ABSTRACT
From the life of Henry Nissen, we learn something about the kind of personality that it takes to make a visible, lasting impact on psychology. The author explores the life of Henry Nissen, his contributions to psychology, and some of the reasons he is not often cited today. His work with the Yerkes Laboratories provides the basis for most of this chapter. Although Nissen's study was primitive by today's standards for such research, nearly 30 years after it was conducted could still call it 'the most adequate naturalistic study of anthropoid life in the scientific literature today'. The concept of motivation, which was at the heart of Nissen's psychology, dated back to his early work with Warden. Here Nissen discussed such issues as the genesis of perception, pattern specificity, the selective process of attention, concept formation, and symbolization and language. They usually attribute the development of post-World War II comparative psychology to such external influences as European ethology and sociobiology.
