GRAY, Jeffrey A(lan) 1934-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born May 26, 1934, in London, England; died April 30, 2004. Psychologist, linguist, educator, and author. Gray was a noted experimental psychologist and professor emeritus at King's College. His initial interest in languages came during his military service in the early 1950s when he was trained in Russian. When he left the army, he completed a degree in modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1957, and would become fluent in over a half dozen languages ranging from Greek to Italian to Persian. Staying at Oxford, he earned a second bachelor's degree in psychology and philosophy in 1959, going on to the Institute of Psychiatry in London to earn a Ph.D. in 1964. During his graduate studies, Gray did research on genetics and how the environment, hormones, and genes influence behavior; his knowledge of Russian also allowed him to analyze data on Russian research efforts, which he eventually collected and edited as Pavlov's Typology (1964). Gray joined Oxford as a lecturer in psychology in 1964, becoming a fellow of University College the next year. He left Oxford in 1983 to join the faculty at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, where he was a professor of psychology until his 1999 retirement. Gray's interests as a psychologist ranged widely and included studies on schizophrenia, anxiety, the nature of consciousness, and synaesthesia. Among his other books are The Psychology of Fear and Stress (1971), Elements of a Two-Process Theory of Learning (1975), and The Neuropsychology of Anxiety: An Enquiry into the Function of the Septo-Hippocampal System (1982; 2nd edition, 2000). At the time of his death, he had just completed a study on consciousness, which is due to be published posthumously.

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Guardian (London, England), May 13, 2004, p. 27.