Jacob "Jack" Block (April 28, 1924 – January 13, 2010) was a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. His main areas of research were personality theory, personality development, research methodology, personality assessment, longitudinal research, and

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

. He often collaborated with his wife Jeanne Block. His most renowned body of work, undertaken primarily with his wife, was a longitudinal study on a cohort of more than 100 San Francisco Bay Area toddlers. He studied them regularly for nearly 30 years. Unlike most longitudinal studies, the Blocks' focused on the psychological makeup and history of the subjects, rather than quantitative measures such as IQ. The study tracked how the subjects' background influenced their later choices and the outcomes of their lives. Block was born in Brooklyn,

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

, and received a bachelor's degree from

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

. He earned his Ph.D. from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1950. He received many awards over the years and was a fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

. One of Block's studies drew particular notice in the news media. Published in ''The Journal of Research in Personality'' in 2006, it found that subjects who at 3 years old had seemed thin-skinned, rigid, inhibited and vulnerable tended at 23 to be political conservatives. On the other hand, 3-year-olds characterized as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating and resilient were inclined to become liberals.

Book publications

*"The Q-Sort Method in Personality Assessment and Psychiatric Research", 1961 *"The Challenge of Response Sets", 1965 *''Lives Through Time'', 1971 *''Personality as an Affect-Processing System'', 2002 *''The Q-Sort in Character Appraisal'', 2008

References

External links

UC Berkeley obituary
20th-century American psychologists 1924 births 2010 deaths Stanford University alumni Brooklyn College alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Quantitative psychologists Personality psychologists {{US-psychologist-stub