Mary Whiton Calkins:

Mary Whiton Calkins:

An extrospection of the woman who stood firmly on the opinion that introspection was the most important part of psychology

Self-psychology

“For with each year I live, with each book I read, with each observation I initiate or confirm, I am more deeply convinced that psychology should be conceived as the science of the self, or person, as related to its environment, physical and social”

Mary Whiton Calkins believed that the conscious self should be the initial and primary unit of psychology. She pioneered, without later credit, the thinking that psychology is the science of the self, and that through observing oneself, one can gain insight into their behaviours, the workings of the brain, and the reasons for it.

Dreams

Mary Whiton Calkins was an American psychologist and philosopher born on the 30th of March, 1863.

Calkins is both notable and revered to those in the field of psychology, and also to those interested in female rights through the ages.

Mary earned her phD under significant psychologist William James, after beginning to study the field so that she could teach it at Wellesly College, where she had been teaching for 3 years prior. Despite this, Harvard refused to present her with the degree as they "did not accept women." Rather than being deterred, Mary went on to do important work, including establishing the first women's psychology lab at Wellesley College, further study under other influential psychologists, many published works, and becoming the 14th President of the APA (American Psychological Association), the first female one.

Another area of psychology that Calkins studied, was dreams. Later praised and centralised, her research involved herself and Edmund C. Sanford recording in detail each dream they had, immediately afterward. From this, Mary deduced that there was a close connection between waking life and the dream life. Furthermore, she realised that a dream was a replication of the persons, places, and events of a recent sense perception.

Memory

Mary Whiton Calkins discovered that frequency of exposure, influences memory retention. This concept, allowed her to develop a new memorisation method, her self proclaimed "one slightly significant contribution to experimental psychology".

Paired- associates technique

In her biography, Mary explains her invention, the paired-associates technique of memory examination: "by showing series of colors paired with numerals, I found that a numeral which has repeatedly appeared in conjunction with a given color was more likely than either a vividly colored numeral or than the numeral last paired with the color, to be remembered, on a reappearance of the given color". Additionally, numbers associated with bright colours were better remembered than those associated with neutral ones.