George Schlager Welsh
| George Schlager Welsh | |
|---|---|
| Born | George Schlager Welsh 24 September 1918 Kingston, Pennsylvania |
| Died | 10 December 1990 (aged 72) Chapel Hill, North Carolina |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
| Alma mater | University of Minnesota |
| Doctoral advisor | Paul E. Meehl |
George Schlager Welsh (September 24, 1918 – December 10, 1990), an early personality researcher, was best known for his research on creativity. Having a diverse range of experiences in psychopathology and personality assessment during World War II times, he dedicated his career to developing and utilizing personality assessment tools.
George Schlager Welsh was born on September 24, 1918 in Kingston, Pennsylvania. His father was an architect and his mother was a homemaker; together they had four children, George and three daughters.
George S. Welsh met and married Alice Mendenhall, a speech pathologist, at the University of Minnesota in 1949. They do not appear to have had any children. About 10 years later, the two moved to Chapel Hill, NC, where they spent the remainder of their lives. G. S. Welsh died on December 10, 1990, at the age of 72, at his home, the historic Woolen-Roberts-Welsh House, in Chapel Hill, NC. Following his death, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill developed the Welsh Professorship, in honor of his and his wife’s commitment to the university and the community of Chapel Hill.
His wife, Alice Welsh, died December 23, 2013, at the age of 93, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Welsh developed an early interest in language and psychology, earning his bachelor's degree in psychology and English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940. He then continue his education at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his master's degree in clinical and experimental psychology in 1943.
During World War II, Welsh served in many capacities, both military and academic. He served as an assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as a psychometrist at the Army Induction Center in Philadelphia and as psychologist in many other locations. Circa 1945, he became the chief of Psychology Service at Bushnell General Hospital in Utah, where he was tasked with assessing the mental status of Italian POWs, despite his lack knowledge of the language. This spawned his desire to develop non-verbal measures of psychopathology that could be used across language barriers, an interest that remained with him throughout the remainder of his education.
In 1947, George S. Welsh entered the University of Minnesota’s clinical psychology doctoral program. While still working on his degree in 1948, he was appointed Acting Chief Psychologist at Fort Snelling Veterans Administration Hospital in Minneapolis. While working at the VA Hospital, 1948 to 1949, he attempted to develop a non-verbal version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). He created 400+ black and white designs to use for this measure. People were then to select which pictures they liked and disliked. Welsh sought to match image preference tendencies with specific emotional disorders. This work became his doctoral dissertation. In 1949, Welsh earned his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “A projective figure-preference test for diagnosis of psychopathology: I. A preliminary investigation,” focused on developing a this non-verbal test for psychopathology. Although this measure was not a successful measure of psychopathology, it spawned a career long interest in psychological assessment.
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