In this video I provide example mnemonics, or memory aids, for remembering important names in the history of psychology including Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, William James, G. Stanley Hall, Mary Whiton Calkins, Margaret Floy Washburn, Sigmund Freud, and B.F. Skinner, as well as the roles they played in the development of structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism. The suggested mnemonics can help you to link these names with a few basic facts and avoid feeling overwhelmed at the start of an introductory psychology course. They can also provide practice for learning to make your own mnemonics in order to make studying easier and more efficient.

Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video I’m going to give you some suggestions for mnemonics, or memory aids, that you can use to remember some details about early figures in psychology. These mnemonics aren’t meant to provide detailed information, they’re just a way to sort of hook the name to one or two basic facts or major accomplishments. And these are also just suggestions, so feel free to change them, right? Mnemonics are meant to be personal, so they’re all about how you can connect the information together and that’s going to depend on you, your background, your knowledge that you have, experiences, your sense of humor, whatever it is for you that helps you to bring the information to mind.

And this process of just thinking about how you can connect the information might help you to remember the material better anyway. So just sitting down and saying “okay what does this name make me think of? What does this remind me of? Or how can I connect these ideas together?” That might be just enough to help you to recall the information and that means that the mnemonics that you create don’t have to be perfect. They don’t even have to be particularly good. They just have to be enough to help you recall the information a few times. And once you’ve done that you’ll find that the information starts to stick and the mnemonic fades away.

You can sort of think of them like training wheels. So they help you get started and then you no longer need them anymore. As your knowledge and your familiarity with the material gets greater and greater then the mnemonics disappear and you’re left just knowing the content. So keep that in mind when we go through these; don’t worry about trying to come up with the perfect example or the best possible mnemonic for something. And some of my suggestions you probably won’t like very much you know, uh, there’s some bad wordplay, attempts at maybe what are even considered jokes, but if some bad jokes are what it takes to have a good memory, then that’s a sacrifice that I’m willing to make. And I’d rather have you groaning at some of these terrible examples rather than groaning after a bad exam score.

So with that in mind let’s take a look at some suggestions for mnemonics you could use to remember these early figures in psychology. So we’ll start with Wilhelm Wundt, often considered to be the father of psychology. He’s the first person to be referred to as a psychologist and he started the first psychology research lab at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Now Wundt was interested in consciousness and how we could break it down into pieces that could then be studied and this is an approach that became known as structuralism. Wundt mostly did this by studying aspects of perception and measuring things like reaction times.

So if we want to connect this name Wilhelm Wundt to these ideas of structuralism and this first psychology laboratory in Germany, then we might think about his name Wundt and say well, it kind of sounds like saying the English word want, but with a thick German accent. So maybe we imagine him saying “I wundt to start a psychology lab” or “I wundt to break consciousness into pieces”. Now my terrible German accent aside, this might be just enough to form this link between this name Wundt and this idea of structuralism and this first psychology laboratory.

Edward Titchener was a student of Wundt’s who translated many of Wundt’s works into English and helped to spread these ideas in the U.S while he was a professor at Cornell. Titchener also developed new techniques for introspection. This means looking inward and this was a technique to try to get participants to be able to report their conscious experiences so that they could be analyzed and broken down as part of this process of structuralism.

So we could think of this name Titchener and think of some words it might remind us of, but I’ll say that it makes me think of the phrase “teachin’ her”. So we might imagine Titchener at his lab at Cornell where he’s guiding a female participant into this process of introspection and so he says “I’m teachin’ her how to report her subjective conscious experiences.”

William James was an American psychologist who taught at Harvard and who wrote what’s considered the first textbook of psychology titled Principles of Psychology. William James promoted the idea of functionalism and this was in contrast to structuralism. Structuralism focused on trying to find the component parts of consciousness and study them in isolation and what William James thought is that we shouldn’t do this. Instead we should focus on the functions of different conscious experiences, meaning what purposes do they serve? Why do we have those experiences? What are they good for?

And so if we want to connect this name William James to functionalism and this first textbook then we might notice that his name William James, both parts of his name could function as a first name. And then we could imagine maybe the printer for his book having a little confusion over which was his first name William or James.

G. Stanley Hall was the first American to receive a PhD in Psychology studying under William James and he also went to Germany and worked with Wilhelm Wundt, and later in his career he became the president of Clark University. More importantly, he became the first president of the American Psychological Association or APA in 1892.

So if we want to remember his role as the first president then we might take a photo here, this one is from Clark University where he’s surrounded by some illustrious psychology colleagues, maybe preparing to make a speech in a big Hall. And that might be just enough to help us remember that Hall was the first APA president.

Mary Whiton Calkins also studied under William James and she completed all of the requirements for a PhD in Psychology but unfortunately, despite James’s efforts to persuade the university, Harvard denied her the PHD because she was a woman. Fortunately the quality of her work was recognized over her career and she eventually served as the first woman president of the American Psychological Association.

Now if we want to remember this name Whiton Calkins, we might imagine her receiving this bad news that she’s not going to get her PhD from Harvard and maybe her face turns white for Whiton and she puts her hands on her cheeks like Macaulay Culkin, and that will remind us of Calkins.

Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman to actually receive a PhD in Psychology. She studied with Edward Titchener at Cornell and received her PhD from Vassar College in 1894. Her most influential work was The Animal Mind: A textbook of Comparative Psychology and she also served as the second woman president of the American Psychological Association.

So if you want to connect this name Washburn to the first woman to receive a PhD in Psychology and her book The Animal Mind, then maybe we can think of her washing burned fur off a cat’s head using her PhD diploma as a washcloth. This is rather strange but it might be enough to link these ideas; Washburn, The Animal Mind, and the first woman PhD in Psychology.

Sigmund Freud is a case where mnemonics might not be all that necessary for some of the basic ideas given his prominence in popular culture, but if we want to connect Freud to his ideas of psychoanalysis, the role of early childhood experiences in shaping personality, and the idea of the unconscious, which are these hidden desires and fears that influence our behavior.

So to connect these to the name Freud then perhaps we imagine ourselves laying on a couch and asking him “do I really have unconscious fears and desires?” and he says “I’m a-Freud so…” and then begins psychoanalyzing your childhood.

Lastly we’ll look at B. F. Skinner most associated with the behaviorist movement in psychology. And BF Skinner did a lot of work with pigeons where he put them in operant boxes that he designed and these were chambers that could provide food reinforcements to the animal and could also track specific behaviors like pecking a disc or pressing a lever and this allowed him to study the relationship between different schedules of reinforcement and the effects on specific behaviors.

Now it might just be me, but I think Skinner looks rather than bird-like himself, so perhaps we can imagine feathers sticking out of his skin and making him look like a pigeon that’s just come from one of these operant boxes.

Remember these mnemonics are just starting points; they’re sort of helping you get the ball rolling and avoiding being overwhelmed by a bunch of new names. They’re sort of like making a snowman. At first you just need to get some snow to stick together and then you can start rolling it and then as you roll it the surface area gets bigger and bigger and it gets easier for it to pick up more and more snow. So the same is true with these mnemonics. We start with something kind of silly like “Skinner looks like a bird” that leads us to pigeon that leads us to a pigeon in the operant box, the operant box makes us think about schedules of reinforcement, and so over time we can accumulate more and more knowledge more and more easily. So these might be a bit ridiculous but they’re just starting points and you have to start somewhere.

This is the first video on specific mnemonic examples that I’ve made for psychology, I hope that it’s been helpful for you and if you’d like to see me make more videos like this in the future then please let me know in the comments. Add any other suggestions that you have, or questions, be sure to like and subscribe, and check out the hundreds of other psychology tutorials that I have on the channel. Thanks for watching!