George W. Holden

George W. Holden, born in 1954, was raised in New Haven, CT. As an adventurous youth, at age 15 he hitch-hiked from Tucson, Arizona to New Haven in five days. A few years later, when driving across the country with two high school friends, he almost stepped on a rattlesnake while camping in the Badlands of South Dakota. After graduating from St. George's School in Newport, R.I., he spent nine months in Europe. His favorite experience was working on an English sheep farm in the Cotswolds. Upon returning to the U.S., he attended Johnson College in Redlands, CA. As an experimental college, there were no grades or requirements. Although Holden liked the philosophy, the peer environment was problematic, so he transferred to Yale. There he majored in psychology. After graduating, he spent a year working on a dairy farm in western Massachusetts. In preparation for graduate school, that pastoral experience was followed by working as a research assistant in a developmental psychology lab at the University of Michigan. From there, Holden went to graduate school at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first job was at The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught and conducted research for 23 years. In 2008 he moved north to Dallas where he is Professor of Psychology at Southern Methodist University. Along this vocational journey, he married Anne Cameron and they have three wonderful children, Meg, John, and Paul.