Janet Taylor Spence

Janet Allison Taylor Spence (August 29, 1923 – March 16, 2015) was an American psychologist who worked in the field of the psychology of anxiety and in gender studies.

Early life

Spence was born on August 29, 1923, in Toledo, Ohio. She was the older of two daughters. Her sister was born in 1927. Her father, John Chrichton, and her mother, Helen Taylor, were both active members of their community. Janet Taylor Spence's parents met in New York where John was working as a reporter and Helen was studying for a master's degree in economics at Columbia University. John joined the school board after running for governor, and Helen worked with the League of Women Voters.

Education

Spence received her undergraduate degree in Psychology at Oberlin College in 1945. The fall after finishing her bachelor's degree, she began a graduate program at Yale University, which she left for the New York Rotating Internship Program. It is here that she changed and better developed her interests from clinical practice to human behavior. She later transferred to the University of Iowa. Yale proved to be an important part of her life as it was where she met her future husband and co-creator of the Hull-Spence Hypothesis of discrimination learning, Kenneth Spence. While at the University of Iowa, she worked as his graduate student doing anxiety research.

Post-education work and life

After graduation, Spence accepted a position as a psychology instructor at Northwestern University. In 1951, her first article, "Anxiety and strength of UCS as determiners of the amount of eyelid conditioning," was published with Kenneth Spence as the co-author. In the same year, her first independently authored article, "The relationship of anxiety to the conditioned eyelid response," was published. She later received associate professor standing and stayed at this job until 1960. She first experienced gender discrimination in the work force when she began teaching at Northwestern University. She was given the opportunity to be the first female faculty member because, as Janet Taylor Spence said, "the chair of the university thought 'having a woman on the faculty was a novel and interesting idea,'" against the belief of some of the other faculty members. She also wrote a statistics textbook. She also received the American Psychological Foundation's 2004 Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology (American Psychologist, 2004). She has been a visiting research professor at Harvard twice. She has claimed that "as children and teenagers, my sister and I were fully exposed to all these activities...perhaps it was due to the exposure to the human suffering so common during the Depression and my parents' concern with it that as a young adolescent I decided I wanted to become a psychologist".

In 2009, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions was established by the APS Board of Directors to recognize transformative contributions to psychological science by rising stars in the field. The award is a fitting tribute to Spence, who developed new approaches to research and pioneering tools including the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, as well as crossing disciplinary boundaries with work on topics ranging from schizophrenia to developmental psychology to gender bias.

Works Spence, J. T. (1988). Janet Taylor Spence. In A. N. O'Connell, & N. F. Russo (Eds.), Models of achievement: Reflections of eminent women in psychology (Vol. 2). (pp. 191–203). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Spence, J. T. (1999). Thirty years of gender research: a personal chronicle. In W. B. Swann, Jr., J. H. Langolis, & L. A. Gilbert (Eds.), Sexism and stereotypes in modern society: The gender science of Janet Taylor Spence. (pp. 35–42). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.Further Reading Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. L. (1978). Masculinity and femininity: Their psychological dimensions, correlates and antecedents. Austin: University of Texas Press. Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. (1972b). Who likes competent women? Competence, sex-role congruence of interest, and subjects' attitudes toward women as determinants of interpersonal attraction. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2, 197-213. Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R. L., & Stapp, J. (1973). The Personal Attributes Questionnaire: A Measure of sex-role stereotypes and masculinity-femininity. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 4, 43-44 (Ms. 617).