20th-century American psychologists

Erwin Walter Maximilian Straus (11 November 1891, Frankfurt am Main – 20 May 1975, Lexington, Kentucky) was a German-American phenomenologist and neurologist who helped to pioneer anthropological medicine and psychiatry, a holistic approach to medicine that is critical of mechanistic and reductionistic approaches to understanding and treating human beings.
Some of his work can also be regarded as a precursor to or early version of neurophenomenology. Straus taught at Black Mountain College.
His books published in English include:

Phenomenology: Pure and Applied (1964, Duquesne University Press)
Phenomenological Psychology (1966, Basic Books)
Psychiatry and Philosophy (1969, Springer)
Phenomenology of Memory (1970, Duquesne University Press)
Language and Language Disturbances (1974, Duquesne University Press)
Man, Time, and World: Two Contributions to Anthropological Psychology (1982, Humanities Press)
On Obsession: A Clinical and Methodological Study (1987, Johnson Reprint Corp)

Martha E. Bernal (April 13, 1931, San Antonio, Texas – September 28, 2001) was an American clinical psychologist. She earned her doctoral degree at Indiana University Bloomington in 1962. She was the first Latina to receive a doctorate degree in psychology in the United States. She helped with the treatment and assessment of children with behavioral problems and worked to develop organizations that have a focus on ethnic groups.

Carolyn Lewis Attneave (July 2, 1920 – June 22, 1992) was born in El Paso, Texas, to Scandinavian and Delaware Native American parents. Attneave spent most of her early years in South Texas, but frequently spent summers with her Delaware relatives in Oklahoma. Her culturally aware upbringing would go on to influence her decision to research diversity. Attneave earned a bachelor's in English and Theatre at Chico State College in California in 1940. She would stay at Chico state College to earn another bachelor's in secondary education. After spending six years as a school teacher, she earned both her master's and doctorate in clinical psychology from Stanford University in 1947 and 1952, respectively.

Montrose Madison Wolf (May 29, 1935 – March 19, 2004) was an American psychologist. He developed the technique of "time-out" as a learning tool to shape behavior in children in the 1960s. He was a leader in creating the discipline of problem-solving, real-world psychological research known as applied behavior analysis. He created the Teaching Family Model as an intervention program for dealing with juvenile delinquents. He helped replicate this model almost 800 times. In the field of applied behavior analysis he introduced and named the concept of social validity.Donald Baer, Sidney W. Bijou, Todd Risley, James Sherman, and Wolf established the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, in 1968 as a peer-reviewed journal publishing research about experimental analysis of behavior and its practical applications.

Stanley Smith Stevens (November 4, 1906 – January 18, 1973) was an American psychologist who founded Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, studying psychoacoustics, and he is credited with the introduction of Stevens's power law. Stevens authored a milestone textbook, the 1400+ page Handbook of Experimental Psychology (1951). He was also one of the founding organizers of the Psychonomic Society. In 1946 he introduced a theory of levels of measurement widely used by scientists but whose use in some areas of statistics has been criticized. In addition, Stevens played a key role in the development of the use of operational definitions in psychology.A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Stevens as the 52nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Jacob Levy Moreno (born Iacob Levy; May 18, 1889 – May 14, 1974) was a Romanian-American psychiatrist, psychosociologist, and educator, the founder of psychodrama, and the foremost pioneer of group psychotherapy. During his lifetime, he was recognized as one of the leading social scientists.

Arthur Middleton Young (November 3, 1905 – May 30, 1995) was an American inventor, helicopter pioneer, armchair philosopher, astrologer, and author. Young was the designer of Bell Helicopter's first helicopter, the Model 30, and inventor of the stabilizer bar used on many of Bell's early helicopter designs. He founded the "Institute for the Study of Consciousness" in Berkeley in 1972. Young advocated process philosophy, an attempt to integrate the realm of human thought and experience with the realm of science so that the concept of universe is not limited to that which can be physically measured. Young's theory embraces evolution and the concept of the great chain of being. He has influenced such thinkers as Stanislav Grof and Laban Coblentz.

France Nuyen (born France Nguyễn Vân Nga on 31 July 1939) is a French-American actress, model, and psychological counselor. She is known to film audiences for playing romantic leads in South Pacific (1958), Satan Never Sleeps (1962), and A Girl Named Tamiko (also 1962), and for playing Ying-Ying St. Clair in The Joy Luck Club (1993). She also originated the title role in the Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong, based on the novel of the same name. She is a Theatre World Award winner and Golden Globe Award nominee.

Nancy Ledins (born William F. Griglak; July 27, 1932 – July 18, 2017) was an American Roman Catholic priest who came out as a transgender woman. At the time of her transition she was still considered a priest even after having resigned from official church roles, due to her never being returned to lay status. In this capacity, she is considered by some to be the first official woman priest in the history of the Catholic Church and is the first openly transgender Catholic priest.

William Herbert Sheldon, Jr. (November 19, 1898 – September 17, 1977) was an American psychologist, numismatist, and eugenicist. He created the field of somatotype and constitutional psychology that correlate body types with temperament, illustrated by his Ivy League nude posture photos.