University of Delaware Office of Public Relations The Messenger Vol. 5, No. 1/1995 Gold Medal Award recognizes life achievements in psychology Frances Keesler Graham, professor emerita of psychology, has come a long way in her profession as a psychophysiologist. After being told at Yale that she would not get a job because she was a woman, she recently received the most prestigious honor in her field. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988, one of the highest achievements for a scientist, Graham has received the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science from the American Psychological Assn., a professional organization with 125,000 members. One medal is given worldwide each year in recognition of the scientist who has made the most outstanding contributions to psychology during his or her lifetime. The award citation honored her with these words: For 50 years of dedicated effort and extraordinary talent, during which Frances Graham shaped the discipline of psychophysiology and offered remarkable insights into the processes of the neonatal mind. For contributions to a scientific definition of orienting, attention, startle, excitation and inhibition that have defined subsequent study in these areas. For empirical studies marked by uncompromising standards of scientific rigor, a style that produced the rigid data blocks that support her towering theoretical insights. The subject of this tribute is an energetic, enthusiastic and involved woman. "They always describe me as working more than five decades," she says, and she thoroughly enjoys her work. "I'm excited about my research. I get a kick out of what I am doing. There aren't many of us involved in psychophysiology, but we are a dedicated group." Psychophysiology involves the relationship between mental and bodily processes. Graham's research has taken several turns, but, basically, involves a study of animal and human brains through physical reactions to stimuli, using non-invasive methods. "I am a believer in simplicity in experiments," she says. Her early experiments as a Yale graduate student involved rats and how they responded to stimuli in a discriminative learning situation. The rats were placed in an alley, and when they heard one tone, by pressing a bar at the far end of the alley, they received a pellet. When they heard another tone, they did not receive a pellet. "They learned to discriminate," she recalled. "They would hurry down the alley when they got the signal that a pellet was waiting; otherwise, they just ambled." She also began measuring startle reactions with rats-research that she later continued with human subjects. Married to an internist, David Graham, and the mother of three, she moved to Washington University Medical School as a clinical psychologist, where she began her work with infants, babies suffering oxygen deprivation, brain-damaged children and infants born without forebrains. Using electrodes, she studied the response of children to visual stimuli and colors and, by inference, what part of the brain was responding to different stimuli. It was there that she was part of a team to develop a test of brain function still used today. The family's next move was to the University of Wisconsin in 1957 where she first worked in the Department of Pediatrics and from 1969, also in that school's Department of Psychology. Her research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Blindness, the National Science Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. While at Wisconsin, she completed research on infants and the effect of brain-damaging events. Since coming to Delaware in 1986, Graham has been working with Robert Simons, conducting research on the body's automatic responses to certain stimuli and how the brain processes these. Using students as subjects, electrodes are placed to measure variations of heart rate, scalp-recorded brain changes and eye blinks to specific stimuli to determine how the brain processes information. Tones of varying loudness are used. In some instances, no task (i.e., listening to a tone) is given to the subject and the response is less than if the subject is told to listen for a tone. Other research showed that a soft tone pre-stimulus prevented blinking to a subsequent loud tone. Tests of loudness showed that the soft tone sounds louder and the loud tone sounds softer, than when the tones are sounded alone. With infants, the lesser tone does not decrease the blink reaction to the louder tone, indicating that babies' brains are not as fully developed as adults. In 1994, a tribute to Graham's career achievements was held in Atlanta at the 33rd annual Meeting of the Society of Psychophysiological Research. The meeting was attended by distinguished scientists from around the world who spoke about their research and how it had been shaped and influenced by Graham's teachings and scholarly activity. Graham has been a member of several publication and editorial boards. She has received a Distinguished Alumna Award from Pennsylvania State University, where she received her bachelor's degree, and the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal from Yale University. She also was named a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 1990. -Sue Swyers Moncure