa, had developed this form of therapy so with Jack and Hans's help much research was undertaken to hone the methods for practical use. In fact, in spite of the ill feeling among psychiatrists about this form of therapy, the most recalcitrant patients such as obsessional compulsives were referred to behaviour therapists as the methods used were the only ones that seemed to work! Eventually, several other Psychology Departments took up behaviour therapy and it was even recognised by the NHS as a legitimate treatment form although it was later developed into cognitive therapy with similar treatment methods.
S.B. Eysenck / Personality and Individual Differences 103 (2016) 8–10
Altogether Hans was adamant in his need for scientific rigour in all his researches, which included the work of all students who came to our Department, where research was ‘program research’ meaning the topics all had to be in the personality field. As this was all coordinated to expand the main aims of the Department it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle to which we all contributed. 2. Psychologist As a psychologist, Hans travelled the world lecturing but what he loved best was to lecture to schoolchildren in this own country whom he regarded as ‘open minded’. They asked very searching and unbiased questions which he appreciated. He once opined that if one addressed a large audience and just one person got the message and acted on the correct path it was worth while having given that lecture. His researches centred largely around his personality theories to do with the various personality factors and this is where our work overlapped as he entrusted me with the development of the questionnaires we used in so many of the researches. At first I found the work easy as all it needed was to contact various groups and persuade them to get sufficient numbers of subjects to complete our questionnaires. Then as we went through any number of such trial groups with intricate statistical methodologies devised and carried out so efficiently by Paul Barrett, several versions of the personality inventories ensued until we were happy with the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) revised version. After Extraversion and Neuroticism were largely refined and clearly measurable the thorny task of getting to grips with Psychoticism was attempted. The main problem with this dimension is that those who score high on it are difficult characters who have no interest in cooperating, are psychopathic and have a “what's in it for me” attitude thus making it hard to establish. As they are proud of their eccentricity they have low lie scores and admit to all sorts of socially unacceptable tendencies but as they are also unwilling to help by filling in the form most bin the questionnaires resulting in very J-shaped distributions when any analyses are attempted. So, many criticisms arose and some maintained that what we were measuring was really psychopathy which was partially true but after careful consideration of all the features we still felt there were sufficient reasons to stick with the term Psychoticism. Interestingly, after perfecting our three factor questionnaire we were approached by some American psychologists who presented us each with a list of adjectives and asked us independently to allocate each word to either Extraversion, Neuroticism or Psychoticism. This we duly did and the Five-Factor Model of personality was subsequently developed, including of course the two extra factors. Our final questionnaire arose because the Psychoticism factor clearly needed better measurement and so we undertook more analyses again with the expert help of our statistician Paul Barrett. This was duly achieved and was published as the Eysenck Personality Scales (EPS). It may not be widely known that we also devised and published a criminality scale, an impulsiveness scale and the Eysenck–Withers scale for those with an IQ under 70. It will be obvious that I dwell on the questionnaire aspect of Hans's work because, of course, this was where our interests coincided. His other areas of research were numerous including intelligence, astrology, criminal behaviour, health issues like coronary heart failure and cancer as connected with personality, genetics, social attitudes and many more. As many of these will be dealt with by other articles in this issue, I will attempt no more on these. After Hans's death in 1997, we established the H.J. Eysenck Memorial Trust in his honour and to fund this initially were contributions from those at the Memorial lecture given at the Maudsley Hospital. To boost these we approached Max Brengelman, who spent much time in our Department but was subsequently at the Max Plank Institute, to see if he could suggest who might be interested to buy Hans's awards and general collection of pictures of psychologists, etc. He responded
9
readily and we were duly paid for this collection by a clinic in Germany although they soon said they had either given or sold these on to the local university. This seemed a good idea to us as more students would be able to access the trophies and reprints in a university setting. Sad to relate however, everything got lost in transit somehow and despite our best efforts and even the help of the German psychologist Petra Netter the whole collection was untraceable and remains a sinister mystery to this day! What a sad loss of all his memorabilia!! On a happier note, I have to report that the H.J. Eysenck Memorial Trust has been very successful under the Trustees' guidance. We recruited Gisli Gudjonsson, Adrian Furnham, Irene Martin (extremely sadly now deceased) and Darrin Evans as Trustees with myself and so far we have managed to support many psychologists from all over the world by an annual grant. A report of their results has been posted on Darrin Evans's website, The Official H.J. Eysenck website. This web construct is very informative and is skilfully designed, written and maintained by Darrin. One of our loyal donators has been Elsevier Publishers and we are all truly grateful for their continued support. While editing articles for Personality and Individual Differences it struck me that, sadly, it seems psychologists nowadays forget to follow the literature back far enough to include Hans's work and so I detected a fair bit of “re-inventing the wheel”. That is probably bound to happen with time, but maybe the appearance of this Special Issue on Hans may reawaken interest in his undoubtedly influential work in helping to put psychology on a firm scientific basis. 3. Family man Hans was married to Margaret, a speech therapist and psychologist, and they had a son, Michael, now a well-known psychologist in his own right. However the marriage did not work out and they divorced. Later we got married. When we were first married we spent some time in America where Hans wanted to observe the clinical courses set up there in various departments with a view to starting the first clinical psychology course in Britain. It was an interesting time and seemed like a honeymoon as it was timed soon after our wedding. This was when some American clinical psychologists confessed to their agreement with Hans but added that they could not say so openly for fear of losing their jobs. Once home we settled into a very comfortable routine and eventually completed our family of four children, Gary, Connie, Kevin and Darrin. Hans was a model father who came home from work at 5 o'clock for tea and relaxed with the children, then usually reading biographies or detective novels, and never bringing work home. Thus he was always available for the family and we all regarded him as our rock. While bringing up our children we started our At Homes which were a great success even though I often cradled one or other of our babies while being hostess! Once in a fortnight we were ‘at home’ to our staff and students for them to come and talk over problems they had encountered and wanted to discuss. At that time we had a Danish au pair who used to prepare lovely Danish open sandwiches and coffee prompting one or two to complain that they could not sleep because of the coffee but we suspected that it was more likely the stimulating conversation! One of our best decisions was to buy a holiday home in the Isle of Wight. The family, including two cats, went there every holiday and it was a great way for Hans to relax away from the Department and the telephone and mentally prepare for his next book or theory. This he managed because we developed a routine by which I walked to a cafe in the morning doing some shopping on the way and Hans would meet me there by car bringing the children. After coffee I drove the children home and prepared lunch while he would walk home on the beach thinking of future plans and theories as well as mentally preparing the next book uninterrupted by anything. I think maybe that routine allowed him to be so prolific as well, of course, as the fact that he was a remarkably tidy thinker who could concentrate without being disturbed by any irrelevant thoughts.
10
S.B. Eysenck / Personality and Individual Differences 103 (2016) 8–10
Once a week Hans and I arranged cover to look after the children and drove down to Brighton. There we walked along the beach talking over future work plans and theories with a leisurely lunch and then home. However, this idyllic state was interrupted by all the controversy Hans encountered and which inevitably encroached onto our family life. There were newspaper reports, often quite hostile, and it all came to a head when the Animal Rights group got the wrong end of the stick and presumed that we mishandled the rats in our Bethlem rat laboratory. In fact we simply trained different strains of rats to run mazes thus replicating some human trends with never a thought of harming them in any way! But with the wrong conclusion they drove up to our house in the early evening and painted derogatory messages on our walls such as ‘Scum’. When our daughter came home after a night out she was rightly frightened and puzzled by what she saw. Clearly something had to be done to protect the children as at that time we wondered whether teachers might be influenced by media hype and take it out on them. There were only two choices: either we had to muzzle Hans or change our name to obtain anonymity for the children. As the first was unthinkable, we followed the second course and though we changed our name back in due course our sons remained with the name they had got used to. Our daughter recalls that at university she had to endure seminars during which her dad was criticised for one or other of his theories though in that setting it was normally the
intelligence controversy. As she was there incognito, as it were, nobody realised that she was related to him. However, she took it in good humour and hopefully realised that the name change was done to protect them all as best we could. Incidentally, she was the only one of our children who changed her name back, as we did, when we felt the climate had changed and went back to our original name. Our sons retained their assumed name and there was considerable merit in that too. Throughout his life Hans loved sport and played tennis or squash every day at lunchtime. Some believed that on interviewing prospective students his question as to whether they played tennis was of consequence but this was probably an exaggeration! However, he also followed other sports on TV and football was of particular interest for him. In fact, he introduced all our children to football at various matches until he and Darrin went regularly to watch games at Manchester United where they had season tickets. It was a very, very sad day when Hans was driven home, after a game of tennis, by our son-in-law because he had seen double. This was caused by his brain tumour from which he died in 1997. I believe his ground breaking researches and resolute scientific outlook had a profound influence on personality psychology which he gave a firm basis for others to build on in the future.