{geni:about_me} Professor of Experimental and Comparative Psychology, University of Wisconsin

Jastrow's education in psychology began as auspiciously as any centered entirely in the U.S. could have in the late-nineteenth century. He received the first doctorate from the first formally organized Ph.D. program in psychologyin this country, G. Stanley Hall's graduate psychology program at Johns Hopkins which survived for only a few years in the mid-1880s. As a graduate student in 1884 Jastrow co-published an important article on psychophysics with C.S. Peirce who was at Hopkins as a lecturer and who was the first to encourage Jastrow to take up the new experimental psychology. Peirce gave Jastrow a lifelong reverence for logic for which Jastrow was later criticized when it dominated his approach as a popular media psychologist and a writer of self-help literature. Mental health was, in that later work, represented as the acquisition of the ability to think logically.

Jastrow's doctoral dissertation on psychophysics was widely cited, and still is cited and described in present day psychophysics literature (for instance the book by psychophysicist Lawrence Marks, 1978). Five years after the dissertation, Jastrow already had 25 publications. In William James' Principles of Psychology (1890) he is cited more than any other American psychologist with the possible exception of Cattell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Jastrow