Rachel Keen BA, MA, PhD

Rachel Keen (published under Rachel Keen Clifton from 1966-2002) was born in Burkesville, a small town in rural Kentucky. She received her B.A. from Berea College in 1959 and her doctorate from the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, in 1963. Her dissertation was on newborns’ discrimination and habituation to tones, using nonnutritive sucking as the response. She was awarded an NICHD postdoctoral fellowship to study newborn behavior using psychophysiological measures at the University of Wisconsin under the mentorship of Frances K. Graham.

This experience determined the direction of Keen’s research for the next decade, as she investigated infants’ habituation, conditioning, and the orienting response using heart rate change as the primary measure.Graham and Clifton extended Sokolov’s concepts of orienting and defense in a 1966Psychological Bulletin article that became a Citation Classic. The 1960’s were a heady time to study newborn behavior because only a handful of researchers were beginning to explore infant development after a hiatus from the 1940’s. Keen’s presidential address “Lessons from Infants: 1960-2000” to the International Society on Infant Studies (Infancy, 2001) reviews this early research.