On 29 Apr 2009 at 18:53, William Scott wrote: > I have often covered the "origins" story of biofeedback in class with the > narrative of Miller and DiCara's work with curarized rats that turned out > to be not replicable. DiCara did not help with the attempts at replication > when he went to the University of Michigan to set up his lab there. He, > instead, committed suicide.
Someone with a long memory and a long time on TIPS reminded me that we had discussed this back in 2001. At the time the question was whether the claim of DiCara's suicide was in fact true. I contributed a post in which I said that I had scoured the web, but couldn't verify the story. That was then. Possibly I was using my then favourite search engine Alta Vista at the time, and the superior Google was still in the future. Or perhaps more about the case has been added since then. Whatever. A Google search now turns up plenty of sources which report his suicide, including, as usual, Wikipedia. Of particular interest is this article, "Are the Claims True" from the _Evening Independent_, (St. Petersburg, FL), October 3, 1977: The "claims" are not of DiCara's suicide, but of his work in conditioning biofeedback. The article quotes Dr. David VanDercar, who worked with Miller to try to replicate the DiCara studies. He says that when he asked DiCara for help in replicating the work, he refused, and when asked for data, DiCara claimed that it was "lost". These evasive actions do raise certain suspicions. Then VanDercar says that DiCara, after progressing up to full professor, one day shredded everything he had published, and then committed suicide. But, says VanDercar, "There has been no official report as to the reason for this suicide". (I was at McMaster as a graduate student at the same time as the A.H. Black mentioned in the article. But we wre not related.) http://tinyurl.com/cumfwo Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: [email protected] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
