Starke R. Hathaway

Starke R. Hathaway (August 22, 1903 – July 4, 1984) was an American psychologist who co-authored the psychological assessment known as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). He was a longtime faculty member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.

Early life Hathaway was born in Central Lake, Michigan, on August 22, 1903, moved to Kansas at the age of 7, and grew up in Marysville, Ohio. As a child, Starke showed great interest in mechanical, electrical, chemical, and quantitative processes. By the time he was 8 years old, Hathaway was allowed to build his own workshop outside the family home.

Education Following his electrical interests and drive, Hathaway entered the school of engineering at Ohio University in the early 1920s. However, he was disappointed in the lack of opportunities and outlets that his talent required, and he felt that he was not being challenged.

After graduation, Hathaway served as a research assistant in engineering with Harry Johnson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here, he developed an automatic camera that enabled researchers to record participants' movements while they slept. This invention is one of the contributions acknowledged by the American Psychological Associations in awarding him the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology in 1977.

In 1932, Hathaway took a position as a lecturer while also pursuing his PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota under the mentorship of Richard M. Elliott. During his time there, he was influenced by the work of Karl Lashley, B. F. Skinner, Edna Heidbreder, and Donald G. Paterson. He received his PhD in psychology, with a concentration in physiology, and his dissertation was titled, "An Action Potential Study of Neuromuscular Relations during the Simple Reaction". The MMPI was developed specifically with an empirical criterion approach to operationalize clinical phenomena derived by selecting items known to be endorsed by patients with certain pathologies. The difference between this approach and other test development strategies used around that time was that it was in many ways atheoretical (not based on any particular theory) and thus the initial test was not aligned with the prevailing psychodynamic theories. This measure was successful in capturing aspects of human psychopathology that were recognizable and meaningful despite changes in clinical theories.

Acceptance of the test grew steadily (Dahlstrom, 1992) until by the late 1950s, the MMPI had become the most widely used objective measure of personality and psychopathology, and the subject of both basic and applied research.

However, the MMPI had flaws of validity that were soon apparent and could not be overlooked indefinitely. The control group for its original testing consisted of a very small number of individuals, mostly young, white, and married people from rural Midwestern geographic areas. The MMPI also faced problems with a number of the items were deemed outdated or offensive because of sexual or religious content, its terminology not being relevant to the population it was supposed to measure, and it became necessary for the MMPI to measure a more diverse number of potential mental health problems, such as "suicidal tendencies, drug abuse, and treatment-related behaviors."

With graduate student Paul Meehl, Hathaway developed three validity scales embedded within the MMPI: the L, or lie, scale indicates when a client is "faking good"; the F, or infrequency, scale indicates when a client is "faking bad"; the K, defensiveness scale identifies individuals in denial about their behaviors and symptoms. The initial scales included: hypochondriasis (Hp), depression (D), hysteria (Hy), psychopathic deviate (Pd), paranoia (Pa), psychasthenia (Ps), schizophrenia (Sc), mania (Ma). Shortly after the MMPI was published, research began to be conducted on its use with adolescents, and in the mid-50s Hathaway and Monachesi, intending to expand use of the test by employing it to predict delinquency among adolescents, conducted a series of longitudinal studies and reported their findings in a book, organizing coded profiles for juveniles based on adult atlas of profiles

Instrumentation Consistent with his life-long interests and background, Hathaway's early work focused on developing mechanical and electrical devices to measure psychological processes. His first publication as a graduate student in 1929, "A Comparative Study of Psychogalvanic and Association Time Measures: A New Psychogalvanic Apparatus", demonstrated his ability to conceptualize psychological and mental processes and to use biological and engineering methods to quantify them. This apparatus was used to measure galvanic skin response in a reliable manner, both at rest and during emotionally salient conditions. He patented this device as a "lie detector" and built and sold 30 devices to other psychology departments. He was henceforth noted nationwide as the inventor of a lie-detector machine and it was used to solve a murder case in Athens, Ohio.

Physiological psychology Physiological psychology is not a separate science but is, as the name implies, a link between two basically similar sciences, physiology and psychology. Its content and definitions are determined by its raison d'etre; namely, by the need felt by psychologists working in the fields of general, clinical, and animal psychology for an enriched vocabulary and for a simplified by fundamentally workable grounding in the allied biological sciences.

As a clinician Later in his career, Hathaway moved beyond his original interest in psychophysiology and diagnosis and became interested in psychotherapy. He avoided theories and orientations that dictated universal treatment strategies and instead favored models that were designed to fit particular cases and clients. Took an empirical approach to cognitive/medical psychology regarding therapy, rather than imposing his own biases or preconceptions on data, let the data speak for themselves. He referred to his methods as pragmatical or "redirective psychotherapy" and described them as resembling Albert Elis rational emotive behavior therapy.

Roland Peek (the former chief of Psychological Services for the Department of Public Welfare of Minnesota) contributed to the collection of letters presented to Hathaway at a ceremony honoring his contributions in psychology in 1969. In it, he wrote:

Starke Hathaway? One of those unforgettable characters, as everyone knows, of course. But why? Well for me there is a kaleidoscopic glitter of images and memories, all unforgettable: his eyes, kindly and penetrating; the unsettling frequency of his mind-reading in clinical settings; his absent-minded combing of a brain model as he paced and lectured in physiological psychology, with a scrap of comb rescued from the floor; unmatched shoes cocked uncomfortably on a VA desk-top; his quiet encouragement of an uncertain student, and his skillful reshaping of a brash one; white duck trousers made greasy from crawling under a car just before the lecture; incisive cuts through words to the essence of things. If psychology has some kind of soul, Starke Hathaway is surely part of it. Hathaway was an avid believer in test norms and standard units of measurement for assessing clinical dimensions. He insisted that one should not develop norms to be used for a specific population and believed that the MMPI norms should be the same for the varying groups that take it, from the elderly, adolescent, or international and cross-cultural population. Although Hathaway was not the first psychologist to address the impact of response bias on the quality of data obtained, his work with Paul Meehl on the development of the L, F, and K scales represented a major contribution to the science of personality assessment.

Hathaway's empirical orientation and his desire to apply rigorous objective methods to the science of psychology (from personality to physiology) and clinical, applied work advanced the field substantially. Although Hathaway was credited with many contributions and a lasting mark on the field, he discouraged accepting anything as "standard" (even the MMPI). Regarding the movement to revise the MMPI, he noted about what he saw as a "mystery of missing progress".

Hathaway had expressed disappointment with what he saw as a lack of progress in the field, and openly challenged researchers and academics to strive for innovation and to improve personality assessment through empirical iterative processes. Hathaway ended his professional career with the same down-to-earth, questioning, pragmatic approach he used when he began it.