Jack Block

Jacob "Jack" Block (1924 to 2010) was a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, whose main areas of research were personality theory, personality development, research methodology, personality assessment, longitudinal research and cognition. Born in Brooklyn, he earned his doctorate at Stanford University in 1950 and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With his wife Jeanne Block he ran the Block Study, a longitudinal project that followed more than 100 San Francisco Bay Area toddlers for nearly thirty years and focused on the psychological makeup and history of the participants rather than on quantitative measures such as IQ. His publications include The Q-Sort Method in Personality Assessment and Psychiatric Research (1961) and Personality as an Affect-Processing System (2002).