[2] It was here that he was inspired to study psychology by George M. Stratton, a man for whom he held deep respect.
through this procedure he hoped to extinguish the troublesome behavior by perhaps "bringing under voluntary control responses which had been involuntary."
(Paradoxical Psychotherapy, Weeks and L'Abate p. 9) In 1938, after serving some time for the APA, he argued against many of Freud's psychoanalysis ideas.
This led him to write one of his most famous works “Are there any instincts?” Instead, he focused more on behaviorism and is credited with the title “response psychology”.
[4] In 1936, Dunlap joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles as Professor and Chairman of the department of Psychology.
During his time there Dunlap also wrote a pretty bold article about treating color blindness.
His article, entitled, “Color Blindness and its Therapy” was published in the Australian Journal of Optometry in 1945.
In his article, he argued against the idea of sex-linked colorblindness and equal affected of males and females.
[2] Dunlap wrote many books and articles detailing his theories and experimental work, including those that featured his inventions.
Dunlap improved the chonoscope so that it made less noise, did not need to be wound up, ran for longer periods of time, had a large, easy to read dial, and the hand automatically reset to zero.
John Watson was a heavy promoter for radical behaviorism, but Dunlap criticized this theory and proposed his own “response psychology”.
Each of the psychologists shaped the views on modern behaviorism, and were very interested in changing the ideas of introspection and instinct proposed by Freud.