Mary Whiton Calkins Essay Example for Free

bloody shame Whiton Calkins EssayIn the early days of psychology there were few female person psychologists who had any type of impact on the field of psychology. There was sex discrimination and it was a car park belief that women were inferior to men. Mary Whiton Calkins was able to beat the odds and have a long steadfast legacy in psychology. She is considered one of the pioneers in psychology and is credited with a major theoretical persona of self-psychology, which was centered on the idea that all consciousness is personal. Calkins overcame discrimination from both(prenominal) students and scholars and succeeded in inventing a surgical operation that was historic paired consort learning, which has become the standard method in cognitive research (Goodwin, 2008). Mary Whiton Calkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1863. She was the oldest of five children their parents encouraged their education, especially the look at of languages and cultures (Furumoto, 1980) . Calkins did graduate from graduate(prenominal) school in Newton Massachusetts and began metal failer College in 1882 as a sophomore.Unfortunately, in 1883, her sisters ailment and subsequent death caused her to decide to study Greek at home the following course. However Calkins returned to Smith College in 1884 as a senior, and graduated with a concentration in classics and philosophy in 1885. In 1887, after graduating from Smith College, she was hired to teach Greek at Wellesley College. She had been instruct for three years when she was offered she was offered a po ragion command in the new area of psychology (Goodwin, 2008). In 1890 Wellesley finally offered Calkins the position, with the condition that she would study psychology for a year.There were very few psychology programs available at that time, and even few that would accept women applicants. This made it difficult for her to have the one year of study needed to teach the proceeds of psychology. During the follo wing year Calkins overly worked unofficially at the psychology laboratory at Clark University with Edmund Sanford. He also assisted Calkins in the creation of a psychology lab for Wellesley College, equipped with state of the art equipment. That psychology lab officially opened in 1891, the same year that Calkins began teaching psychology at Wellesley (Goodwin, 2008). after(prenominal) being invited to sit in on some of the lectures at Harvard, Calkins formally requested that she be allowed to sit in on these lectures. She decided to try to take classes at the Harvard add taught by Josiah Royce, a Harvard professor, because the Annex was not an official part of Harvard University. Royce, however, pushed her to try to attend regular Harvard classes because not all of his classes were available through and through the Annex. Charles Eliot, the death chair of Harvard, believed strongly that the two sexes should be educated separately.But it was not until the pressure applied to him from both James and Royce was combined with a petition from Calkins father and a letter from the president of Wellesley College that Eliot finally hold in 1892. Calkins would be allowed to attend James and Royces seminars on psychology, but it was officially stated that she would not be a student of the University entitled to registration. (Furumoto, 1980). Calkins felt like she needed to do more graduate work. She continue teaching sequence simultaneously studying with J. Munsterberg until 1894 when she studied full-time for a year.At that time Munsterberg petitioned Harvard to adopt Calkins as a Ph. D. candidate, but was refused. The Harvard psychology department held an informal examination of Calkins, which she passed in 1895. The same year, while at Harvard, Calkins presented her theses, where she completed a series of experimental studies on association. She developed a procedure know as paired-associate learning (Goodwin, 2008). Her subjects jump studied stimulus-respons e pairs comprised of sequentially presented color patches and n umbers, and then they tried to recall the umber responses when shown the color stimuli.Her results showed that recall was enhanced by each of the foursome factors frequence, vividness, recency, and primacy. These four conditions could strengthen associations, and found that frequency was the most important. (Goodwin, 2008). Calkins then returned to Wellesley College where she continued to teach until her retirement in 1927. From about 1900, her publications became less research-oriented as she developed her major theoretical contribution to psychology, self-psychology.Calkins maintained that psychology could be the study of mental life, but that the of import fact of psychology must be that all consciousness contains an element of the self (Goodwin, 2008). In 1900, Calkins make her first article on a transcription of psychology of the self, a topic which became her primary focus. all over the next thirty years, Ca lkins continued to present, develop, and defend her theory of self-psychology, gradually moving more towards philosophy and onward from the psychological trend towards behaviorism.There is evidence that her primary interest was always philosophy rather than psychology. She was teaching psychology for almost a decade before another faculty member trained in psychology joined the philosophy department. (Furumoto, 1980). In 1905, Calkins became the first char elected president of the American mental Association. As her interests shifted to philosophy, she became the first woman elected president of the other APA, the American Philosophical Association in 1918. All of her work in philosophy as well as psychology came to center or so the importance of self.She used it as a way to reconcile competing theoretical schools of thought including structuralism and functionalism (Furumoto, 1980). She believed that self-psychology was a method of resolving disputes between structuralism, whic h analyzes consciousness in to its basic elements, and functionalism, which focuses on how consciousness serves to adapt the soulfulness to the environment (Goodwin, 2008). Among her major contributions to psychology are the invention of the paired associates technique and her work in self based psychology. Calkins believed that the conscious self was the primary focus of psychology.Despite Mary Whiton Calkins contributions, Harvard maintains its refusal to collapse the degree she earned and her influence on psychology is often overlooked by both scholars and students. She was ablaze about her beliefs, even when Harvard was going to award her a PhD. from Radcliffe College she refused to accept the degree because she did not agree with the hurt of unequal treatment of the sexes based on the implicit assumption that there are inherent differences in their mentalities (Furumoto, 1980). Mary Whiton Calkins was a pioneer in psychology.She was responsible for the creation of a method of memorization called the paired associate technique, founder of one of the early psychological laboratories in the United States, and creator of a system of self-psychology (Furumoto, 1980). Conclusion Mary Whiton Calkins was a prolific writer in both psychology and philosophy, publishing four books and over a hundred papers divided among the fields. In addition to being the first woman president of the American Psychological Association, Calkins also served as president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918.The topics Mary Whiton Calkins studied in psychology covered a wide range including dream research, sensual consciousness, and memorization. In 1892 she presented a report on a dream study that she had worked on with Sanford at the first meeting of the APA. Thirteen years later she was elected president of that same organization. In 1895 she returned to Wellesley as an associate professor, and in 1898 she became a full professor, a position she held until she reti red in 1927 (Furumoto, 1980).On February 26, 1930, Calkins died of inoperable cancer, one year after retiring from Wellesley as a Research Professor and turning over that department to Eleanor Gamble. Her teaching career spanned forty two years. She died with two honorary degrees, a doctor of letters from Columbia University and a doctor of laws from Smith College. However, she never received the degree that she worked for at Harvard. In 1927 a group of Harvard alumni petitioned the president of Harvard requesting that the university grant Calkins her Ph. D. , but they were denied (Furumoto, 1980).