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IN MEMORIAM
LEE WILLERMAN
Lee Willerman was born in Chicago on
July 26, 1939; he died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack
in Austin on January 10, 1997, at the age of 57. He left a wife, Benné,
two grown daughters, Raquel and Amiel, two older brothers, and many
grieving friends, colleagues, and former and present students.
Lee
grew up in tough neighborhoods in Chicago, the youngest of four sons
of poor immigrant parents from Russia.
He seems to have resisted his academic calling for some time: at age
16 he turned down a scholarship offer from the University of Chicago
to concentrate on his skills as a pool player and yo-yo demonstrator.
Later he left Roosevelt University during his sophomore year to travel
the world on a Danish freighter and write novels. He soon found this
life to be less romantic than he had supposed, and returned to college.
He received his BA degree from Roosevelt University in 1961, and he
and Benné were married in 1962. He obtained his MA from Roosevelt
University in 1964 and his PhD from Wayne State University in 1967.
Lee began his professional career with three years in Washington as
a research psychologist at the National
Institutes of Health, where he was involved in the Collaborative Perinatal
Project, a large multi-institution study focusing on pregnancy, birth,
and early human development. Next came a post-doctoral year at the
University
of Michigan in the Department of Human Genetics. In the fall of 1971
he came to The University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until
his death, except for a semester in 1983 as visiting Schienfeld Professor
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At Texas, he was promoted to
associate professor in 1974, to professor in 1981, and became the first
Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Regents Professor in Clinical Psychology
in 1985. He directed the Clinical Psychology Training Program in 1979-1980
and from 1981 to 1989.
He was a Fellow of the American Psychological
Association and the International Society of Twin Studies, served on
the editorial boards of leading professional journals such as Intelligence,
Behavior Genetics, Contemporary Psychology, and Developmental
Psychology, and as consultant to Veterans Administration Hospitals
and the March of Dimes. Lee was the author of two influential textbooks:
The Psychology of Individual and Group Differences and Psychopathology
(the latter coauthored with David B. Cohen), and of over 50 research
articles and chapters in edited volumes.
Research
The main thrust of Lee Willerman’s
research work over the years was relating behavior to its biological
underpinnings. He was never satisfied with purely psychological explanations;
his quest for answers took him to domains as diverse as neonatology
and sociobiology. Lee was interested in a wide variety of intellectual
topics, always full of ideas, and ready to set up a research collaboration
at the drop of a hat.
From the beginning, Lee was interested
in intelligence and how it is related to both genetic and environmental
factors. His first published paper concerned environmental influences:
it examined the effect on IQ of birth weight differences between identical
twins. The twin who had been heavier at birth tended to be higher in
IQ. Lee especially liked data with a touch of the dramatic–data
approaching an old problem from a new and unexpected direction. For
example, he looked into the curious association between high IQ and
retinoblastoma, a genetically-caused eye tumor that may result in blindness.
He also studied the IQs of children from interracial matings. Mixed-race
children whose mothers were white had higher average IQs than mixed-race
children whose mothers were black. This implicated environmental factors,
as children obtain their genes for intelligence equally from both parents.
Another paper discussed the interaction of social class and IQ development.
Lee found that retardation in development at eight months had decidedly
more adverse implications for the later IQs of lower-class children
than of higher-class children.
For more than 25 years, Lee worked with
his colleagues Joseph M. Horn and John C. Loehlin on a major study
of
adoptive families, the Texas Adoption Project. An adoption study is
a powerful design for untangling genetic and environmental influences
on a trait, and thus particularly appealed to Lee. The study involved
giving IQ and personality tests to the members of 300 families who
had
adopted infants from a Texas home for unwed mothers. Lee and his colleagues
were able to examine resemblances between the birth mothers and the
children with whom they had had no contact since birth, and between
biologically related and biologically unrelated members of the adoptive
families. The children were studied twice–initially, when they
averaged about eight years old, and again, roughly ten years later,
when most were late adolescents or young adults. A third round of testing
was in the planning stage at the time of Lee's death.
The results for
IQ from the adoption study were provocative: the adoptive childrens'
IQs resembled those
of their birth mothers, whom they had never met, more than those of
their adoptive mothers, with whom they had lived all their lives. Genetically
unrelated children who grew up together in the same family were somewhat
similar in their measured IQs when they were young children, but by
late adolescence they were as different as any two individuals randomly
selected from among this population, suggesting that it is shared genes,
not a shared family environment, that creates lasting IQ resemblance
in ordinary families. Lee was a co-author on a dozen papers reporting
results from the Texas Adoption Project. Two papers on abilities illustrate
the typical Willerman focus on generalizing findings: one showed that
the results extended to academic achievement as well as IQ, and a second
examined the contribution of a particular component of intelligence,
mental processing speed. A third paper on psychopathology showed that
differences in antisocial behaviors among the children were also partly
genetic.
Lee's recent research on intelligence
continued his dual emphases on a link to fundamental processes and
a search for the dramatically revealing rather than the routine result.
One such example was his foray with his students into information processing
foundations of intelligence. These studies showed a link between IQ
and the processing time required to make simple auditory pitch discriminations.
In the late 1980s Lee became convinced that the new neuroimaging technologies
would permit the discovery of brain characteristics responsible for
individual differences in IQ, and embarked on a study of neuroanatomical
predictors of intelligence. This research showed a stronger association
between brain size and IQ than had previously been found using head
size or postmortem measures, a result which has helped revitalize interest
in the biological bases of intelligence. It also revealed an intriguing
sex difference: men with larger left brain hemispheres had better verbal
than non-verbal abilities, whereas for women it was the other way around.
At the time of his death, Lee and his former student Robert Schultz
were completing revisions on a major theoretical paper on "The Physical
Basis of Psychometric g and Primary Abilities." They propose that psychometrically-defined
general intelligence results from correlated processing capabilities
across structurally independent brain modules.
Lee also did important
research in the areas of personality and psychopathology. Typical of
his approach to
the first area was his notion that we ought to measure personality
traits as we do ability, in terms of maximal rather than typical performance–we
should find out how extraverted a person can be, not just how extraverted
he or she usually is. Typical of the work on psychopathology are the
ongoing studies of Lee and his students involving the microscopically
visible network of capillaries at the base of people's fingernails.
A tangled pattern of these had been shown to be associated with a predisposition
to schizophrenia. Lee's hypothesis was that this reflected a capillary
fragility that might be present in the central nervous system as well,
allowing free radicals to leak into the brain. The results so far are
suggestive but not conclusive.
Teacher and Friend
According to the testimony of his graduate
students, Lee was a highly effective mentor, who motivated students
by insuring that their studies were interesting enough that they, and
he, would want to know their results. He was quite flexible in terms
of topics he would supervise, but he challenged students to think critically
and to tackle questions fundamental to the core of human nature, and
he showed his impatience with ideas and pursuits which he regarded
as
pedestrian. Lee conveyed a sense of intellectual excitement that was
contagious, and he imparted to his students a sense of intellectual
integrity, ambition, and passion for the truth.
Lee was a wonderful
person–sympathetic,
erudite, entertaining. He was an intellectual enthusiast, always full
of new and exciting information. His personal charm and wide-ranging
interests made him a central figure in the psychology department and
in the broader community. His death brought forth an outpouring of
tributes
from colleagues, former students, and others. He is missed by everyone
who knew him.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner,
President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared
by a special committee consisting of Professors Joseph M. Horn (chair),
John C. Loehlin, and David B. Cohen. It is in part derived from an obituary
"Lee Willerman (1939-1997)" Intelligence, 1997, 24, 323-328.
Selected Bibliography
Leavitt, E. A., Rosenbaum, A. L.,
Willerman, L., & Leavitt, M. (1972). Intelligence of patients
with retinoblastoma and their siblings. Child Development,
43, 939-948.
Poole, J. H., Maricq, H. R., Alson,
E., & Willerman, L. (1991). Negative symptoms in schizophrenia
and nailfold plexus visibility. Biological Psychiatry, 29,
757-773.
Raz, N., Willerman, L., Ingmundson,
P., & Hanlon, M. (1983). Aptitude-related differences in auditory
backward recognition masking. Intelligence, 7, 71-90.
Raz, N., Willerman, L., & Yama,
M. (1987). On sense and senses: Intelligence and auditory information
processing. Personality and Individual Differences, 8,
201-210.
Willerman, L. (1979). Effects of families
on intellectual development. American Psychologist, 34,
923-929.
Willerman, L. (1979). The psychology
of individual and group differences. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Willerman, L., Broman, S. H., &
Fiedler, M. (1970). Infant development, pre-school IQ, and social
class. Child Development, 41, 69-77.
Willerman, L., & Churchill, J.
A. (1967). Birthweight and intelligence in identical twins. Child
Development, 38, 623-630.
Willerman, L., & Cohen, D. B.
(1990). Psychopathology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Willerman, L., Horn, J. M., and Loehlin,
J. C. (1977). The aptitude-achievement test distinction: A study of
unrelated children reared together. Behavior Genetics, 7,
465-470.
Willerman, L., Loehlin, J. C., and
Horn, J. M. (1979). Parental problem-solving speed as a correlate
of intelligence in parents and their adopted and natural children.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 627-634.
Willerman, L., Loehlin, J. C., &
Horn, J. M. (1992). An adoption and a cross-fostering study of the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Psychpathic Deviate
scale. Behavior Genetics, 22, 515-529.
Willerman, L., Naylor, A. F., &
Myrianthopoulos (1970). Intellectual development of children from
interrracial matings. Science, 170, 1329-1331.
Willerman, L., Schultz, R., Rutledge,
J. N., & Bigler, E. D. (1991). In vivo brain size and intelligence.
Intelligence, 15, 223-228.
Willerman, L., Schultz, R., Rutledge,
J. N., & Bigler, E. D. (1992). Hemisphere size asymmetry predicts
relative verbal and nonverbal intelligence differently in the sexes:
An MRI study of structure-function relations. Intelligence,
16, 315-328.
Willerman, L., & Schultz, R. T.
(under review). The physical basis of psychometric g and primary abilities.
Willerman, L., Turner, R. G., &
Peterson, M. (1967). A comparison of the predictive validity of typical
and maximal personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality,
10, 482-492.
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