UpDate - Vol. 15, No. 5, Page 1
September 28, 1995
Prof. Graham receives life achievement award

     Frances Keesler Graham, professor emerita of psychology, has come
a long way in her profession as a psychophysiologist from being told
at Yale that she would not get a job because she was a woman to
receiving the most prestigious honors in her field.
     Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988, one of the
highest achievements for a scientist, Graham recently 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.
      For  achieving high scientific distinction in the face  of
   social obstacles presented to a devoted wife and mother,  and
   so  for  offering us all a model for independence,  integrity
   and fullness of life.

     The subject of this tribute is an energetic, enthusiastic and
involved woman. "They always describe me as working more than five
decades, " she commented with mild wonder at the length of her career.
For Graham, time obviously flies when you're having fun, and she said
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 said.
     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 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.
     According to Thomas Scott, associate dean for research and
graduate studies in the College of Arts and Science and previously
chairperson of the Department of Psychology when Graham came to
Delaware, Graham's research has had enormous impact on explaining such
phenomena as conditioning or learning, attention and development.
     "It is a tribute to Fran that she has accomplished so much in
spite of the biases she faced as a woman in science," Scott said. "In
addition to her professional work, Fran has raised three children, who
are themselves successful professionals. In 1988, she was only the
fourth female psychologist ever elected to the National Academy of
Sciences [founded by Abraham Lincoln], and the gold medal from the
American Psychological Association is the single highest award offered
in psychology," he said.
     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, among
her honors.
     She also was named a William James Fellow of the American
Psychological Society in 1990.
                                                   -Sue Swyers Moncure