From there he went to Yale University where, while teaching full-time at Brooklyn College in New York City, he earned his PhD in 1951.
[2] Berlynes first academic teaching position was at St. Andrew's University in Scotland while he was still a student at Cambridge.
He was also a resident member at the Centre International d'Epistemologie Genetique in Geneva, Switzerland from 1958 to 1959, and a visiting scientist and the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland from 1959 until 1960.
[2] Berlyne has published seven books, including: Conflict, Arousal and Curiosity (1960), Humor and its Kin (1972), Invited Commentary: B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972), and Behaviorism?
His work focused on "why organisms display curiosity and explore their environment, why they seek knowledge and information".
The last of these was a term coined by Berlyne which attempted to describe the hedonic levels of arousal fluctuation through stimuli such as novelty, complexity, surprisingness, incongruity.