George Schlager Welsh

George Schlager Welsh (September 24, 1918 – December 10, 1990), an early personality researcher, was best known for his research on creativity.[1] Having a diverse range of experiences in psychopathology and personality assessment during World War II times, he dedicated his career to developing and utilizing personality assessment tools.[1]

Biography

George Schlager Welsh was born on September 24, 1918 in Kingston, Pennsylvania.[1] His father was an architect and his mother was a homemaker; together they had four children, George and three daughters.[1]

George S. Welsh met and married Alice Mendenhall, a speech pathologist, at the University of Minnesota in 1949.[1] They do not appear to have had any children. About 10 years later, the two moved to Chapel Hill, NC, where they spent the remainder of their lives. G. S. Welsh died on December 10, 1990, at the age of 72, at his home, the historic Woolen-Roberts-Welsh House, in Chapel Hill, NC.[1][2] Following his death, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill developed the Welsh Professorship, in honor of his and his wife’s commitment to the university and the community of Chapel Hill.[3]

His wife, Alice Welsh, died December 23, 2013, at the age of 93, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.[4]

Education and early career

Welsh developed an early interest in language and psychology, earning his Bachelors degree in psychology and English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940.[1] He then continue his education at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his Master’s degree in clinical and experimental psychology in 1943.[1]

During World War II, Welsh served in many capacities, both military and academic. He served as an assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania.[1] He also served as a psychometrist at the Army Induction Center in Philadelphia and as psychologist in many other locations.[1] Circa 1945, he became the chief of Psychology Service at Bushnell General Hospital in Utah, where he was tasked with assessing the mental status of Italian POWs, despite his lack knowledge of the language.[1] This spawned his desire to develop non-verbal measures of psychopathology that could be used across language barriers, an interest that remained with him throughout the remainder of his education.[1]

In 1947, George S. Welsh entered the University of Minnesota’s clinical psychology doctoral program.[1] While still working on his degree in 1948, he was appointed Acting Chief Psychologist at Fort Snelling Veterans Administration Hospital in Minneapolis.[1] While working at the VA Hospital, 1948 to 1949, he attempted to develop a non-verbal version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). He created 400+ black and white designs to use for this measure. People were then to select which pictures they liked and disliked. Welsh sought to match image preference tendencies with specific emotional disorders. This work became his doctoral dissertation. In 1949, Welsh earned his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “A projective figure-preference test for diagnosis of psychopathology: I. A preliminary investigation,” focused on developing a this non-verbal test for psychopathology.[5] Although this measure was not a successful measure of psychopathology, it spawned a career long interest in psychological assessment.[5]

Professional career

Following the receipt of his PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1949, Dr. G. S. Welsh worked for the Veterans’ Administration in the Bay Area and served as assessment researcher at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research at UC Berkeley.[1] When at UC Berkeley, he developed close relationships with Harrison Gough and Frank Barron.[1] He began collaborating with Gough and Barron on researching personality assessment and the nature of creativity.[1] These interests and collaborations continued throughout Welsh’s life. Welsh realized the non-verbal MMPI he created while working on his PhD may be tapping into something besides psychopathology and emotional disorders. He began exploring the idea that it may be tapping into creativity, something that is often very closely linked with psychopathology.

In 1959, Welsh developed the Welsh Figure Preference Test, as a modified version of the non-verbal MMPI.[1][5][6] The purpose of this test was to measure or predict creativity.[6] Similar to the non-verbal MMPI, this test consisted of 400 black and white figures, which participants were to indicate which ones they liked and disliked.[5][6] Welsh classified these various figures as “creative,” meaning they were complex and asymmetric, and “not creative,” meaning they were simple and symmetric.[5][6] Liking more creative pictures was thought to be indicative of a more creative personality.[5][6] The next step was the creation of the Barron-Welsh art scale.[7]

In 1963, Welsh collaborated with Frank Barron in the creation of the Barron-Welsh Art Scale.[7] This was a more Freudian-based measure of creativity than the Welsh Figure Preference Test.[7] Participants were given 86 benign figures (lines or shapes) and asked to draw images incorporating those images.[7] The drawn figures were then classified as “creative” or “not creative,” based on the same criteria as before; drawing more creative figures than not creative figures was thought to predict increased creativity.[7]

In 1953, Welsh joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[1] While at UNC, Chapel Hill, Welsh co-authored many publications and had many enriching experiences.[1] In 1956, Welsh co-authored Basic Readings on the MMPI in Psychology and Medicine.[8] Then, from 1956 to 1957, Welsh was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the Instituto di Psicologia in Florence, Italy.[1] Then in 1960, and later in 1972, he co-authored and co-edited An MMPI Handbook, editions 1 & 2, comprehensive texts on the MMPI.[1][9] In 1962, Welsh coauthored, alongside E. Earl Baughman, Personality: a Behavioral Science, one of the first textbooks on personality.[10]

Next, in 1963, Welsh began serving as research coordinator for the North Carolina Governor’s School for the academically and artistically talented.[1] Here he used summer program attendees as study subjects. Utilizing the Barron-Welsh Art Scale, he assessed the creative expectations for the school’s students.[1] This was a critical experience for his career, in that he was able to establish his measure as a reliable predictor of creativity among children.

In 1975, Welsh published a seminal piece in creativity literature, a comprehensive volume of his work on creativity and intelligence entitled Creativity and Intelligence: A Personality Approach.[11] In this text, he introduced two new dimensions of creative personality: intellectence, the capacity to utilize abstract intelligence, and origence, the capacity to produce novel ideas.[1][11] In 1992, W. Grant Dahlstrom stated, “This work is a lasting contribution to the challenging task of predicting creative talent.” Multiple editions have since been updated and published.[1]

Throughout the remainder of his career, he taught many psychology courses at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, including personality courses and assessment courses, directed doctoral dissertation research for 32 graduate students, and continued studying and publishing on creativity and personality assessment.[1]

Impact on personality research

Using Google Scholar, it can been demonstrated that George S. Welsh had a vast impact on personality research and assessment.[12] As of April 15, 2015, Welsh’s first and second authored articles (those which it can be inferred that Welsh made a significant contribution to) on personality and measurement have been cited hundreds of times over the past few decades of research, detailed below.[12]

An MMPI handbook: A guide to use in clinical practice and research (1960) has been cited in 452 individual texts. “Artistic perception as a possible factor in personality style: Its measurement by a figure preference test” (1952) has been cited in 299 individual texts. “An anxiety index and an internalization ratio for the MMPI” (1952) has been cited in 152 individual texts. “An extension of Hathaway's MMPI profile coding system” (1948) has been cited in 68 individual texts. “Personality correlates of creative potential in talented high school students” (1966) has been cited in 62 individual texts. "MMPI profiles and factor scales A and R” (1965) has been cited in 37 individual texts. “A technique for objective configural analysis of MMPI profiles” (1952) has been cited in 25 individual texts. Personality: A behavioral science (1962) has been cited in 25 individual texts. “Detection of anxiety by use of the Wechsler Scale” (1946) has been cited in 19 individual texts. “Sex, masculinity—feminity, and intelligence” (1977) has been cited in 14 individual texts. “Personality correlates of intelligence and creativity in gifted adolescents” (1976) has been cited in 17 individual texts. Gifted Adolescents: A Handbook of Test Results (1969) has been cited in 16 individual texts. “The MMPI as diagnostic differentiator: a reply to Rubin” (1950) has been cited in 14 individual texts. “Some practical uses of MMPI profile coding” (1951) has been cited in 13 individual texts. “Comparison of D-48, Terman CMT, and Art Scale scores of gifted adolescents” (1966) has been cited in 12 individual texts. “Perspectives in the Study of Creativity*” (1973) has been cited in 6 individual texts. Some of his early texts do not appear in this list due to limited record keeping and citation tracking. In total, Welsh’s work on personality and assessment has been cited 1206+ times.

Collectively, these numbers demonstrated the impact George Schlager Welsh has had on personality assessment and measurement development.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Dahlstrom, W. G. (1992). "George Schlager Welsh (1918-1990): Obituary". American Psychologist. 47 (10): 1238. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.47.10.1238.
  2. ↑ Gardner. "Snapshots of Old Chapel Hill, Historic Homes Located in the Franklin-Rosemary Chapel Hill NC Historic District". North Carolina Fine Architecture.
  3. ↑ "The Dr. George and Alice Welsh Professorship". UNC College of Arts & Sciences. The Arts and Sciences Foundation at UNC Chapel Hill.
  4. ↑ Keck, Aaron (2013). "Longtime Town Leader Alice Welsh Passes Away". Chapelboro. Chapelboro.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Akin, L. J.; Richardson Foundation, G. I. (1967). A REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON THE WELSH FIGURE PREFERENCE TEST. Greensboro, NC.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Welsh, G. S. (1980). Welsh Figure Preference Test. Menlo Park, CA.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Welsh, G.; Barron, F. (1963). Barron Welsh Art Scale. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
  8. ↑ Welsh, G. S.; Dahlstrom, W. G. (1956). Basic readings on the MMPI in psychology and medicine. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  9. ↑ Dahlstrom, W. G.; Welsh, G. S.; Dahlstrom, L. E. (1972). An MMPI handbook. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  10. ↑ Baughman, E. Earl; Welsh, G. S. (1962). Personality: A Behavioral Science. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
  11. 1 2 Welsh, G. S. (1975). Creativity and Intelligence: A Personality Approach. Chapel Hill, NC: Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  12. 1 2 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=G.+S.+Welsh&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11. Retrieved 15 April 2015. Missing or empty |title= (help)
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