Charles E. Osgood

Charles Egerton Osgood (20 November 1916 – 15 September 1991) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Illinois. He was known for his research on behaviourism versus cognitivism, semantics (he introduced the term "semantic differential"), cross-culturalism, psycholinguistic theory, and peace studies. Osgood then went on to study at Yale University where he completed his Ph.D. in 1945. During this period, Osgood also worked as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut from 1946 to 1949. Osgood would often submit himself to his own experiments get a better grasp of what his subjects may experience.

In addition to this, Osgood completed a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 1958 to 1959; and was given an honorary doctorate from the Dartmouth College in 1962.

Mediation theory Osgood's Mediation theory—The psycholinguistics foundations in human behaviour and communication process.

Osgood proposed the mediation theory which suggested that the physical stimuli exist in our environment have elicited our internal response and lead to our interpretation of the underlined meaning of those presented stimulus. With our 3-level of thought process, we will have our internal stimuli, which are our thoughts and emotion towards the physical stimulus and the internal stimulus will bring up the outward response(s), which are visible feedbacks to the physical stimulus in the environment. Osgood also suggested that by measuring the visible outward response we can determine the intensity of emotion that has been brought up by the physical stimulus.

With the development of the Atlas, affective meanings are used as universal functional markers with the E-P-A dimension and they have high validity in measuring indigenous and cross-cultural comparisons. These affective meanings are being widely applied on social-cultural studies on social dynamics, international communication, mental illness stigma and connotation of racial concepts, etc. It has a great contribution to the development of cross-cultural researches and also international communications.