Ellen p. Reese (1926-1997): teacher, mentor, and respectful student of human and nonhuman behavior.
Ellen P. Reese showed that warm, exact mentorship creates lasting behavior analysts, and later papers keep adding new teaching tools to her model.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Poulson (1998) wrote a tribute to Ellen P. Reese after she passed away.
The paper recalls how Reese ran the Keller–Schoenfeld lab at Mount Holyoke College.
It shows how she trained students to respect both human and animal behavior.
What they found
The article found that Reese’s teaching style left a lifelong mark on her students.
Her mix of warmth and exact lab standards created new behavior analysts for decades.
How this fits with other research
Hineline (2022) extends Reese’s legacy by giving today’s teachers story-based tools to teach behavior-analysis history.
Geurts et al. (2008) built a big list of 116 teaching articles that put Reese’s lab ideas into print for college instructors.
Catagnus et al. (2025) and Jimenez‐Gomez (2024) update the mentorship theme by adding cultural humility and antiracist practice to the Reese model.
Together these papers show a chain: Reese started respectful mentoring, and later authors keep adding new layers for modern classrooms.
Why it matters
You can copy Reese’s respect-first style in your own supervision. Pair firm lab standards with genuine care for your trainee’s perspective. Add the newer cultural checks from Catagnus et al. (2025) and Jimenez‐Gomez (2024) to keep the legacy current.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
fully in her home in South Hadley, Massachusetts, surrounded by the people and animals she loved, and bathed in the sunlight of an early April afternoon.She gave up the long fight against terminal emphysema on April 2, 1997.Ellie, as we all know her, spent her entire professional career at Mount Holyoke College, entering as a freshman in 1944, earning her BA in 1948 and her MA in 1954, and culminating 50 years later in her appointment as Norma Cutts Dafoe Professor of Psychology in 1994.Ellen Pulford was a student when her future husband, Mount Holyoke professor Thomas W. Reese, established one of the first two introductory psychology laboratory courses built upon the Keller and Schoenfeld model.Both laboratories opened simultaneously at Columbia College and Mount Holyoke College in 1946.Ellie became a research assistant in 1948, and she became Mrs. Reese in 1949.Ellie devoted her energies both to her studies and to the establishment of this new laboratory.One can still feel the sense of excitement the laboratory engendered from viewing the old black-and-white photographs of the Reeses and
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1998 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1998.69-1