Jerome E. Singer


Jerome Everett Singer was the founding chair of the Medical and Clinical Psychology Department at Uniformed Services University. He is best known for his contributions to the two-factor theory of emotion. He also served as one of the fourteen members on the National Research Council committee on human performance in 1985. Singer played a role in the cognitive revival of modern psychology. His main area of expertise was the psychological and physiological effects of various types of stress.

Early life and education

Jerome E. Singer was born in the Bronx in 1934. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1956 and earned his PhD in 1960 from the University of Minnesota. He studied under Stanley Schachter who was a former student of Kurt Lewin. He became a fellow at the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research and went on to become a professor at Pennsylvania State University and at the State University of New York's Stony Brook campus. Later in 1976 he moved to the Uniformed Services University where he founded and chaired the Medical and Clinical Psychology Department.
He died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife of 52 years, Linda Ascher Singer survived him. They had three children together, Judith, Matthew, and Daniel, and three grandchildren.

Career

He was one of 14 members on the National Research Council committee on human performance in 1985. With a small group of other intellectuals he studied a new version of medical psychology that was an integration of social psychology, psychopathology, and psychobiology. This field deals with physical and mental health. Singer focused primarily on stress and its effects on health.
Singer has been referred to as the "best second author" in psychology, writing with and for Stan Schachter, Dave Glass, Andy Baum, and Leon Festinger. He looked at many things including cognitive alteration of feeling states, organ transplants and the psychosocial processes involved, Type A behavior and possible animal models, stress, and the interaction between psychology and public health.
He is most known for the Schachter-Singer theory that he and Stanley Schachter developed in 1962. This was a new theory in emotion research that took into account cognitive factors, something that had not been considered until the resurgence of cognitive psychology a few years before. The two devised a model of emotional experience using cognitive terminology. The model showed stimulation leading to perception and interpretation. This would create general autonomic arousal and coupled with the context a particular emotion would be experienced by the individual. This experience would then feedback to be perceived and interpreted continuing the cycle. Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron conducted a study in 1974 that provided experimental support for the theory.
This research was not unanimously accepted by the academic world. Many criticized the theory for placing too much emphasis on a "general pattern of excitement" and for not explaining the process of emotion that Schachter and Singer claimed happened in the autonomic nervous system. Two major alternative theories were proposed. The Facial Feedback Theory focuses on facial muscle movements playing a role in interpretation. Lisa Feldman Barrett put for a theory of two dimensions of emotion, valence and arousal. All emotions can be placed on this two-dimensional grid.
Some of his other research topics included Machiavellianism, effects of noise, human factors, cognitive alteration of feeling states, human organ transplantation and the psychosocial factors involved, an animal model of Type A behavior, stress, and public health.

Selected publications