Psychologist-Author Bernice Eiduson Dies

Bernice T. Eiduson, a clinical psychologist known as much for her ability to secure research grants as for the research that money helped support, is dead of cancer.

Dr. Rocco Motto, former director of the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center where she once was research director, said Mrs. Eiduson had died July 31 at UCLA Medical Center. She was 62 and a professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA.

Motto said that Mrs. Eiduson had taken early retirement last year to concentrate on her writing.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, both at Reiss-Davis and UCLA, Mrs. Eiduson raised more than $2.5 million in grants from such groups as the Carnegie Corp., the National Institute of Mental Health, the Office of Child Development and others.

A small portion of that money went to help publish her own research, some of which involved children being raised in alternative family styles at a time when single parenthood was on the rise. She was author of more than 120 scientific publications and author or co-author of six books.

Study of Nobel Laureates

One was a study of several Nobel laureates she titled “Scientists: Their Psychological World.” With her husband, Samuel, a UCLA chemistry professor, she helped write “Biochemistry and Behavior.” She also co-authored “Science as a Career Choice: Empirical and Theoretical Studies.”

Her final book, “Bringing Up the Only Child,” was published in 1976 but she contributed to “The Family: Dying or Developing” in 1978.

She was a delegate to the Conference on Science, Government and Society sponsored by West Germany in 1964 and was a distinguished research professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm where she returned often to speak, most recently on the radicalized American woman.

Mrs. Eiduson, who received her doctorate degree at UCLA after undergraduate work at the University of Buffalo, is survived by her husband, a son David, and two brothers.