Riley Gardner


Dr. Riley W. Gardner was an American psychologist who published works on individual differences and cognition.

Early life and education

Gardner was born in Ree Heights, South Dakota, and was the son of Hugh Gardner and Ruth Speicher Gardner. They were among the "town people" in the tiny farming community of Ree Heights, South Dakota. His father was at various times a store keeper, an insurance agent, postmaster and the co-op grain elevator manager, as well as school board president and church elder. His mother was the piano teacher and church organist for the community. In Ree Heights Riley lived very close to his uncle Charles Whiting Gardner, a banker and South Dakota state Senator married to Mary Ruth Butler Gardner, and his cousins Chuck and Barbara.
Riley Gardner was the second born of three children, after his sister Katherine who was four years his elder, and before his brother Wayne. He graduated first in his high school class from Ree Heights High School in Ree Heights, South Dakota. In 1945 he graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's in English from Yankton College in Yankton, South Dakota.
After college, Gardner entered the military and became a staff sergeant in the US Army Medical Corps, serving from 1946 until 1948. It was during this military service that he was introduced to psychiatric care. Following the military, he earned his Ph.D in Psychology from the University of Kansas in 1952, summa cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He married Ruth Janssen on August 27, 1950 in Yankton, South Dakota.

Career

Gardner spent most of his professional career as a research psychologist at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. During this time he was the Director of the research group engaged in studying cognition control principles. He had two major grants from the National Institutes of Health and invitations to teach in seminars and at universities around the USA and abroad, and he published numerous papers on individual differences and cognition.
Gardner's work was part of what was called the "new look in perception." In the late 1950s an attempt was being made in academic psychology and psychoanalysis to correlate and study the interaction of cognition, needs, and personality. A number of the leaders of this "new look" were psychoanalytically trained psychologists working at the Menninger Clinic. Gardner was part of this well known group that also included George Klein, Philip Holzman, and Robert Holt. Gardner, with his research on cognitive controls, was part of this group that insisted that cognition played an essential role in the formation and functioning of personality rather than being a mental function separate from personality. This idea is an implicit foundation for modern day psychoanalytic concepts such as self and object representations, mentalization, and a structural perspective on the workings of the mind. The concept of cognitive control explains Gardner and Klein's finding that individuals use particular cognitive or ego strategies to notice, register, compare, process, integrate or avoid information from the environment. Furthermore, individuals differ in the types of strategies they use. The entire focus on self-regulation within the field of psychoanalysis is based on this assumption.
As part of his research, he performed an in-depth study of 105 pairs of twins in the vicinity of Topeka, Kansas, and received an honorary invitation to membership in Topeka's Mothers of Twins Club. In late 1970 he suffered a temporary mental breakdown which marked the end of his professional career.

Family and later life

Gardner and his wife Ruth had two children together, Helen and Mark. Later in life he became the full-time caretaker for his granddaughter and continued his personal education in music and the sciences. He died on October 23, 2007 and is interred Topeka, Kansas.

Publications

1951
1953
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968