astronomy

Theodore Millon

Theodore Millon is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Theodore Millon rather than just read about it. In short: Theodore Millon () (August 18, 1928 – January 29, 2014) was an American psychologist known for his work on personality disorders. He founded the Journal of Personality Disorders and was the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders.

Key takeaways

Theodore Millon belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Theodore Millon to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Theodore Millon from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Theodore Millon () (August 18, 1928 – January 29, 2014) was an American psychologist known for his work on personality disorders. He founded the Journal of Personality Disorders and was the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. In 2008 he was awarded the Gold Medal Award For Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Foundation named the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology" after him. Millon developed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, worked on the diagnostic criteria for passive-aggressive personality disorder, worked on editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and developed subtypes of a variety of personality disorders.

Biography Millon was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the only child of immigrant Jewish parents from Lithuania and Poland. His 19th-century ancestors came from the town of Valozhyn, then a part of the Russian Empire (now Belarus). He studied psychology, physics, and philosophy as an undergraduate at the City College of New York and went on to receive his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 1954, with a dissertation on "the authoritarian personality." Millon was a member of the board of trustees of Allentown State Hospital, a large Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital for 15 years. Shortly thereafter he became the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. He was Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School and the University of Miami. In 2008, Millon was awarded the Gold Medal Award For Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology by the American Psychological Association. The American Psychological Foundation presents an award named after Millon, known as the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology," to honor outstanding psychologists engaged in "advancing the science of personality psychology including the areas of personology, personality theory, personality disorders, and personality measurement."

Theoretical work Millon has written numerous popular works on personality, developed diagnostic questionnaire tools such as the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, and contributed to the development of earlier versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Among other diagnoses, Millon advocated for an expanded version of passive aggressive personality disorder, which he termed 'negativistic' personality disorder and argued could be diagnosed by criteria such as "expresses envy and resentment toward those apparently more fortunate" and "claims to be luckless, ill-starred, and jinxed in life; personal content is more a matter of whining and grumbling than of feeling forlorn and despairing" (APA, 1991, R17). Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder was expanded somewhat as an official diagnosis in the DSM-III-R but then relegated to the appendix of DSM-IV, tentatively renamed 'Passive-Aggressive (Negativistic) Personality Disorder'.

Millon's personality disorder subtypes Millon devised a set of subtypes for each of the DSM personality disorders:

Sadistic (psychopathic) personality disorder subtypes Self-defeating (masochistic) personality disorder subtypes Schizotypal personality disorder subtypes Schizoid personality disorder subtypes Paranoid personality disorder subtypes Antisocial (sociopathic) personality disorder subtypes Borderline personality disorder subtypes Histrionic personality disorder subtypes Narcissistic personality disorder subtypes Dependent personality disorder subtypes Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder subtypes Avoidant personality disorder subtypes Passive-aggressive (negativistic) personality disorder subtypes Depressive personality disorder subtypes Exuberant/Hypomanic (turbulent) personality disorder subtypes Decompensated Personality Disorder

Millon's personality disorder descriptions Millon and other researchers consider some relegated diagnoses to be equally valid disorders, and may also propose other personality disorders or subtypes, including mixtures of aspects of different categories of the officially accepted diagnoses. Millon proposed the following description of personality disorders:

Books 1969: Modern Psychopathology: A Biosocial Approach to Maladaptive Learning and Functioning, Saunders 1981: Disorders of Personality: DSM-III: Axis II. John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0-471-06403-3 1985: (with George S. Everly, Jr.) Personality and Its Disorders. John Wiley and Sons ISBN 978-0471878162 1996: (with Roger D. Davis) Disorders of Personality: DSM IV and Beyond 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0-471-01186-X 1974: (with Renée Millon) Abnormal behavior and personality: a biosocial learning approach, Saunders 2004: Personality Disorders in Modern Life, John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-23734-5 2004: Masters of the Mind: exploring the story of mental illness. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9780471469858 2007: (with Seth Grossman) Moderating Severe Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach, John Wiley & Sons. 2007: (with Seth Grossman) Resolving Difficult Clinical Syndromes: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach, John Wiley & Sons. 2007: (with Seth Grossman) Overcoming Resistant Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach, John Wiley & Sons. 2008: (editor with Paul H. Blaney) Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology, 2nd Ed., Oxford University Press. 2008: (editor with Robert Krueger and Erik Simonsen) Contemporary Directions in Psychopathology: Toward the DSM-V and ICD-11, Guilford Press 2008: The Millon inventories: a practitioner's guide to personalized clinical assessment, Guilford Press ISBN 978-1-59385-674-8 2011: Disorders of Personality: Introducing a DSM/ICD Spectrum from Normal to Abnormal, 3rd edition John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0470040939

See also Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory Pyotr Gannushkin (1875–1933) — a Russian psychiatrist who created a classification of personality disorders, then known as "psychopathies", that intersect in many respects with those of Theodore Millon.

References

Sources Theodore Millon, a Student of Personality, Dies at 85, The New York Times, January 31, 2014.

External links The Millon Personality Group

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Theodore Millon

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Theodore Millon claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Theodore Millon before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Theodore Millon ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Theodore Millon

In research: Theodore Millon appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Theodore Millon in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Theodore Millon is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1928 births, 2014 deaths, 20th-century American Jews, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Theodore Millon outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Theodore Millon in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Theodore Millon means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
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Frequently asked questions

What is Theodore Millon in simple terms?

Why does Theodore Millon matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Theodore Millon?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Theodore Millon.