Mary Whiton Calkins, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) 14th President, was the first woman to hold the position. Despite obtaining her PhD from Harvard under William James, Calkins was denied the degree by the Harvard Corporation due to the university’s attitude on women’s admittance. Despite this, she is regarded as one of the most influential first-generation American psychologists.
Calkins founded one of the earliest psychological laboratories at Wellesley College, wrote four books, and was named 12th among the 50 most renowned psychologists in the United States in 1903. She created a system of scientific self psychology that centred on the conscious self as the primary unit of investigation.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
Mary was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1863 and later relocated to Newton, Massachusetts in 1880. Calkins earned a degree from Smith College in 1885 and began teaching at Wellesley College in 1887. She went on to study psychology and philosophy at Clark University and Harvard University, where she was taught by William James, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Münsterberg. Calkins met all of the requirements for a Ph.D. in 1896, but Harvard refused to recognise her.
Mary began teaching psychology at Wellesley in 1890 and advanced to the position of professor of philosophy and psychology in 1898. She developed one of the country’s first experimental psychology laboratories, which was located in a women’s institution. Her research centred on space and time consciousness, emotion, association, color theory, and dreams. Her “self-psychology” theory emphasised the conscious self as the basic fact of psychology, in contrast to the behaviourist viewpoint. She stated that Royce’s idealism was the primary impact on her personalistic absolutism.
Calkins was a well-known psychologist and philosopher, having published numerous papers and books, including:
–An Introduction to Psychology (1901)
–The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (1907); which went through five editions
–The Good Man and the Good (1918)
She was the first woman to be elected president of both the American Psychological Association (1905) and the American Philosophical Association (1918). Calkins departed as a research professor at Wellesley after making significant contributions to the subject.
CONTRIBUTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
Calkins made significant contributions to the behavioural sciences by doing extensive research on dreams, memory, and the self. Throughout her career, she wrote extensively on psychological and philosophical subjects, publishing over 100 papers, four books, and a textbook. In 1903, psychologist James McKeen Cattell requested ten other psychologists to evaluate their American counterparts based on merit. Mary finished 12th on the list despite not being permitted to pursue her doctorate in psychology after meeting the prerequisites at Harvard.
Despite the fact that she never obtained her Harvard degree, Columbia University consented to confer an honorary Doctor of Letters degree on her in 1909. Smith College gave her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1910.
THE SERIAL POSITION CURVE
The serial position curve’s theoretical construct states that the primacy effect indicates recall from a more distant memory or long-term memory, which is more consolidated than the recency effect, which represents recall from a more current memory or working memory.
Calkins developed the following early observations:
Recency
Calkins was mindful that recency could influence how people remembered her stimuli, so she carefully planned test sequences so that the final pair shown in a list was not the first to be evaluated, “so that no after-image of the numeral might remain”
Calkins’ observations of these occurrences in 1896 appear unbelievable.
Modality effects
Calkins executed two sets of experiments, one with a visual presentation and the other with audio presentations. She observed that the two sets were comparable, with the exception that the audio presentations had larger recency effects.
Negative Recency Effect
The recency effect, as previously mentioned, disappears when there is a delay. Your memory of such objects fades fast, and you are unable to apply the same methods, or to the same extent, as you were with the other items on the list. “This reduction is undoubtedly an indication of fatigue; the twelfth pair is not observed with the same emphasis as the previous ones”
Primacy effects
In 1896, Calkins remarked that the subject “may not only enhance the first presentation but reoccur to it while learning the rest of the series” (9). Rundus (1971) and Glanzer (1972) concluded 80 years later that the primacy effect arises because we tend to rehearse the first thing as we go through the list (remember, these are the citations most usually used in my textbooks) (13, 14). She was also possibly the first to introduce the term primacy when discussing recollection experiments
Other than recency and primacy effects, paired associate (PA) learning was also developed by Mary Whiton Calkins in 1894 and involves combining two things, usually words, as a stimulus and response. This strategy is useful in understanding everyday learning because it allows researchers to investigate the relationships between inputs and responses. Although the stimulus-response approach has lost some relevance in modern psychology, behaviourists have long been interested in how stimulus-response relationships form and break.
Psychological studies have shown that when people learn paired associations, they participate in two distinct brain processes: learning the answer and building a bond between the two words. This process results in a one-way association, with a learner being more likely to recall the response word if given the stimulus and less likely to recall the stimulus if provided with the response word. This pattern applies when the reaction has never been utilised as a stimulus. However, if the same word is used as both a stimulus and a reaction, the learner becomes habituated to using it in both ways.
On the basis of the results of this study, psychologists concluded that learners recall word pairs as a whole, rather than as a stimulus that triggers a reaction.
Despite strong appreciation and lobbying from the fellow male students, Calkins was unable to obtain a PhD, and is now recognised less than her contemporary male colleagues. This emphasises the significance of history in understanding why certain ideas and theories acquire attention while others do not.
Works Cited
—. “Mary Whiton Calkins — The Learning Scientists.” The Learning Scientists, 18 Sept. 2023, www.learningscientists.org/blog/2023/8/24.
“—.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 Apr. 2024, www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Whiton-Calkins.
—. 7 July 2015, www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/mary-whiton-calkins.html#:~:text=Calkins%20was%20born%20in%20Hartford,a%20bachelor%27s%20degree%20in%20philosophy.
“—.” Department of Psychology, psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/mary-whiton-calkins.
—. “Mary Whiton Calkins’ Influence on Psychology.” Verywell Mind, 8 Aug. 2023, www.verywellmind.com/mary-whiton-calkins-biography-2795541.
—. 8 May 2024, www.betterhelp.com/advice/psychologists/mary-calkins-and-her-career-in-psychology/#.
—. www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/paired-associate-learning.
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My name is Isidora and I am a rising sophomore in high school. My interest in STEM is mainly because of my fascination with abnormal psychology and psychoanalysis!
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