Biography of paul meehlen

  • I was born January 3, 1920, in Minneapolis to Otto and Blanche Swedal; the name Meehl is my stepfather's.
  • Paul Everett Meehl was an American clinical psychologist.
  • Paul Everett Meehl (3 January 1920 – 14 February 2003) was an American clinical psychologist.

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    Paul E. Meehl was born on January 3, 1920, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Otto and Blanche Swedal. He lost both of his parents during his childhood; his father an intelligent man who valued education, committed suicide in 1931; his mother remarried (Meehl used his stepfather’s name) in 1934 and died soon afterward in 1936 from ether pneumonia following surgery for a brain tumor (Meehl 1989).

    Meehl was married to Alyce Roworth Meehl who died in 1972, and was later married to Dr. Leslie Jane Yonce for nearly 30 years. Dr. Yonce was very involved, helping Meehl in his research and writing (Yonce 2006), and she continues to maintain his Web site which houses Meehl’s complete bibliography and links to many of his papers.

    Dr. Meehl earned his B.A. (psychology major with a minor in Biometry) from the University of Minnesota in 1941, and in 1945 he was awarded his doctorate in clinical psychology from the same institution, he was hired as a faculty member and remained at the...

  • biography of paul meehlen

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    Abstract

    This article briefly examines the life and work of the late clinical psychologist and philosopher of science Paul E. Meehl. His thesis in Clinical versus Statistical Prediction (1954) that the data combination performed by mechanical operations, as compared to clinicians, achieves higher accuracy in predicting human behavior is one of the earliest theoretical works that laid the groundwork for utilizing statistics and computational modeling in research in psychiatry and clinical psychology. For today’s psychiatric researchers and clinicians grappling with the challenges of translating the ever-increasing data of the human mind into practice tools, Meehl’s advocacy for both accurate modeling of the data and their clinically relevant use is timely.

    Keywords: history of psychiatry, machine learning, scientific psychology, computational psychiatry, ethics

    From making a diagnosis, to creating a treatment plan, to deciding on a disposition for the patient who reports suic

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    In 1975, my undergraduate abnormal psychology teacher, Neil P. Young, made a claim that I will never forget: that Paul E. Meehl of the University of Minnesota was "the smartest living psychologist." I cannot remember how many reasons Dr. Young gave to support his claim. The only explanation I remember him giving concerned an informal study that Meehl conducted in which Meehl successfully predicted that the wall plaques in the stairwell of the Washington Monument would show more financial donations from fire departments than police departments.

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    Why was this study indicative of Meehl's brilliance? Because it showed that Meehl was able to come up with a prediction, subsequently verified by empirical observation, that no other living psychologist could have made. Think about it: If you spent your entire life making predictions about human behavior, would you ever have hypothesized that fire departments contributed more money to the Washington monument than police dep