Additionally, he was also offered an opportunity to go to China as a missionary teacher. However, he decided to return to his home state and spent the next fifty years as a researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa. In 1908, Seashore was made Dean of the Graduate School at University of Iowa, where he maintained the position for nearly 30 years. He became president of the American Psychological Association in 1911 and presided over the 20th meeting in Washington D.C. In 1905, Seashore was made chairman of the Philosophy and Psychology Department and in 1908, he was made Dean of the Graduate School. He served for 40 years as Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department of Psychology. He also served as Chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology from 1933–1939. He helped found the Iowa Psychological Clinic in 1908 and later became president of the American Psychology Association in 1911. He went on to establish the Psychopathic Hospital at the University of Iowa, the Iowa Institute for Mental Hygiene, and the Gifted Student Project in 1915. Seashore was interested in audiology, the psychology of music, the psychology of speech and stuttering, the psychology of the graphic arts and measuring motivation and scholastic aptitude. In particular, he was interested in the three perspectives of the psychology of music: the psychology of individual talent, the psychology of aesthetic feeling in musical appreciation and expression, and the psychology of the pedagogy of music. Seashore used standardized tests to objectively measure an individual's ability to perceive different dimensions of music and how musical aptitude differed between students. He devised the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability in 1919, a version of which is still used in schools in the United States. The test involved controlled procedures for measuring respondent's ability to discriminate pitch, loudness, tempo, timbre, and rhythm. His interests in the fine arts led to a joint effort with Dr. Norman Charles Meier (1893-1967) and the publication of the Meier-Seashore Art Judgment Test in 1929. During the early 1930s, he received financial support for his research from the Bell Laboratories. Among the larger projects that he supervised was one at the Eastman School of Music with financial assistance from George Eastman. His complete publication list from 1893 to 1949 includes 237 books and articles. Given his interests in music and the arts, Seashore established some of the first graduate programs in the nation in the creative arts, especially music, theater, and the literary arts, where a student could obtain a doctorate with an artistic creation.