Remarkable Women in Psychology

This week’s post is a special one in honour of International Women’s Day 2018. Whilst some of the most famous figures in psychology are men (think Freud, Jung, Milgram etc), this doesn’t mean that women haven’t made a massive contribution to the field. The work of female scientists should be celebrated, so I’ve picked 5 women who have made a real difference to the field of psychological research to profile below.

1. Mary Ainsworth

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Born: 1913. Ohio, USA

Studied: University of Toronto

Most famous for: Devising the Strange Situation – a test to observe attachment type between an infant and their primary caregiver (to find out more about the Strange Situation read my blog post here). Her work makes up the cornerstone of attachment theory – that is the type of attachment an infant has to their primary caregiver (usually their mother). If an infant does not have secure attachment then it may result in emotional or behavioural problems later on in life.

2. Mamie Clark

mamie clark

Born: 1917. Arkansas, USA

Studied: Columbia University

Most famous for: Doing some of the first work into racial bias with young children in segregated America that went on to provide pivotal evidence in the United States Supreme Court case which ruled it was unconstitutional to have separate schools for white and black children. Her experiment used dolls of different skin tones and children were asked questions such as “show me the doll that looks bad” or “which doll would you like to play with?”. The experiment revealed a preference for the white doll, mimicking society at the time. It concluded that racial segregation caused psychological harm to children.

3. Anne Treisman

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Born: 1935. Yorkshire, UK

Studied: University of Oxford

Most famous for: Developing Feature Integration Theory with Gelade in 1980. This states that the individual features of a stimulus (such as colour or shape) are processed simultaneously through an automatic process before object recognition occurs at a later stage. This process explains how we search for a target in a crowded field – if it has a distinctive feature like being a bright colour (e.g. a pink circle in a field of blue ones) then it seems to pop out automatically. However, processing takes longer if the target shares a feature with the distractors (imagine looking for a blue circle in a field of blue squares). In the first example processing happens automatically, whereas the second example requires more attention to find the target. This work has since gone on to form the basis of several new experiments in the field of cognitive psychology, and her paper with Gelade (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) has been cited over 100,000 times.

4. Elizabeth Loftus

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Born: 1944. California, USA

Studied: Stanford University

Most famous for: Her work on the reliability of eyewitness testimony. In her well-known experiment, she showed participants a video of a car accident. She then asked half of them “How fast was the car going when it bumped into the other car?” and the other half “How fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car?”. The participants who were asked the second question were more likely to overestimate the speed the car was travelling. Her work in this field shows how careful interviewers must be when talking to eyewitnesses as leading questions can alter their perception of the event. She has gone on to advise courts in several famous cases, including that of OJ Simpson.

5. Dame Vicki Bruce

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Born: 1953. Essex, England

Studied: University of Cambridge

Most famous for: Being a leader in the field of face recognition and eyewitness testimony. In 1986 she developed a Functional Model of Face Processing with Young (Bruce & Young, 1986) which states that there are 7 different codes that we use to process faces which, include expression, pictorial, and structural codes. The model explains how familiar faces are processed differently to unfamiliar ones, and why we have the ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon, when we know we know someone’s name but can’t remember exactly what it is. She was awarded an OBE for services to psychology in 1997 and was made a Dame in 2015.

 

 

Were there any people profiled here that you hadn’t heard of before? It’s be really interesting to put this post together, but also frustrating at times – some female psychologists who I wanted to feature don’t have their own Wikipedia page, making it hard to find out their biographical information. This just goes to show that we should celebrate women in science! Please share, using the hashtag #internationalwomensday and if there’s anyone else you think I should have featured here please let me know in the comments below.

 

References:

Ainsworth, M.D.S., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E. and Wall, S.N., 2015. Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Psychology Press.

Bruce, V. and Young, A., 1986. Understanding face recognition. British journal of psychology77(3), pp.305-327.

Loftus, E.F. and Palmer, J.C., 1996. Eyewitness testimony. In Introducing psychological research (pp. 305-309). Palgrave, London.

Treisman, A.M. and Gelade, G., 1980. A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive psychology12(1), pp.97-136.

http://www.naacpldf.org/brown-at-60-the-doll-test

 

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