Édouard Claparède

Not to be confused with René-Edouard Claparède (1832 - 1871), professor of comparative anatomy.

Édouard Claparède (March 24, 1873 in Geneva, Switzerland – September 29, 1940 in Geneva) was a Swiss neurologist and child psychologist.

Studies of science and medicine, later of psychology under Théodore Flournoy; 1897 MD from the University of Geneva; 1897-98 at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris; 1901 foundation of the Archives de psychologie with Flournoy, which he edited until his death; from 1904 onward at the University of Geneva; 1904 General Secretary at the Second International Congress of Psychology; 1909 General Secretary at the Sixth International Congress of Psychology; 1912 founder of the Rousseau Institute; 1915-1940 professor of psychology at the University of Geneva in succession to Flournoy; Permanent Secretary at the International Congress of Psychology; Life President of the Comité de l'Association Internationale des Conferences de Psychotechnique.

He focused on infant psychology, teaching, and memory.

He was married to Hélène Spir, daughter of the Russian philosopher African Spir.

Trauma experiment

Claparède performed a fairly well known experiment in which he would test whether or not the trauma of a painful event would be retained if short term memory was lost. His experiment involved a woman who suffered from a form of amnesia. She had all of her old memories as well as her basic reasoning skills, but the recent past was not remembered. Claparède had greeted her every day, each time she could not remember his face at all. Then during one session of the experiment, Claparède hid a pin in his hand and reached to shake the woman's hand, pricking her. The next day, sure enough, she did not remember him. But when Claparède went to shake her hand, he found that she hesitated, recognizing a threat when her memory had been severely damaged.

Works

• L’association des idées (1903)
• Psychologie de l’enfant et pédagogie expérimentale (1909)
• L’éducation fonctionnelle (1931)
• La genèse de l’hypothèse (1933)

External links

• Eustache, F.; Desgranges, B.; Messerli, P. (1996). "Edouard Claparède and human memory". Revue neurologique 152 (10): 602–610. PMID 9033952. 
• Boake, C. (2000). "Édouard Claparède and the Auditory Verbal Learning Test". Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology (Neuropsychology, Development and Cognition: Section A) 22 (2): 286–292. doi:10.1076/1380-3395(200004)22:2;1-1;FT286. PMID 10779842. 
• Short biography, bibliography, and links on digitized sources in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science