Janet Allison Taylor Spence (August 29, 1923 – March 16, 2015) was an American psychologist who worked in the field of the psychology of anxiety and in gender studies.
Janet Taylor Spence's parents met in New York where John was working as a reporter and Helen was studying for a master's degree in economics at Columbia University.
[4] John joined the school board after running for governor, and Helen worked with the League of Women Voters.
Yale proved to be an important part of her life as it was where she met her future husband and co-creator of the Hull-Spence Hypothesis of discrimination learning, Kenneth Spence.
[5][6] While attending Yale University as a clinical student, Spence worked under Clark L. Hull, the predominant learning theorist of his era.
In 1951, her first article, "Anxiety and strength of UCS as determiners of the amount of eyelid conditioning,” was published with Kenneth Spence as the co-author.
In 1974, she began editing Contemporary Psychology, where she had started as an associate editor to Gardner Lindzey five years prior.
During the 1970s, she was on the Board of Directors for the APA and served on the Communications Committee with oversight for development of a National Information System for Psychology.
She has claimed that "as children and teenagers, my sister and I were fully exposed to all these activities...perhaps it was due to the exposure to the human suffering so common during the Depression and my parents' concern with it that as a young adolescent I decided I wanted to become a psychologist".
The award is a fitting tribute to Spence, who developed new approaches to research and pioneering tools including the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, as well as crossing disciplinary boundaries with work on topics ranging from schizophrenia to developmental psychology to gender bias.