Anna Berliner
Biography
Family
Anna Meyer Berliner was born in Halberstadt, Germany on December 21st, 1888 to Jewish parents Henriette and Israel Meyer [1]. She grew up with three sisters named Grete, Elisabeth, and Gertrude. Her father had his own business in the women’s fashion industry. In 1910, she married Sigfrid Berliner, a physicist at the University of Leipzig[2]. During the year 1914, when war ensued, Anna was deported to the United States while her husband was declared an enemy of the state and held in the Bandō prisoner-of-war camp until 1920[1]. Anna returned to Germany but fled again with her husband as the Nazis gained power. Anna Meyer Berliner continued her work at several American universities until her death at the hands of a teenage male assailant in May 1977[1][2][3].
Education
Berliner had a typical gymnasium education[3]. She studied at the Realgymnasium in Hannover where she graduated in 1909 before pursuing further education[1]. First, she studied medicine at Freiburg in 1909 for two semesters. After moving to Berlin, she studied for a single semester in 1910 at the institute of psychology. When Berliner moved to Leipzig with her husband, she decided she wanted to study there as well[2]. She ended up studying with a slew of professors there - Klemm, Meumann, Spranger, Flechsig, Gregory and Brahn. But, when the labs at Leipzig started to move in a direction where women could participate more in studies, Berliner made a meeting with Wilhelm Wundt. She was the first and only woman to receive a PhD from him. After defending her thesis, the Berliners moved around quite a bit because of their status as German Jews and the racial injustices against them. They first moved to Tokyo. While here, Berliner became a student at the Imperial University. While her husband was imprisoned, and Berliner was deported to the United States, she studied at the University of California, Berkeley campus. After California, she made another move to Washington. Her education ended when she moved to New York and studied at Columbia University. During this time, she also worked in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum as a psychologist.
Work
When her husband was released from the Bando war camp, she moved back to Japan[2]. At this time, she worked a lot in advertising and as a psychological consultant for Hoshi Pharmaceuticals. In 1925, Anna and Siegfried moved back to Germany, where she conducted research, until 1938 when Germany was under Nazi rule. They made another move from Germany to the United States. Moving to Ohio, Berliner taught Japanese at Ohio State University. She also translated all the research she had previously done for the University of Chicago. For a year (1946-1947), she taught at Northern Illinois College of Optometry. Throughout all this time, she had a very difficult time finding the opportunity to get and hold a job as a Jewish woman. In 1949 the couple moved to Forest Grove. In 1951 she had the opportunity to be a professor and headed a psychology lab. Then, after years of work and research, in 1962 she retired.
Research
Psychology and Optometry
Berliner had a wide knowledge when she began to research and teach psychology. Interestingly enough, Berliner had a large focus on optometry and how that can be influenced by or can influence psychology. In a 1918 study done by her, she focused on mental images in the morning and at night and after intensive work[4]. She started by showing an image for five seconds. The observer would then close their eyes and wait thirty seconds, while being told not to think of the image they were shown during that time. Once the observer was given a signal, they were supposed to call up the image they had been shown and then press a key when they had done so. They would be instructed to hit a key when they actually saw the image and not when they thought of the image, which she reports was easy for them to discriminate between seeing and thinking of the image. The results of the study show that there is a certain amount of time that individuals keep certain mental images and that the impact of mental work can be indicated by the duration of the one image[1]. Another study, this one from 1949, clears up some issues with spatial organization of unified equal figures[5]. It has a ten-point conclusion having mostly to do with different geometric figures and the points at which half-views, frames and spatial organization actually lie at on a plane. This is very similar to the other research she did, focusing on visual planes, geometric figures and the distortion between different lines. A 1948 study done by both Anna and Sigfrid Berliner found more on the curvature of lines on different geometric fields[6]. Both the 1949 and 1948 study were done in order to respond to a previous study in which findings were incorrect or deceiving.
Psychology of Advertising
Berliner was the individual that began the psychology of advertising[3]. This new form of psychology is a subset of industrial psychology. This stemmed from her time in Japan where she was able to take her knowledge of the Western world and compare it to that of Japan[1]. They were working on aesthetic judgements and how that may impact the sale of a product. What they found is that if a product had a certain feel to it, as said an “atmospheric value”, they will recognize that product just by glancing at it.
Legacy
Berliner’s legacy clearly lives on in everyday life. She was able to explain certain visual phenomena that have not since been disproven. Her influence on advertising has an influence today on products individuals buy and how companies advertise. People also refer to some of her findings as Berliner’s Law[1]. Her work transcended beyond her time and continues to still have an influence on research, advertising and what we know about optometry.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 "Berliner – WiNEu". Retrieved 2018-12-15.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Ball, L. "Profile". Feminist Voices.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Biography of Anna Berliner". http://www.apadivisions.org. Retrieved 2018-12-15. External link in
|website=(help) - ↑ Berliner, Anna (October 1918). "The Influence of Mental Work on the Visual Memory Image". The American Journal of Psychology. 29 (4): 355–370. doi:10.2307/1413963. ISSN 0002-9556. JSTOR 1413963.
- ↑ Berliner, Anna (January 1949). "Spatial Displacement of Straight and Curved Lines". The American Journal of Psychology. 62 (1): 20–31. doi:10.2307/1418703. ISSN 0002-9556. JSTOR 1418703. PMID 18117585.
- ↑ Berliner, Anna; Berliner, S. (April 1948). "The Distortion of Straight and Curved Lines in Geometrical Fields". The American Journal of Psychology. 61 (2): 153–66. doi:10.2307/1416962. ISSN 0002-9556. JSTOR 1416962. PMID 18859550.
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