Neal E. Miller

Neal Elgar Miller (August 3, 1909 – March 23, 2002) was an American experimental psychologist. Described as an energetic man with a variety of interests, including physics, biology and writing, Miller entered the field of psychology to pursue these. With a background training in the sciences, he was inspired by professors and leading psychologists at the time to work on various areas in behavioral psychology and physiological psychology, specifically, relating visceral responses to behavior.

Miller's career in psychology started with research on "fear as a learned drive and its role in conflict". Work in behavioral medicine led him to his most notable work on biofeedback.

Life and education Miller was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1909. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest. His father, Irving Miller, worked at Western Washington University as chair of the Department of Education and Psychology. His father's position, in Neal Miller's words, "may have had something to do with" his interest in psychology. His unique ideas and experimental techniques to study these autonomic drives resulted in findings that changed ideas about motivations and behavior.

Miller was also one of the founding fathers behind the idea of biofeedback. Today, many of his ideas have been expanded and added to, but Miller has been credited with coming up with most of the basic ideas behind biofeedback. Miller was doing experimentation on conditioning and rats when he discovered biofeedback.

Neal Miller, along with John Dollard and O. Hobart Mowrer, helped to integrate behavioral and psychoanalytic concepts. They were able to translate psychological analytic concepts into behavioral terms that would be more easily understood. Specifically, they focused on the stimulus-response theory. These three men also recognized Sigmund Freud's understanding of anxiety as a "signal of danger" and that some things in Freud's work could be altered to fix this. Miller, Dollard and Mowrer believed that a person who was relieved of high anxiety levels would experience what is called "anxiety relief". Together with fellow psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer, Miller gives his name to the "Miller-Mowrer Shuttlebox" apparatus.

Over the course of his career, Miller wrote eight books and 276 papers and articles.

Controversy Miller's use of laboratory animals brought criticism from the animal rights movement but he defended the practice, arguing that if people had no right to use animals in research, then they had no right to kill them for food or clothing. He nevertheless acknowledged the complexity of the issue; "there is sacredness of all life. But where do we draw the line? That's the problem. Cats kill birds and mice. Dogs exploit other animals by killing and eating them. Humans have to draw the line somewhere in animal rights, or we're dead."

Honours In 1958, Miller was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Miller served as president of the American Psychological Association from 1960–61, and received the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1959 and the APA Citation for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 1991. In 1964 he received the National Medal of Science from President Johnson, the first psychologist to receive this honor. Miller is a distinguished member of PSI CHI International Honor Society for Psychology. In 1967, he received the Wilbur Cross Medal. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

He was also President of the Society for Neurosciences, the Biofeedback Society of America and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research.

Major works

Books

Republished as:

Selected articles