Citizenship American Name Herman Spitz | Role Psychologist | |
Born March 2, 1925 (age 99)
Paterson, New Jersey ( 1925-03-02 ) Institutions Trenton State Hospital,
E. R. Johnstone Training and Research Center Alma mater Lafayette College,
New York University Known for Mental retardation studies Books Nonconscious movements, The raising of intelligence Education Lafayette College, New York University Fields Psychometrics, Intellectual disability | ||
Herman H. Spitz is an American psychologist known for his work measuring intelligence among those with developmental disability. He was Director of Research at the E.R. Johnstone Training and Research Center, which was a State Institution for upper level mentally retarded adolescents and young adults, in Bordentown, New Jersey, until he retired in 1989.
Spitz studied concepts such as mental age, and the abilities of autistic savants. He co-authored a survey of attempts to raise intelligence among people with mental retardation. He reported on programs like the Carolina Abecedarian Early Intervention Project which advocated the early education of poor children. Through use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, he reported that the Flynn effect of massive intelligence quotient gains in a single generation in many nations only applied to people in the average intelligence range. He also looked at the hereditarian hypothesis for general intelligence factor by examining Wechsler subtest patterns among mentally retarded test-takers. He published 2 books and over 100 papers in scholarly journals and books. His last book was Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages to Facilitated Communication, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1997).
In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on the measurement and significance of intelligence following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.