Abram Amsel (December 4, 1922 – August 31, 2006) was a Canadian-born American psychologist and faculty member at several universities.
[2] Shortly after he finished the Ph.D., Amsel completed research that expanded upon the Hull-Spence theory of learning and motivation.
They were based on finding a frustration effect (FE) with rats in a double-runway: faster running after reward omission at the beginning of the second runway.
[4] An alternative account of the FE, now termed the omission effect and supported subsequently by a series of experiments, was presented by Staddon and Innis in 1966,[5][6][7] and the topic rather faded from the animal-learning literature.
Later in his career, Amsel's research interests evolved from learning theory toward neurobiology as he worked to understand developmental differences in his young and mature rat subjects.