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Mind Changers: Julian Rotter and Locus of Control

23/04/2012

Julian Rotter and Locus of Control

BBC Radio 4 - Mind Changers, Julian Rotter and Locus of Control

Claudia meets Julian Rotter, who promoted personality theory in clinical psychology.

Claudia Hammond meets Julian Rotter, who promoted personality theory in clinical psychology with his test to measure if a subject has an internal or external locus of control.

When, as a Psychology student, Claudia Hammond read about Locus of Control in Julian Rotter's Social Learning Theory she assumed its author, like most great Mind Changers, was no longer alive. Twenty years later she met him in his home near the University of Connecticut. He was happy to reflect on his career.
In 1966 Rotter published his famous IE scale. This measured whether the subject had an Internal Locus of Control - believing that they could affect the course of their life, that their choices would have an impact on what happened to them - or an External Locus of Control, in which case their life was guided by luck or fate and they themselves had little power to change things. The test has been developed in many ways since then, but it is still widely used today and the notion of Locus of Control has been particularly influential in healthcare. Claudia visits Guy's Hospital in London to hear from health psychologists Dr Nicky Thomas and Professor John Weinman about how it affects their work with patients.
Julian Rotter himself was one of the first clinical psychologists ever to be trained in the US and was to be extremely influential in training those who followed. He was proponent of the scientist-practitioner model and he worked hard to ensure that clinical psychology became a research-based discipline. He was largely responsible for bringing personality theory into the clinical arena.
Claudia also meets his wife, Doffie - a former graduate student of Rotter's, his friends and former colleagues at UCONN: Professors Charles Lowe, Marianne Barton and Jerome Smith. And hears from Margie Lachman of the Lifespan Developmental Psychology Laboratory at Brandeis University, how Locus of Control can change with age.

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