Biography of J. Bruce Overmier
Bruce Overmier was born in New York 2 August 1938 (James Bruce Wheelwright, later adopted by Leslie L. Overmier, 1949). Raised in Piqua, Ohio, and later North Baltimore, Ohio. He graduated high school in 1956 and then received a BA degree in Chemistry from Kenyon College (Ohio) in 1960, an MA degree in General Psychology from Bowling Green State University (Ohio) 1962, and a PhD degree in Experimental Psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He is currently Professor of Psychology (Graduate Faculties of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science) and was Executive Officer (1973-78; 1981-83) and Director (1983-1989) of the Center for Center for Research in Learning, Perception, & Cognition (now, Center for Cognitive Science). Overmier has held postdoctoral fellowship awards from National Science Foundation (for study of Comparative Physiology at Queen Mary College, London, England), National Academy of Sciences (to Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland), Fogarty Center (to Institute of Physiological Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway), James McKeen Cattell Foundation (to Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University), Fulbright-Hayes (to Marine Biological Institute, Kotor, Yugoslavia), and the Norwegian Marshall Fund and later Norwegian Research Council (to University of Bergen). He won Scholar of the College Award (CLA University of Minnesota, 1989-92), the Quad-L Award in Psychology from the University of New Mexico (1999), Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Service Award in Behavioral Neuroscience & Comparative Psychology (2001), the Minnesota Psychological Association Outstanding Psychologist Award (2004), the American Psychological Association Neal Miller Lecturer Award in (2004), and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science (2005).
Overmier is recognized in 2000 Outstanding Scholars of 20 th Century and Who's Who in America (60 th Diamond Edition, 2006). He served as a National Research Society Sigma Xi Distinguished National Lecturer 1999-2000. In 1990, Overmier received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Kenyon College.
Overmier was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1965, Associate Professor in 1968, and Professor in 1971. He has also held appointment as Professor II in the Department of Biological and Medical Psychology at the University of Bergen (Norway) since 1992. Overmier was a licensed Psychologist in Minnesota from 1976-1994. Overmier has held term teaching appointments at University of Hawaii (USA), Kenyon College (USA), University of Bergen (Norway), Kansei Gakuin University Japan), University of Seville (Spain), as well as visiting research appointments to University of Newcastle (Australia). He has ongoing research collaborations with colleagues in Norway and Spain.
Overmier's research spans specialties of learning, memory, stress, psychosomatic disorders, and their biological substrates. This research has been carried out with a variety of species of laboratory animals (fish, birds, mammals) as well as with human client volunteers (with Down's Syndrome, Korsakoff's Syndrome, or Alzheimer's Disease). The laboratory animals serve as models for various forms of human dysfunction and the development of therapies (e.g., "learned helplessness" first reported and named by Overmier & Seligman, 1967, and popularized by Seligman as a model for depression-although it may be a better model for post-traumatic stress syndrome). Overmier has authored some 200 refereed research articles, book chapters, and books in his specialties. This research has been funded by NIMH and NSF.
Overmier has been a member and chair of the National Academy of Science's United States National Committee for Psychology (1991-2002), on the Board of Directors of American Psychological Society (1994-97) and a Member of the Council of Representatives of American Psychological Association (1987-90; 1995-97), on the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association (1999-2004), President of the Midwestern Psychological Association (1988-89), President of APA Division of Physiological and Comparative Psychology (1990-91), President of APA Division of Experimental Psychology (1992-93), President of the Pavlovian Society (1996-97), and President of the Society for General Psychology (2003); in addition he served as Secretary-Treasurer (1981-83) and on the Board of Governors (1983-1988) of the Psychonomic Society. Overmier serves on the Board of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences. Overmier has also sersved as Deputy Secretary General of the International Union of Psychological Science (1993-96), as a member of the Union's Executive Committee (1996-2004), and is currently President of the Union (2004-2008).
Career Reflections of J. Bruce Overmier
Science has intrigued me since I started reading science fiction early in high school. But during my college studies of the core sciences, I was distracted first by a girl friend and then by two lectures in psychology to which she took me on her campus during my last year (1960). These lectures were on (1) the "executive monkey" phenomenon wherein stress induced fatal ulcers, and (2) the POWs during the Korean War wherein reasonably healthy young men POWs sometimes "gave up", pulled a blanket over their heads, and were dead the next morning. The message I took away from these was that your 'mind' could kill you! This seems so important that after graduation from Kenyon College , I abandoned my BA major (chemistry) and applied to graduate school in psychology. There I had the good fortune to work with marvelous, flexible mentors, first John R. Schuck who stimulated my research in issues of controlling uncertainty and the Richard L. Solomon who taught me about "fear ", defense, and coping. In many ways, these early experiences have continued to shape my researches. I became interested in the consequences of uncontrolled trauma on later learning, leading to the initial demonstration of "learned helplessness"-and likely not unrelated to either the issue of uncertainty or those POWs that Edgar A. Schein (an R. L. Solomon Ph.D. student, as well) had interviewed. Later, my asking the question (sensible in the 1960-70s) of whether different fears were discriminably different for the individual led me into my researches on differential outcomes of responses and how 'expectancies' of these outcomes can guide choices among behaviors; this of course was a complete break with traditional Thorndikian psychology of learning in which reinforcers are viewed merely catalysts of learning and not learned about. But, I never quite forgot about those executive monkeys, and in the 1980s returned to study how helplessness inducing operations modulated ulcer formation-in animals. I add "in animals" because, I also became interested in the whole broader concept of animal models of human dysfunction-the various kinds of models, the structure of models, their functions in science, and importantly their usefulness in advancing our understanding-even treatments-of human dysfunctions. My interest today in fostering the study of animals in basic psychological research focusing on mechanisms of brain and behavior stands on all those past experiences taken together. It stands in spite of the almost faddish trends of contemporary cognitive psychology, its 'neuroimaging' phrenology, and emphasis on 'higher order' cognition that seems at times to ignore that basic bio-behavioral mechanisms underlie it all. Of course, there is room for both, need for both, and they will someday become synergistic. I have never regretted my change of field some 50 years ago. I have worked hard for psychology as a scientist and in the organizations that support psychological science, committing thousands of hours to its management. I have done so because psychology needs to be better organized to compete with the other sciences that are well organized for the funding so critical to both students and scholars. Psychology has been good to me, and I turn now to fostering its development in the international arena.
