Yerkes, Robert Mearns
1876–1956
AMERICAN COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGIST, RESEARCHER
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Ph.D., 1902
Brief Overview
Robert Mearns Yerkes was a leading figure in comparative psychology, a branch of psychology that studies animal behavior and often makes comparisons from species to species. The ultimate goal is to find general principles that may sometimes shed light on human behavior. Yerkes published several books on the subject. Among them was The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life, an influential book he coauthored with his wife, Ada Watterson Yerkes. He also started the first U.S. scientific journal devoted solely to the study of animal behavior. In 1929, Yerkes founded the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology, the first laboratory for nonhuman primate research in the United States. The laboratory was later renamed the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
Early in his career as an animal researcher, Yerkes also worked with John Dodson to develop the Yerkes-Dodson law. This law originally related the strength of a stimulus to the speed of avoidance learning in mice. It has since been used, however, to explain the effect of arousal on human performance. The basic idea is that there is an optimal level of arousal for the best performance on any task, and this level depends upon the task's difficulty.
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