Knight Dunlap

Knight Dunlap (1875 to 1949) was an American psychologist who founded the Journal of Psychology, was the first editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1922. Raised in rural California and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where George M. Stratton inspired him to study experimental psychology, he completed his doctorate at Harvard, taught at Berkeley, and from 1906 spent twenty years at Johns Hopkins University as professor of experimental psychology. He was a talented inventor, and his best-known devices were the Dunlap chronoscope, the Dunlap tapping plate and a chair for vestibular research. He worked alongside John B. Watson but tried to distance himself from Watson behaviorism, which he thought derivative of scientific psychology, argued against much of Freudian psychoanalysis, and is credited with the label response psychology. He developed a paradoxical technique called negative practice, and from 1936 to 1946 he chaired the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles.