What I would like you to do is to find a PERSON from chapter 6 that you are interested in and search the internet for material on that PERSON. Please use 3 or more quality resources.
Once you have completed your search and explorations, a) I would like you to say WHO your PERSON is, b) how exactly HE OR SHE fits into the chapter, and c) why you are interested in THIS PERON. Next, I would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your PERSON, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about it. At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. Keep in mind that it will be easier if you keep it to one topic.
Additional instructions: For each URL (internet resource) you have listed. Indicate why you chose it and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
Let me know if you have any questions.
I decided to research Mary Whiton Calkins. She relates to chapter 6 by becoming the first American woman to become a psychologist. I am interested in her because against all odds of women going to college to further their education.
Mary Whiton Calkins went to many universities to get her Master's and eventually her PHD, but without many obstacles to achieve her many degrees. Mary found Harvard University to be interesting with what she needed to gain more information in psychology. She wrote to the president but was denied because she was a woman. Her father and another president at Wellesley College allowed Mary to attend Harvard. During her experience at Harvard she was the only one in the lectures because she was a woman. Mary had all of the requirements for her P.H.D, but was refused because she was a woman. Radcliffe University offered Mary that degree but declined because it had no meaning to her major of psychology, and worked with a German psychologist Hugo Munsterberg. Mary continued to work on psychology even though she was rejected of her P.H.D at Harvard. She became the first president of American Psychological Association. Mary would research the idea of self-psychology. Self psychology was the science of ourselves, and it related to her thoughts on ethics and morality during that time period.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/marywhitoncalkins.html - used this site for background information about her, and all of the details about why she wasn't issued her P.H.D
http://www.apa.org/pi/women/resources/newsletter/2011/03/mary-calkins.aspx- more background information and about how she became the first president of the APA.
http://www.brynmawr.edu/psychology/rwozniak/theory.html- this site explains more of her theory on self psychology.
I chose to research Francis Sumner, who is one of the best-known African American "pioneers" of education. I felt as though I needed to find out more about him, since the book did not go into much detail when talking about it. The search for civil rights has always been a big topic of interest for me as well, so this was a pretty fun assignment to do. Francis Sumner was mentioned in the book in the portion about education for minorities. In terms of learning about the history of psychology, he is a pretty important individual.
The first thing I found most impressive about Sumner is that he was the first African American to receive a doctorate degree in the study of psychology. To rephrase that: he was actually the first African American to receive a doctorate AT ALL. I also found it astonishing that up until he was accepted at a university, he was largely self-taught!
Sumner had a pretty close relationship with G. Stanley Hall, and they even studied psychology together. Hall could be considered one of the more "race-acceptant" individuals during that time period. After studying with Hall as well as the Dean of Psychology at his university, Sumner went on to do some great things. For example, he had a longtime position with the Psychological Bulletin and the Journal of Social Psychology as a professional abstractor. He also established a program of psychology at Howard University that was (finally!) independent of philosophy. Today, Francis Sumner is known as being one of the main founders of Black psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Sumner
This had a bunch of great info on Sumner, including his work, his childhood, and his career.
http://www.socialpsychology.org/social-figures.htm
This site included a brief summary of Sumner's career. It also had links to a lengthier bio, as well as a slide show of photos of Sumner.
http://jazminemccoy.blogspot.com/2011/02/francis-sumner.html
This is a blog dedicated solely to discussing the work of black psychologists. Other than being a pretty fascinating blog, it contained a short summary of Sumner's life and work.
I was interested in learning more about Christine Ladd-Franklin. She is important to the history of psychology because she was an early American psychologist. She is also important because she was a woman and at that time being a woman came with expectations of raising a family and keeping the home, not going to school and getting doctorates. For me this is what makes her so interesting.
In psychology Christine Ladd-Franklin is most known for her work with color vision. It is this work which led her to study in Muller’s lab in Germany. At this time German universities wound even allow women in, but Ladd-Franklin was granted admission to meet with Muller at his laboratory. While there Muller would repeat his lectures for her. Along with Muller, Ladd-Franklin also worked with Helmholtz while in Germany. One reason why these men may have been so willing to take her in and teach her was because she posed less of a threat to their jobs since she was foreign. After working with these men she rejected their theories on color vision for her own which she released in London. Even today parts of her theory relating to evolution are still accepted.
Besides being educated in psychology Christine Ladd-Franklin was also accomplished in mathematics, completing the necessary course work for a doctorate in 1882, which was unofficial since Johns Hopkins didn’t admit women. Mathematics was Ladd-Franklin's first interest and even played a part in her future interest in psychology, vision had some mathematical components. This is where she met her husband and eventual father to her one daughter.
Christine Ladd-Franklin became an advocate for women and women’s rights, especially in academics, because of her family background. She had a supportive family who were also women’s rights advocates bringing Christine to meeting as young as age three. Later in her life she would continue fight for women’s rights when she tried to gain admission, for herself and other women, to the prestigious Experimentalists group headed by E.B. Titchener. On one occasion Titchener argued women couldn’t be admitted because the men smoked; to which she replied that she always smoked when in “fashionable” society. Christine Ladd-Franklin was also interested in becoming a professor. In her struggles to become a professor she wrote an article arguing for her and other women to be given the opportunities as men. She wrote this in 1904,
Christine Ladd-Franklin is an important figure in the history of psychology and the history of women’s rights. Yet she is rarely discussed in history classes. I have never heard of her before, and I am a history major. The ideas she was most passionate about were academics which would explain why she is left out of many history books, but she is a generation before Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, two influential women in gaining women’s suffrage in 1920.
http://www.cem.uvm.edu/~cooke/history/seconded/errata/p101.pdf
I used this site mainly for background information on Christine Ladd-Franklin and her eventual family.
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/christineladd.html
I used this site mainly for information on Christine Ladd-Franklin while she was in Europe, mainly Germany, her involvement in women’s rights, and some information about her early life.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Ladd-Franklin/professorships.htm
This is an article which Christine Ladd-Franklin wrote and it explains her views on women’s rights.
I am doing my topical blog activity on Chapter 5 after doing chapter 6 last week which I made sure to check with Dr. Maclin that it was okay. I chose to do Sir Francis Galton, and he fits into the chapter because the work he accomplished can be related to Darwin's evolutionary theory with ease. His study of the nature of intelligence and eugenics uses the evolutionary theory of passing along genetic material and traits to offspring at its core to explain his work. I found him interesting primarily because of his firm belief in eugenics, and chose him over Darwin because so much of Darwin's life is taught along with his theory of evolution so there is more material about Galton to uncover than Darwin.
Before Galton made any contributions to psychology or any of the scientific work he accomplished throughout his life, Galton established himself first as a geographer and explorer. After going to college and inheriting his father's wealth he spent some years living the life, travelling around the British Isles, hunting on the estates of friends, and travelling casually in Egypt and the Sudan. He eventually grew tired of this and decided to explore a little known region of Southern Africa. He joined the Royal Geographical Society and received a mandate from them to launch an expedition. Between April 1850 and January 1852 Galton explored and charted "Damaraland" and "Ovampoland" in South West Africa, financing the expedition himself. The original intention had been to penetrate from Damaraland to Lake Ngami, but his party was ultimately unable to reach the lake, and charted the previously unknown interior regions of Ovampoland in northern South-West Africa. The trip was great for Galton's ethnological observations of the inhabitants saying: "I saw enough of savage races, to give me material to think about all the rest of my life." Although he would never go exploring in such a degree again, he actively sponsored and encouraged others to do so, providing helpful advice, and some practical inventions. Galton was involved in the expedition launched by Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke to discover the sources of the Nile in Africa, having drafted their instructions for their expedition to "The Mountains of the Moon."
Galton was the founder of the statistical approach to heredity, now commonly called the "biometric approach", which was greatly extended and developed by the mathematician Karl Pearson. Darwin had proposed that the mechanism of inheritance was "pangenesis", in which "gemmules" in bodily fluids mixed during mating. Galton tested this by performing a series of experiments on rabbits, to see if blood transfusions would alter heritable characteristics. Darwin was excited, and exchanged several letters with Galton about the experiments. Galton was disappointed to discover that the transfusions did nothing of the sort, disproving pangenesis. Darwin's reaction was very defensive, and he attempted to fix his theory by a series of changes, and reacted rather upset in the newspapers of the time. Galton, a person to avoid controversy, published a response showing his regard and respect for Darwin.
Galton was one of the first experimental psychologists, and the founder of the field of enquiry now called "differential psychology," which concerns itself with psychological differences between people, rather than on common traits. He started basically from scratch and had to invent the major tools he required. He even had to create the statistical methods he used - correlation and regression. These are now the basics of the empirical human sciences, but were unknown in his time. His work the Hereditary Genius was the first attempt to investigate the effect of heredity on intellectual abilities, and was notable for its use of the bell-shaped Normal Distribution to describe differences in intellectual abilit and its use of pedigree analysis to determine hereditary effects.
Later Galton went on to suggest the use of twin studies to disentangle nature from nurture, by comparing identical twins to fraternal twins. I was very surprised to find out that it was Galton who actually coined the phrase "nature versus nurture." The research program that Galton initiated in this regard has developed into the important field of behaviour genetics. Galton went beyond the study of human traits into general anthropometry. The goal being trying to find as many measurable traits as possible, so that their distribution and heritability could be determined. His psychological studies also included mental differences in visualization, and he was the first to identify and study "number forms", now called "synaesthesia". He also invented the word-association test, and investigated the operations of the sub-conscious mind, obviously key to Freud and his work. When Galton began his research he only started with a general overview of what his research would be: to identify and measure variable human traits. Galton essentially founded 'eugenics', which seeks to improve the human stock and prevent the degeneration of genetic potential. He introduced the term and the overarching study of eugenics. He also inquired into racial differences to see the different variations between distinct races. In the last decade of his life, Galton basically started a religion founded on eugenics which demonstrates how important he thought it to be. Even with all of these accomplishments from Galton there was a lot more areas of study he contributed to including meteorology, statistics, forensic science, and anthropology.
http://galton.org/ - This site is exceptional because the site attempts to collect online all of Galton's original published work, including all his books, papers and other published work. They also give a concise overview of his work in a field with some direct quotes while also giving the links to each related, original document.
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Galton.html - This site gave a good description of Galton's early life with his parents as well as short items about the work he completed throughout his life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton - I try not to use wikipedia, but wikipedia had more information than Encyclopedia Britannica. It does a nice job of categorizing all his work into concise sections and also had the most information.
I was interested in researching Francis Sumner. He was an interesting person in my opinion to research because he was the first African American to graduate from college with a doctorate in psychology. He fits into this chapter because he is part of the rise of psychology in the United States. He plays a larger role with psychology because he helped pave the way for more minorities to take an interest in psychology.
Francis Sumner was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He grew up and attended school in multiple locations. He lived in New Jersey, Washington D.C., and Virginia during his early childhood education. When Francis reached high school he learned from his father at home. His father did not have a lot of trust with the schools in Virginia. His reasoning was the school his son would have attended probably wasn't going to be able to give him the education he thought he deserved. Segregated schools were common throughout the state of Virginia.
Francis was progressing fast academically. In 1911 at the age of sixteen, he was accepted into Pennsylvania's Lincoln University, which was the country's first black college. Francis earned a bachelor's degree there and earned another at Clark University. He stayed at Lincoln to teach psychology and German, and at the same time he fulfilled the requirements for a master's degree. Not long after earning his master's degree Sumner was drafted by the military. He was able to earn his doctorate degree after he was discharged from his duties in France in the summer of 1920.
People have to remember that Francis Sumner was only one generation after the civil war. This was a time where life was difficult for many folks of the minority. Racism and discrimination remained a heavy focus in America's culture. It was hard for black folks to find an equal place in society. What really shocks me about Francis Sumner was that he was only 1 of 11 out of 10,000 to earn a Ph. D in the years of 1876-1920. Sumner joined the faculty at Howard University in Washington D.C. where he implemented strong graduate and undergraduate psychology programs. Under his influence and leadership the University was able to produce a number of graduates at the bachelor and master's level.
Francis Sumner is a very important figure to recognize in the history of psychology not only because he accomplished so much at a young age, but he did it all during a time period that wasn't necessarily accepted by society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Sumner
This site was useful because it presented some background on Francis Sumner.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vDZxzuiIIQ0C&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=francis+sumner+psychology&source=bl&ots=oIFTtqh5Qd&sig=kGqsarV0P26oHjywxU_xcncfSEA&hl=en&ei=vfOMTpPQKoKpsQL3ndCkBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CG0Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=francis%20sumner%20psychology&f=false
This site was my favorite site because it gave some interesting stats that I was not able to find anywhere else, while still presenting good informationa and background about Francis Sumner.
http://www.socialpsychology.org/social-figures.htm
This site was useful because it presented more background on Francis Sumner.
The person I chose to write about is Thomas Upham. He was the first American psychologist to created a psychology textbook of sorts, he did this by writing and combining his lectures into a book. This fits into that chapter in that Thomas Upham was a psychologist, pacifist, poet, author, and educator, as well as a major figure in the holiness movement of the time period.
I am interested in this person, because I wonder how he decided what to add include or omit from his lectures to create this textbook. With no previous books of that nature around, how did he know that his information, theories or findings were correct. I am also curious as to what kind of response he got towards the release of his book.
In my research of Upton, there are some complications with his book Elements of Mental Philosophy because, it was republished in some 50 different versions that it is hard to tell what edits and citations were made, so there are issues in the validity of the book and its recent editions.
I also found a lot of information on Thomas Upham and his movement in the holiness movement, as well as, research on various works of literature. It was really interesting to see how such a minor mention of him a text book, could be considering the great deal of personal accomplishments he made.
http://www.enotes.com/topic/Holiness_movement I chose this research to discover more about his contributions to the holiness movement.
http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/upham.htm#works I chose this resources about the works he created.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cogswell_Upham This gave me a more generalized background of information about the man.
I was most interested in the female movement among psychologists and how they were starting to make their way towards the top of the education branch by going to college and getting PhD's just like their fellow male psychologists. I'm most interested in Mary Calkins, because she was at the lead of the pack when it came to female psychologists. She was the first female president of the APA (both psychological and philosophical)and contributed a lot to the evolution of psychology. Mary Calkins fits into this chapter becuase she is pioneer of psychology, she expanded theories and was a strong contender in the growth of psychology.
Calkins was known for her self-psychology and paired-associate techniques. Calkins started her educational career by teaching Greek, when she decided to study the new psychology and teach that. Her biggest problem was facing the obsticles of finding a college that had a psychology program and one that would accept females. Calkins applied to Harvard to get her PhD, but was denied access. Calkins didn't stop she just took classes unofficially. Calkin's work focused a lot on self psychology, issues focusing on the self and memory. Since her first degree was in philospophy, Calkin's writing crossed over with psychology and philosophy. Some other psychologists in the functional psychology and behavioral psychology opposed Calkins research on self-psychology. Calkins believed that the conscious self was the most important to study in psychology. However, they may be other things just as important to study, but Calkins focused on the conscious self.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_marycalkins.htm
This website had some of her contributions and books that she published
http://helpingpsychology.com/mary-whiton-calkins-noteworthy-psychologist
This website had a lot of information on her life and contributions that she acheived even though she was a female.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/marywhitoncalkins.html
This was where a lot of information on Calkins was found about her life before psychology, her contributions, her education, and her struggle as a female to succeed in a man's world in a new science.
I found Francis Sumner to be the one person that interested me. He relates to the chapter because he is best known minority pioneer, for a black man he made lots of progress for there he started out. I am interested in Francis because he is black, I say this because there is not many black psychologists talked about or that stood out. He did things that most African American’s back in the days never did.
Francis Cecil Sumner was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology. He earned such a degree at Clark University located in Massachusetts in 1920. Sumner did not get there by having money or a family that had connections. Sumner started receiving his early education in New Jersey, Washington D.C., and Virginia. For his high school years he was home schooled by his father. This is because his father did not trust the quality of Virginia segregated schools. At the age of 16 he was accepted to Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. There he earned his bachelor’s degree and then earned a second bachelor’s degree from Clark College. Because of everything that Francis Sumner accomplished he is often referred to as the Father of Black Psychology.
Sumner did his dissertation on the psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler. He then became the chair of the Department of Psychology at Howard University in Washington D.C. Due to Sumner Howard University became the leading university for providing training in psychology to African Americans at both graduate and undergraduate levels. When Francis received his Ph.D. it was a big accomplishment due to at this time only 11 blacks out of 10,000 recipients had earned a Ph.D. Francis was however was the first to receive a Ph.D. and be black. By Francis getting his Ph.D. he opened the door for many other blacks, not only in Psychology but in education. This showed that you are able to accomplish goals no matter what color you are.
“Once Sumner graduated he accepted a professor position at Wilberforce University in the fall of 1920. In Sumner of 1921 he went to teach at Southern University in Louisiana, a HBCU. In fall of 1921 Francis then got a position at West Virginia Collegiate Institute. There he wrote many different articles dealing with the state of colleges and acceptance of African-Americans. He remained at that college for the next 7 years. Sumner resigned from West Virginia Collegiate Institute in 1928. He then moved on to Howard University in the fall of 1928, and became the acting chairman and professor, until 1930 upon which time he became the fully appointed chair of Psychology and succeeded in making the department independent from Philosophy. Sumner held the position until he died on January 12, 1954.”( Wikipedia)
The above passage, well there was no way to reword anything.
Within the time frame of his teaching he married Francees H. Hughston in 1922. The marriage did not last and ended in a divorce. He then married Nettie M. Broker in 1946. There was no children from either of the marriages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Sumner
This allowed me to get some information in detail which was very helpful understand all of his schooling and teaching.
http://www.socialpsychology.org/social-figures.htm
This site had three links under his name, I was only able to get one to work so its like an extra
http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/6230_Chapter_1_Belgrave_I_Proof_pdf.pdf
This site allowed some general information about black psychology
orgs.utulsa.edu/trapt/historypresentations/Sumner.ppt
This was someone else powerpoint which I found very interesting.
I wanted to find more information on the female psychologist Christine Ladd-Franklin. She was a great example of how to persevere through adversity in order to follow your dreams. This chapter discussed how women had very little chance to succeed in psychology, and she was one of the few able to make it to the top. She is an inspiration to any girl who wants to pursue science, or any unorthodox career for a woman today.
Christine Ladd was born on December 1, 1847 in Windsor, Connecticut. She had two younger siblings, Henry and Jane, and two half-siblings as well. Even at a young age, Christine knew the importance of women’s rights. He mom and aunt were major advocates of women’s suffrage, and attended activists’ meetings with Christine as early as her toddler years. Her mother unfortunately died when she was only 12 years old, but the seed of determination had been planted.
Christine spent two years at the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, where she took the same classes as the boys who were getting ready to eventually attend Harvard. She graduated there in 1865 as valedictorian of her class. Christine then attended Vassar College, where she was able to study under a female astronomer, Maria Mitchell. Mitchell was the first woman to discover a new comet using a telescope. She also became the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and later the first in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Mitchell was also a women’s rights activist, and she founded and became president of the Association for the Advancement of Women. She inspired Christine to discover her own passions and pursue them. After one year, she had to drop out for financial reasons. During that year off, she taught and studied trigonometry, biology, and different languages. She then returned to Vassar and graduated a year later.
Christine was most interested in physics, but because she was not allowed access to the laboratories, she pursued mathematics, an area that a woman could engage in more independently. Ladd was allowed to attend graduate courses in mathematics at Johns Hopkins University despite the fact that the university was not open to women. At Johns Hopkins, she met her future husband, Fabian Franklin, a member of the Johns Hopkins mathematics department. She also found interest in symbolic logic and physiological optics. Optics led her to the research she is most well known for, color vision.
She was a lecturer on logic and psychology for five years at Johns Hopkins University (the only woman on the faculty) and for over fifteen years at Columbia University. She received an honorary LL.D. degree in 1887 from Vassar College, and in 1926 was finally awarded a doctorate from Johns Hopkins during their 50th anniversary celebration, forty-four years after the completion of her dissertation. She was 78 years old! Christine Ladd-Franklin died of pneumonia in New York City on March 5, 1930.
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/christineladd.html - This site gave a biography of Christine Ladd-Franklin’s life. There were also a lot of interesting quotes from family members on it.
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/ladd.htm - This provided new biographical information.
http://www.feministvoices.com/christine-ladd-franklin/ - This source gave biographical information the other two websites did not have.
I was originally going to choose Charles Darwin, but he is much too common and public of a figure. So I chose to look more into Francis Galton. Galton was really into the study of knowledge and whether or not it was inherited or was affected more from nurture (environment). Eugenics was one of the topics that I found interesting, not because I agree with the idea or anything like that, simply because it was an idea that if brought up today would probably be seen as highly taboo. The idea of trying to create a better race is a good idea, but I think it’s when you tell people that they can’t reproduce that it gets to be a problem. However, I do not get this feeling from Galton, I really think that he was trying to make the world a better place and advance human genetics for a good reason. As I said on my Tuesday assignment I have dealt a lot with his Nature vs. Nurture argument and was always fascinated by it, so it only made sense that I would want to look more into this man. I didn’t think that this argument fits really well with what we have been reading; I thought that the idea of inherent knowledge and eugenics was more along the lines of what we have been talking about and what we will deal with later in the books. My first point was really explored in the video I found, it is a simple but very informative video that helps explain the argument, it shows that while our nurture certainly effects things like social skills, how to treat people etc… it cannot completely dismiss some of the things we inherit from nature. For example no matter how hard I try, I will not become 6 foot 5 and dunk the ball like Kobe; I was just not created that way. However, my nurturing can impact me by creating an environment where all I do is practice basketball and make it to the NBA but eventually I will hit my ceiling of limitations. Two of my best friends were twins, so I have always been interested in and have been familiar with Twin studies and the whole idea of separation at birth. While I understand that there are some ethical and moral issues with the idea of separating people at birth and then studying them x amount of years down the road, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the idea of similar tastes and knowledge levels between two people who have never met. I understand this falls into the realm of nature vs. nurture but it is hard to argue with the fact that even though these people can be raised in completely different environments that they can have similar hobbies, ideas, and personalities. Chalk one up for the Nature side. That’s why I found the second video so cool because it shows exactly what some people are looking for in those twin studies, 2 people related by blood but raised separately coming together to find out that have a ton of common interests and characterizes despite growing up in two different households.
http://galton.org/-this provided a good base website to find out more of Galton's concepts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AIHC4PNCak.-this video was a great one to watch and show in an entry level class to get an idea of what exactly the argument is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yTCShemS_0-This was a really cool news report that shows there is some validity to twin studies and nature vs. nurture.
I choose to do my research on William James. AS a psychologist he interested me because of how he approached spiritualism. He also interested me because of how he went from being a psychologist to a philosopher. This aspect significantly increases the tie between early philosophers and psychologists. He fits into the chapter by being one of the first American pioneers in psychology. He also had many noteworthy accomplishments throughout his career which help to contribute to his importance in the history of psychology.
William James grew up in America but due to his dad’s wealth he was able to learn abroad. They as a family made many trips overseas and did some schooling in Europe. James’s father put a large emphasis on learning foreign languages in order to broaden your own horizons. At the age of 19 James enrolled into Harvard University. He aim was to study science. He started out studying chemistry but found little delight in that so he moved on to biology which fit better for him. James also a talented artist decided he could never be great in that are so he abandoned the idea of being an artist,
In his professional career James was a professor at Harvard University. His most famous works were books he contributed to the field of psychology. He wrote Principals of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, and The Will to Believe. His Principals of Psychology was a huge hit. It was a bestseller and invaluable to academia. It was encyclopedia like encompassing everything of the time in it that contributed to psychology.
James’s methodology was a little different for the time. He took an introspective look at psychology. By that he meant a careful self-observation of how the conscious mind works. He took the conscious mind to a whole new level in order to help increase his understanding of it. He talked about the mind as a flowing river with thought constantly streaming in one direction smoothly. He developed five levels of the conscious mind to help increase the understanding of his theory. James also stated that habits are adaptive functions of the mind whether good or bad. The next thought he had on the conscious mind was on emotion. He theorized as previous psychologists had before him that emotion was based on experience and that experience helps to influence the emotion. So a positive experience brings about a positive emotion.
In his later years James turned more from psychology to philosophy. He also took a look at spiritualism to see how legitimate some of the mediums were. He took a scientific approach to this research but even with this approach his colleagues still found flaws in his work and criticized him for donning research on this topic.
http://www.itp.edu/about/william_james.php used this website to get information regarding James’s concepts and theories
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/american/genius/william_bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James#Works_by_James I used this website and the one above to gain background and general knowledge regarding James and his theories
I have decided to do research on Mary Whiton Calkins. Mary Calkins fits into this chapter because she is on the the first female psychologists discussed. This chapter talks a lot about inequality pertaining to education for women, so I thought it would be perfect to discuss her. I find her interesting because she was treated so much differently than males when it came to education, but she was strong and pushed through it. To start with, I will provide some background information on her.
Mary was born on March 30th of 1863 in the town of Hartford Connecticut. She then began her education in Massachusetts, where her family moved. This eventually become her home for life. After the death of her sister, Calkins decided to take sixteen months off from school and traveled Europe with her family. While traveling, Calkins soon learned the Greek language. She soon resumed studies and Calkins enrolled into Smith College to study classics and philosophy. While teaching Greek at Smith College, a teacher noticed how brilliant Calkins was and decided to offer her a teaching job in laboratory psychology as long as Calkins received a full year of education and practice before she began her teaching. This is where Calkins true story of sex discrimination in education begins.
Calkins decided to start her graduate studies at Harvard to study under William James and philosopher Josiah Royce. Upon being at Harvard, Calkins soon learned that the opportunities for women in education were very limited. Even though William James and Josiah Royce supported Calkins to the fullest, the Harvard officials agreed to accept Calkins, but made it very clear that she was an unofficial "guest" of Harvard. The treatment of women was very similar in other college institutions as well.
While at Harvard, Calkins was enrolled in Philosophy 20a, Physiological Psychology with the instructor William James. Uneasy being in the same classroom as a female, the male students that had enrolled eventually dropped out within a few days of starting class. Calkins quoted,” James and I were left...quite literally at either side of a library fire. "The Principles of Psychology" was warm from the press; and my absorbed study of those brilliant, erudite, and provocative volumes, as interpreted by their write, was my introduction to psychology." As a side note, I admire Calkins drive for education. It must have been tough to push through the unsettling thought that she was not welcomed by the institution of her choice.
After studying at Harvard, Calkins then decided to go to Wellesley, but she was still driven to look for further education and training in psychology. Upon going to Cambridge, Calkins met Hugo Munsterberg through William James. They soon became colleagues and Calkins worked in Munderberg's lab while teaching at Wellesley. She then took a leave from the college to continue completion of her education and studies.
Calkins decided to study association. She then conducted experiments of association and invented paired-associate learning to become a method in cognitive research. How this would work is, Calkins would take a subject and show them a pair which consisted of a color, and a number to go along with that. Each of these combinations was shown for four seconds. When shown the color, the subjects were then asked which number went with those particular stimuli. Basically, these tests were conducted in order to further understand memory processes.
Calkins completed her Ph. D in the month of May of 1895. Sadly, Harvard granted this as an unofficial Ph. D. So in reality, Calkins never received a Ph. D at all. Calkins was then described by her colleagues and teacher Munsterberg as,” superior...to all, candidates of the philosophical Ph. D during the last years" and "surely one of the strongest professors of psychology in the country." Even after this grand statement, Harvard still refused to reward Calkins with her Ph.D. Calkins was then offered a Ph. D from Radcliffe. She refused and claimed that she wanted her doctorate from the school she earned it from. She would either receive it or nothing at all. Calkins never did receive her Ph.D due to Harvard never changing their mind.
Calkins then returned to Wellesley and continued to build her lab in psychology. Calkins then developed a contribution to self-psychology. Calkins argued that "psychology could be the study of mental life, as James had said, but that the central fact of psychology must be that all consciousness contains an element of the self." To end on a good note, Calkins was elected the fourteenth president of the APA in 1905, being the first woman to be honored. Calkins wrote the book "The persistent Problems of Philosophy" in 1907. Calkins also shifted her studies of psychology over to philosophy. She was also elected president of the other APA, making her the first woman elected for both. Calkins died of cancer in 1930, a year after retiring from Wellesley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whiton_Calkins
This website provides information on Calkins from a young age
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Calkins/murchison.htm
This is an autobiography of Mary Calkins. It is written in first person so it is very interesting.
http://www.apa.org/pi/women/resources/newsletter/2011/03/mary-calkins.aspx
More about Mary Calkin's life from the perspective of the APA itself
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/marywhitoncalkins.html
Another neat website with information about the life of Mary Calkins
In reading chapter 6 I found William James to be a very interesting person to read about. William James is relevant to chapter 6 “American Pioneers” in that he is referred to as “America’s First Psychologist.” I was refreshed to read the caption in the “habit” section of the book on page 181. He recommends seeking, “Opportunities to act on new habits as mere good intentions are not sufficient.” I can do better at this regarding some behaviors of my own I have been “intending” to alter.
Good intentions are mere indeed. We have read and discussed much concerning subjectivity and objectivity in our classroom. I feel that intentions are solely subjective and actions then are objective. Where’s the proof? One might ask. The proof is in the pudding. The pudding is action. Active Pudding, now that’s something.
I started to think of the economy of a day. How many thoughts do I think in intentional manner? How often then are my thought directed to a real step in the process of completing what I set out to do? Is thinking about a new habit or ridding an old habit functional? How much is too much? When should I learn to just move on and forget it?
In reading more on William James and related subjects I start to wonder how it is that things are getting darker, yet clearer. I am darker, yet clearer. I am more pessimistic, yet excited about it. So on and so on. I am “brought upon to tread therein.”
One more question I bring. If there is no such thing as a free lunch? Then is there such thing as free will?
Let’s talk it over something to eat. Shall we?
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/misc/james.html
outline concerning topic of "the will to believe"
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/james/
detailed description of William James' philosophy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJoL_f0i_c
Jerry Jeff Walker - "Gettin By" - 'easy come easy go' chance and choice
The person I found most interesting from chapter six was Margaret Floy Washburn. Washburn was born on July 25, 1871 in Harlem, New York. She was an only child born to Francis and Elizabeth Floy Washburn. She started school at the age of seven, a bit later than the average child, but could read and write well before she had ever attended school. She started at a private school ran by a retired Presbyterian Minister but attended a public school a few years later. She graduated at the age of fifteen and shortly after started her college education at Vassar College. She started at Vassar with her majors being French and chemistry but she found science and philosophy to be much more interesting to her. She applied to Columbia and was allowed to “sit in” on the classes because women were not yet allowed to be admitted fully into Columbia University. Her mentor advised her to after a year to transfer to the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. After two years she had earned a PhD in the field of Psychology and was the first woman to do so. Washburn moved around for a few years teaching at different colleges but eventually ended back at Vassar College as an Associate Professor of Philosophy; the same year she had been appointed as a cooperating editor of the American Journal of Psychology. She remained a well-liked Professor at Vassar until her retirement in 1937. Aside from teaching, Washburn did much research in the areas of theory development (including her motor theory), experimental work, animal behavior and professional service; she published over 200 articles and throughout her career, she had served as an editor for the American Journal of Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, Journal of Animal Behavior, Psychological Review, and Journal of Comparative Psychology. She was also the very first woman to be appointed president of the American Psychological Association (1921).
Washburn fit well into this chapter because it was about American Pioneers. While she did not exactly make any huge discoveries, it was a huge step for women everywhere for her to break the social norm and do what most men do and what most women would not; which is also why I find her so interesting. She is one of the reasons that when I look around the classroom, I see largely females rather than males. This would not have been the same during her time at all.
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/washburn.html
I used this site largely for her early life and biography.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Floy_Washburn
I used this site to learn more about her studies and contributions to psychology.
http://www.feministvoices.com/margaret-floy-washburn/
I used this site to learn about her biography and her accomplishments over time.
I chose William James. He fits into this chapter because he is 1) in the chapter 2) the first said american psychologist 3) wrote the first psychology text book. He is kind of a big deal. I am interested in him because he was a few "firsts" for the world of psychology. Even though psychology originated in Europe, he made it popular here in the states, and for that I am sure we are all very grateful! I found many things interesting about him in which I researched, one being his ideas on habit. He was so correct with what he talked about, having to do with habit. --"Provided one can stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one’s hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die…if it be never fed." This passage really spoke to me. I know a lot of people who have been so motivated up until the last few months about something they are passionate about, but they simply just aren't motivated any more. I have learned from James that it isn't a lack of interested per-say, but it might just be that they aren't "fueling the fire", if you will. This is something I will share with them, and I feel will help them with their over all life speculations. James also interests me with his thoughts on spirituality. "James wrote that spiritual ideas should be judged on three criteria: 1) Immediate luminousness; 2) Philosophical reasonableness; and 3) Moral helpfulness. Put simply, do they enlighten us, do they make sense, are they a good guide to living?" I am personally not very religious, but I like the way James studied spirituality. He studied the reactions of people who have been converted, and how people react to religion. I am a firm believer that faith has helped a lot of people through life, and this is what James studied.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/#4
-This is a good back round of James
http://www.goodhabitsgoodstudents.com/blog/?p=6
-This is where I got information on habits. It goes into more detail, very interesting.
http://www.butler-bowdon.com/the-varieties-of-religious-experience
-This is where I got information on his religious studies/beliefs.
Francis Sumner is the person from chapter six that I chosen to write about. He was the first African American to become a psychologist and I think that’s pretty impressive, which is why I picked him. Chapter six goes back to the times when psychologists were coming into play. This being the first known psychologists, the first women psychologist, and the first minority psychologist, hints Sumner.
Francis Cecil Sumner was born on December 7, 1895 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas to Ellen Lillian Sumner and David Alexander. He was the younger of two boys. Growing up Sumner went to two different elementary schools. First he went to Norkfolk, Virginia then over to Plainfield, New Jersey. Sumner then became home schooled and taught himself, with the help of his parents. He did a lot of writing and a lot of reading. He had to do this because he did not obtain a high school degree. However, the hard work paid off. At the young age of 15, Sumner got accepted into Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. A year later Sumner went to Clark University where he got a second Bachelor’s degree, this time in English. Before Sumner was drafted into the military in 1918 he went back to Lincoln University. He was now a grad student and he came back to teach two things: German and psychology. This guy really likes to go back and forth. After getting his Master degree Sumner decided to return to Clark where he would get his Doctorate. And then he returned to Lincoln! I’m kidding he didn’t, instead for the next three years we would move from Wilberforce University to Southern University to West Virginia Collegiate Institute.
Around this time in 1922, three years after returning from World War 1 he got married to Francees H. Hughston. Their marriage didn’t last and they ended up getting a divorce. At this point Sumner was still at WVCI, where he stayed for seven years. By this time its 1928 Sumner switched over to yet another college, this time Howard University. He stayed here for 26 years until his death.
It’s at Howard University that he really started to shine. Upon arriving he was a professor and an acting chairman. Within two years he became the fulltime chairman and the head of Psychology. By 1946 he remarried to a woman named Nettie M. Broker. He remained married and active chairmen until his untimely death on January 12, 1954. He was 59 years old and had no children. But in his 59 years he became the first (known) African American to ever get Doctorate in the field of Psychology. To make this more impressive he was the first African American to ever get a Doctorate in all of the American Universities.
Some of the things that he did while working as a psychologist was look at the equableness in the justice system between blacks and whites. He also taught many great psychologists, the one example is Kenneth Bancroft Clark.
This man was pretty amazing back in his time. I learned a lot about him that the book didn’t state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Sumner --> has everything you ever what to know! It’s about medium length, goes from the bringing of his life up until the every end.
">http://psychology.okstate.edu/museum/afroam/bio.html--> this site was good. It’s a time line that really broke down Sumner’s life.
">http://www.xtimeline.com/evt/view.aspx?id=480521--> this is a short one, the other two pretty much gave all I needed but I found this one to get my final one in. There isn’t a lot out there about him. But these three are the best sites to look at for information about Sumner.
Christine Ladd-Franklin was born in 1847. She fits into this chapter as a female pioneer in the field of psychology. I am interested in doing research on her life because of the way the book told of her activism in supporting women’s education.
Ladd-Franklin’s mother died when Christine was between the ages of 12 and 15. Around the time of her mother’s death, she began keeping a diary. The diary begins in 1860 and continues until 1873. The diary discusses her time at Vassar as well as her ideas and studies.
Ladd-Franklin attended schooling at Wesleyan Academy in Massachusetts. After this, she went to Vassar, but dropped out after the first year. While out of school she continued to teach herself trigonometry, biology, and languages. She then returned to Vassar.
She worked under Maria Mitchell, a famous female astronomer, and found an interest in astronomy herself. Ladd-Franklin graduated Vassar in 1869. After graduation she began teaching mathematics and science. She also began attending courses at Washington College, Jefferson College, and Harvard.
Ladd-Franklin contacted J.J. Sylvester at John Hopkins University, and with his help, she began attending graduate courses. While attending courses, she found an interest in symbolic logic. Women were not allowed to receive a Ph.D., so when she had finished her coursework, she was not rewarded a degree. She received her degree when she 78 years old, over 40 years after she finished her dissertation!
Ladd-Franklin traveled to Germany, with the husband she met at John Hopkins, and found an interest in psychology. She developed a theory of color vision that was presented at the Second International Congress of Psychology in 1892. She was along side Mary Whiton Calkins as one of the first two women to be elected to the American Psychological Association in 1893. She was also shown in Cattell's American Men of Science volume and was one of only three women psychologists starred in 1903. Ladd-Franklin became the first woman to teach in the Arts and Sciences faculty at Johns Hopkins.
Throughout her life she was an advocate of graduate education and academic employment for women. She helped to create the Sarah Berliner fellowship, which supported Ph.D. women in their research. Ladd-Franklin’s daughter became an important member in the women’s suffrage movement.
I found the life of Christine Ladd-Franklin to be very interesting to read about. I am surprised that she had not been mentioned in other courses I have taken. Her dedication to learning and education, despite the fact that she was female during a time that did not encourage development of female minds, shows how important she is to the field of psychology, as well as to the advancement of women’s education.
http://www.feministvoices.com/christine-ladd-franklin/ I used this web page a lot. It helped me to learn about her advancements and contributions as a women in her time period.
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/ladd.htm This page gave an overview and background of Christine Ladd-Franklin's life.
http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/christine-ladd-franklin.html This page gave details of her experiences at Vassar.
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/womeninpsych_2.htm I did not use this page very much because there is not a lot of information on it, but it told me about her daughter's position on female rights.
I chose to research Mary Whiton Calkins. She relates to chapter six because she was the first woman president of the American Psychology Association and has made countless contributions to the psychology field. I am interested in learning more about her because she overcame so much to get where she ended up. She was denied so many things it is amazing that she became the person I get to study today.
Mary Calkins started working as a Greek professor for Wellesley College in 1887. In 1890 she was invited to teach psychology but would need at least a year’s worth of study in the subject in order to teach it. She wanted to attend Harvard University since it was one of the few universities to offer the subject. At first Mary Calkins was denied when she asked to sit in on at Harvard, because she was a woman, by the President but her father and the President of Wellesley College and in October of 1890 she was allowed to sit in on lectures at Harvard. In 1895 she presented her thesis to Harvard faculty but was denied a degree.
In 1895 Calkins was made the Associate Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Wellesley College and in 1898 was promoted to Professor. While she was professor at Wellesley she wrote hundreds of papers and four books. In 1905 she was elected president of the American Psychology Association and in 1918 was elected the president of the American Philosophical Association. Her major contributions to psychology include the paired associate’s technique and her work in self-psychology. In 1927 after teaching for 42 years she retired from Wellesley College. She died in 1930 from cancer.
http://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/CALKINS.html: http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_marycalkins.htm
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/marycalkins.html
All websites had detailed information about all the aspects of her life.
I wanted to know more about G. Stanley Hall, because Goodwin presented him as this really intriguing person: he was the first to receive a doctorate in psychology in America; he was the first professor of psychology in America; he founded the American Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Genetic Psychology (nee the Pedagogical Seminary); he created the American Psychological Association, and was elected its first president; he created Clark University; he was the first to distinguish children and teenagers as distinctly different from adults, and even coined the term ‘adolescence’; and he brought Sigmund Freud (and Carl Jung) to America for his first and only visit (HMP, 185-194).
It seemed like Hall must have been pretty bada* in early American psychology. The first article I read, however, portrayed him in a very different light: a racist, a fascist, a misogynist, and a man with “no sympathy for the poor, the sick or those with developmental differences or disabilities” (Wikipedia).
Wow.
So it was interesting reading a paper that defended Hall’s work (Amett), as well as passages from Hall’s own work (Youth).
There are many similarities between Hall’s findings and current work with adolescents, including “the prevalence of depressed mood in adolescence; adolescence as a time when crime rates peak; adolescence as a time of high sensation seeking; susceptibility to media influences in adolescence; characteristics of peer relations in adolescence; and biological development during puberty” (Amett).
The problems that arise with Hall, however, seem to stem from his particular understanding of evolution. Hall apparently subscribed to a Lamarckian theory of evolution (Amett) [“the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring” (Wikipedia)] as well as the theory of Recapitulation (HMP, 193) [“a hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors” (Wikipedia)]. Based on this (mis)understanding of evolution, Hall argued that human development (from infancy to adulthood) proceeded in stages similar to human evolution (from savage and animalistic to civilized and cultured); he also apparently believed that different races represented these different stages in human evolution, as well (Richards, 22).* In Adolescence, Hall argues that minorities are not incapable of the ‘virtues’ of whites; they are 'merely' at a more primitive stage of development:
"Every vigorous race, however rude and undeveloped, is, like childhood, worthy of the maximum of reverence and care and study... for they are the world's children and adolescents" (Adolescence, 748).
And in Youth, Hall argues that women -by pursuing advanced education in the same sphere as men- risk falling from the pedestal upon which he has placed them:
“But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing in the growing fear that modern woman… is coming to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways” (Youth, 168).
Even after all of this research, I am still at a loss as to what to make of Hall. Clearly he contributed a great deal to the history of psychology; yet at the same time, he perpetuated stereotypes that reinforced barriers to women and minorities. Reading Hall’s own work, it seems as though he meant well; he was simply terribly misguided in his beliefs about minorities and women (which was not exactly uncommon at that time).
*Some of Hall’s ideas may be explained by his reading of Nietzsche (as he was initially a student of philosophy, and also studied in Germany), especially Nietzsche’s concept of the “Will to Power”:
“Nietzsche's notion of the will to power can… be viewed as a response to Schopenhauer's ‘will to live.’ Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had regarded the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to live, thus resulting in all creatures' desire to avoid death and to procreate. Nietzsche, however, challenges Schopenhauer's account and suggests that people and animals really want power; living in itself appears only as a subsidiary aim—something necessary to promote one's power. Defending his view, Nietzsche describes instances where people and animals willingly risk their lives to gain power—most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare.” (Wikipedia)
“G. Stanley Hall”, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Stanley_Hall
Information on the negative aspects of Hall’s work.
“G. STANLEY HALL’S ADOLESCENCE: Brilliance and Nonsense”, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Clark University, History of Psychology, 2006, Vol. 9, No. 3, 186–197
http://www.jeffreyarnett.com/articles/Arnett_2006_HP2.pdf
Information on the aspects of Hall’s Adolescence that are still in favor.
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, G. Stanley Hall, Project Gutenberg, 2005
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1473112
Hall in his own words.
Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology ..., Volume 2, Granville Stanley Hall, New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1904
http://books.google.com/books?id=31gXAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA748&lpg=PA748&dq=%22the+world%27s+children+and+adolescents%22+hall+adolescence&source=bl&ots=x-Mg3YQALf&sig=kZMtLoTQnXn25fqKk8C3qgqPa2Y&hl=en&ei=Vz-OTqy5OcSnsAKp1My0AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hall in his own words.
Race, racism, and psychology: towards a reflexive history, Graham Richards, Routledge, 1997
http://books.google.com/books?id=HVlremBoYHEC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=G.+Stanley+Hall+race&source=bl&ots=qwErmfZIE7&sig=2psTOKzME0QgTNdraVGhoEixAL4&hl=en&ei=BjeOTrSDJdCWtwe0tvmYDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CFUQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=G.%20Stanley%20Hall%20race&f=false
Hall on race.
“Lamarckism”, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
Explanation of Lamarckism.
“Recapitulation theory”, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
Explanation of Recapitulation theory.
“Friedrich Nietzsche”, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
Explanation of Will to Power.
G. Stanley Hall, facebook
http://www.facebook.com/pages/G-Stanley-Hall/112063485475217
I just find it amusing when I see a facebook page like this.
I chose to research about Mary Whiton Calkins..I choose her as she was a woman who reached tremendous heights and gained success in the field of psychology. Mary Calkins also became the first woman president of APA.There was information about her in chapter 6 hence making it relevant to that chapter. I was interested to read more about her because of the struggle she might have gone through to become what she did eventually and being a woman I feel proud of her accomplishments and reaching a very significant position against all odds.
Mary Whiton Calkins was born in the United States and completed her education here as well. She got interested and had a desire to broaden her knowledge after she spent some time in Europe. She wanted to enroll in a college in Germany but dropped that idea because of the position of women in society and after she was discouraged by a female student not to enroll because of the stern believe of the lower position of women and how this hampers the quality of education that women received.
It was interesting to know that she also taught as she worked as a professor for a few years. She worked really red and wrote a lot of papers.Calkins developed a theory of self-psychology and did a lot of research on various topics such as association, dreams etc. After a lot of research work and teaching she went on to become the first female president of the APA and the American philosophical Association. After years of work and valued contributions in the field of psychology she retired and unfortunately died of cancer.
The individual from this chapter that I chose to focus on was Margaret Washburn. She was one very unique woman. As an only child in a family that was financially stable possibilities in life seemed endless for her except for one thing, Margaret was a woman. Still Margaret’s parents strongly encouraged the pursuit on and education. She was able to obtain higher education although it was not easy, and in time it paid off.
One very unique thing that I learned about Washburn ties directly into this chapter is the theory of introspection. She learned about this theory from Titchener. I talked about this theory in my blog on Tuesday and I said that I thought this was the least interesting thing in the chapter. I said that at the time because in reference to William James. I thought that I was silly that a research would choose to use a technique that they knew had bias to it. It is now obvious to me that this theory must have really appeared to have some payoff to it for James, Washburn and others to use it anyway.
Washburn like James thought introspection was essential to understanding ones thoughts. She went on to spend a lot of time focusing on thoughts and not behaviors and ultimately published a book on it. She was rivaled by many people who thought that the actions of individuals should be the sole focus of research. As time passed her interest did change and the last type of research that she did focused on the problems that students faced. In that research she found that high academic standing does not necessarily guarantee good reasoning ability but good reasoning ability is an excellent guarantee of high academic standing.
It is obvious that Margaret Washburn had a very successful life. What is more amazing is that she was able to be successful in a field among men who did not necessarily think that she should be there. Washburn took a path that not many women chose. She gave up focusing on things like children and family in exchange for more knowledge and better research. In doing so and being successful at it Washburn and the other leading female psychology made equality a much more attainable thing for women.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Margaret_Floy_Washburn - background on her life
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/09/animal-mind.aspx - talked about the theory of introspection
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/washburn2.html - she did have it better than most women because her family was economically stable, also talks about how focused she was on her work
http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Washburn/Martin_1940.html - showed how in depth she went as a thinker and how her interest changed over time.
Mary Calkins was a pioneer for women in the psychology field because she was the first women to earn a PhD, but was Harvard refused to give it to her, and she was the first female president of the APA. Calkin’s did not have a lot of support going for her, but she overcame that and was very successful and contributed some great research to the field of psychology. Calkin’s proved herself in the field of psychology which allowed other women to follow in her footsteps and make an impact in this field.
Mary did a wide range of research, and even had a great interest in philosophy as well. She did some research about dreams, and this research helped Freud in his theories about dreams. Like many other people of Mary’s time, she did this by analyzing herself and her dreams. She did this by recording dreams in a journal and then realized that her real life and her dream life had a lot of comparisons to each other.
Mary’s biggest accomplishment in her research was with paired associate learning. She did this research by pairing a color with a number and then seeing participant’s ability to recall the pairs. She discovered that vividness, primacy, recency, and frequency increase the chances of recall. This research is still believed and used today. This work just showed her ability to be an influential psychologist, and that women are important and should be given the same opportunity as men.
The work that Mary did gave her a lot of merit and she was voted the 12th most influential psychologist of her time and was later elected the president of the APA. This was a big honor and proved her place in the field of psychology. Mary received many degrees, but she refused to accept the degree from Harvard since they had denied it to her when she had rightfully earned it. This was a very bold decision on her behalf, but she made a statement by not accepting it. Mary is a very important figure in psychology, and not just because she was a woman, but for any psychologist, man or woman, her work deserves her recognition.
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/marycalkins.html
http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-whiton-calkins/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whiton_Calkins
Yay! It let me sign in!
I’d chosen Mary Whiton Calkins as my person of interest for Chapter 6 because I thought she seemed relentless and dignified in the face of institutionalized sexism, but I was even MORE impressed once I did a bit of research.
Mary Calkins was able to overcome obstacles (like grieving her sister’s death) to graduate with a double major from Smith College in philosophy and the classics. She began at Wellesley College in their Greek department and, only a year later, was offered a position in the new, “less theoretical” psychology department. The stipulation was only that she study psychology first for one year.
This is where Mary came into trouble. There was almost nowhere she could go as a woman to get her graduate degree in psychology. She explored every option – even looking overseas – when she received a letter from Harvard’s president. He believed emphatically that men and women should NOT go to school together. It took a letter from Wellesley’s president and Calkins father before she was allowed to go to school there.
She often found she was the only student in attendance at the Harvard lectures since some other Harvard classmates felt it was unnecessary for a woman to be educated on the same level as themselves, and essentially protested class. This led Mary to have a one-on-one education from some very bright minds in the field.
At some point during her year at Harvard, Calkins began doing graduate work under the German Hugo Cnsterberg. Hugo wrote a letter, asking that Calkins be admitted into the PhD program, but was refused. The Psych Department examined Calkins informally and again petitioned the president of Harvard to accept her candidacy. They once again declined, but they did offer her a PhD from Radcliffe. Calkins removed simply because it made no sense.
Calkins went on to teach at Wellesley until retirement in 1927. She had turned down many job offers simply because this job allowed her to stay home and care for her ailing parents.
That same year, a group of Harvard alum petitioned Harvard to give Calkins an honorary PhD, but they again declined.
When she died three years later, she’d still not received her PhD from Harvard, although there are still people who petition on her behalf. In 2002, a group of students and professors had petitioned Harvard to give Calkins her degree posthumously, but, as we’ve seen before, they were denied.
Mary was not only a bright mind who discovered aspects of the human memory but a woman who persevered when others tried to get in her way. This absolutely relates to psychology because the life of each of these brilliant minds has had an impact on the field of Psychology, and their trials and successes shaped how they looked at their world.
http://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/CALKINS.html I used this link because it was incredibly thorough.
http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-whiton-calkins/ I know this is kind of silly, but the first thing I noticed about this site is the picture of Mary Calkins. Besides that, I liked the source because – again – it had a lot of interesting tidbits.
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/marywhitoncalkins.html Again: details.
"Yay! It let me sign in!"
I'm relieved to see that I'm not the only one who had that problem!
I decided to learn some more about William James, because I was interested in his feelings about the early field of psychology. William James was a focal point of this chapter, since he wrote one of the first textbooks in the field: "Principles of Psychology". I was primarily interested in James because he expressed ambivalence about psychology. In fact, after he wrote his masterwork, he described it as “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable”. Nevertheless, it was one of psychology's most influential books, and it helped the field develop into the science it is today, regardless of whether James's initial assessment was accurate.
The theoretical framework that James helped to develop was functionalism. Functionalism was concerned with discovering the evolutionary function of consciousness. James was very affected by Darwin's ideas of natural selection, and this led to the idea that consciousness was an evolved trait. The status of consciousness as a genetic trait naturally raises the Darwinian question of what the function or purpose consciousness is.
An additional goal of the functionalist perspective is gaining insight into how consciousness and other brain processes work, not by breaking them into parts, but by introspectively examining how they work together.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/#3
This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on William James. I found some good general biographical information here, as well as some information about James's Principles of Psychology.
http://www.psych.utah.edu/gordon/Classes/Psy4905Docs/PsychHistory/Cards/James.html
This is a page from the University of Utah's psychology department website, which gave me some background on Functionalism and William James.
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/psychistory.htm
This is a history of psychology page in the psychology section of about.com. I used it to get a little more information about functionalism.
One of the people I found most interesting in chapter 6 was Mary Whiton Calkins. The first thing that got my attention was her title in the book, of challenging the male monopoly. She fits very well into this chapter as one of the American Pioneers of Psychology. She is best known for two things: becoming the first woman president of the American Psychological Association and being denied her doctorate from Harvard. She also founded an early psychology laboratory and invented the paired-associate technique. These are some of the reasons she is interesting to me. Throughout her life she had many educational setbacks. Besides being a woman in 1890, there were also very few Psychology programs at this time. once she started looking at Universities she was turned away many times when even just trying to sit in on some lectures. After studying at Clark University, Calkins returned to Wellesley College as an Instructor of Psychology in the Department of Philosophy. In that same year she established a psychological laboratory at the college with this being one of the other setbacks for her when looking for Universities. There were not many with Psychology Labs. When trying to study under men, she kept hearing that she would be welcomed as a guest, but not as a student. How discouraging. During this period Calkins had been writing and conducting several experiments within the field of psychology and it was at this time she invented the paired-associate technique. Calkins' major contribution to psychology was the development of a system of self-psychology. She was was the first to "discover" the psychology of selves. She called it a reconciliation between structural and functional psychology. Her first basic definition of her psychology is as follows:
"All sciences deal with facts, and there are two great classes of facts-Selves and Facts-for-the-Selves. But the second of these great groups, the Facts-for-the-Selves, is again capable of an important division into internal and external facts. To the first class belong percepts, images, memories, thoughts, emotions and volitions, inner events as we may call them; to the second class belong the things and the events of the outside world, the physical facts, as we may name them... The physical sciences study these common and apparently independent or external facts; psychology as distinguished from them is the science of consciousness, the study of selves and the inner facts-for-selves
A year later she published an Introduction to Psychology, which was then used as a text in colleges and universities nationwide.
I found it encouraging to know that after being rejected for a degree from Harvard, Calkins continued to work and strive for equality. In addition, Calkins published writings based on both philosophy and psychology. She never was held back by being an intelligent woman, regardless of her obstacles. I admire that.
htthttp://www.apa.org/pi/women/resources/newsletter/2011/03/mary-calkins.aspxp://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/CALKINS.html
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/marycalkins.html
Last night I went to a haunted house. It was on strawberry farm and some creative people took the time to set it up as frightening maze will characters in full costume. Besides being chased with a "chainsaw," there is a particular Grimm Reaper that had me petrafied. He simply followed me through every turn, staying close enough behind to sometimes hide around corners then sneak up on me when I least expected it. As I sqeeezed me friends arm, I remember saying "It's important to always know whats behind you."
I did survive the ghosts and goblins, but for some reason I keep repeating that one little phrase over and over again in my mind. "Its important to always know what's behind you." It got me think about my everyday life, includung my History in Psychology class.
First of all, I wake up everyday looking forward to the day ahead. By that I mean, I literally WAKE UP and LOOK FORWARD to the day ahead.With nearly every step I take, I am looking forward to see what's in front me. Of course, this is extremely important so I don't trip, fall and break my face, but I also think its important to know whats behind me. I have to turn around and make sure that there is no Grimm Reaper following me, or just to make sure I don't bash into the car behind me while putting it in reverse.
I also feel it is important to know whats behind me in regards to my past. The things that are behind me have made me who I am today, and will continue to shape my future. I, personally, believe it is important for me to learn from my past. I try to think of it like a never-ending encyclopedia that I keep in my purse and pull out to reference information anytime I am in a jam. If I chose to look up my memories or try to forget the hard ones, it would be like going through the worst of things for the first time over and over again. Because, I always acknowledge what's behind me, I can learn from it and use it as a tool in my future.
I also feel that this relates to A History of Psychology in the sense that knowing what's behind us in a historical matter, educates us to prepare for the future. Because these psychologists took extensive notes, proposed ideas and pushed the bar, we are able understand their findings in great detail, without even living within one hundred years of some of these men.
So I feel like the lesson I learned from our history class this week was a good one. I may have learned it from the Grimm Reaper and it may have involved a blood-curtling scream, but the positve side is that I have a great new montage: "Its important to always know whats behind you."
I decided to do more research on Margaret Floy Washburn. She happened to be one of the few women that had been introduced to us in this chapter. Like many people, I am excited to see how the field of psychology is beginning to develop and along with that the changes that are being made with more people being able to pursue a higher education and career. Rather than continuing to hear about only white males, this chapter introduced us to women and minorities being able to finally get the opportunities that they had so long been deprived of.
Washburn is often known for being “the first women ever awarded a Ph.D.” She was a great teacher whose work in psychology has left a lasting impression. Even though these two sentences say a lot about Washburn, I was interested to learn more about where her story began. Margaret was born July 25, 1871 in Harlem, New York. She was the only child of Francis and Elizabeth Washburn. I was actually shocked to learn about how hard her father pushed and encouraged her to pursue a higher education. Most of the time, we are informed of the male dominance in history and how many of them believed that women should not have careers but should instead tend to the family and take care of the household. Even though her father showed a bit of a temper, her mother was the opposite by showing a more caring attitude. Despite the situation at home and lack of interactions with other children, Washburn was not lonely; instead she filled up her time with readings, studying other languages, music, and other interests.
Margret did not begin school until she was seven years old. The first school she attended was located right next to her house. However, because of her family constant moving around, Washburn ended up attending several different schools. After graduating high school in 1886 she went straight to Vassar College; she was only fifteen. Margaret was very fortunate to have a family who was economically secure and could finance her education. Without having this advantage it may have been a lot more difficult for her to pursue a higher education. Margret had not found her interest in psychology until her senior year when she was required to take a class taught by the president. I never would have guessed this since she is very well known in psychology, I just figured that she started out with that interest, but I was wrong. Margret turned completely to the study of the mind. After graduating from Vassar College in 1891, she was determined to study in the graduate program at Columbia University. However, Columbia University was not accepting women into their graduate program, it was a “privilege reserved only for men.” Instead, she was allowed to audit courses and work in James M. Cattell’s new laboratory of experimental psychology but was not admitted as a regular student.
Then again, James M. Cattell treated Margaret as a ‘regular’ student, but it wasn’t enough to convince the Columbia’s board to allow her enrollment as a regular student in the graduate program of the university. Even though she showed all of the required traits to be accepted as a regular student at Columbia University, she had to leave for Cornell University since Columbia was not giving her the chance just because she was a woman. At Cornell, Margret met E.B. Titchner, who eventually became her second guidance in the world of psychology and a big part of her success in the field. From Cornell, Margret became the first woman ever awarded with a doctorate degree in June 1894. During the same year, she was accepted into the American Psychological Association (APA). Unlike other women psychologists who received a higher education, Margret did not marry. The opportunity did present itself to do so, but getting married meant the woman giving up her career to have children and to tend to the household. Instead, Washburn wanted to stick to the field of psychology and devoted her life to doing so.
Margret was an outstanding teacher; however, she worked in many areas of psychology and is well known for her contributions in theory development, experimental work, animal behavior, and professional service. She published over two hundred scientific articles and reviews, translated Wundt’s Ethical Systems, and wrote two books: “The Animal Mind,” and “Movement and Mental Imagery.” Her book on “The Animal Mind,” was the first textbook in comparative psychology that compiled the experimental studies of animal behavior and mentality. Washburn maintained that “psychology is about studying both behavior and consciousness and research should both describe and explain by obtaining and interpreting facts.” Margret was a member of the APA and later the President of the APA in 1921. Her most notable achievement was the election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1932 and in 1903 she was ranked in the top fifty psychologists.
Before doing research on Margret Washburn, I had no idea who she was. I am so used to hearing about the same male psychologists in every course I take. However, I have found that this class is much different and it has given me an opportunity to search psychologists that I may not have otherwise gotten the chance to learn about. I found Washburn to be a very fascinating and inspirational woman. She had goals in life and did what she had to in order to achieve them. This was a big step in history and I look forward to reading more about the continued growth in psychology and those who contributed.
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/washburn2.html : I liked this link because it gave a detailed background of Margret. I learned a lot more about her and was able to gain an understanding of the difficulties she faced while entering the field of psychology.
http://www.feministvoices.com/margaret-floy-washburn/ : I liked this link because it talked a bit more about what was expected from women and how Washburn went against the norm and decided to tend to her career in psychology.
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/womeninpsych_4.htm : This link was helpful in describing Washburn’s contributions to psychology.
(I have talked with Dr. MacLin about week six and week seven and why they are late. He said to get them done when possible and turn them in. I just thought I would make a quick note letting you know and I apologize for the inconvenience)