Although her dissertation was an experimental study of the association of ideas in which she initiated the paired-associates technique of studying memory, Calkins spent a large part of her career developing a system of scientific self psychology to which she was ardently committed. Calkins based her system on the conviction that the foundational unit of study for psychology should be the conscious self. She defined personalistic introspective psychology as the study of conscious, functioning, experiencing selves that exist in relationship to others. In her autobiography, published in 1930, the year of her death, she attributed her conception of the self as social to the influence of Royce and James. She also wrote, “For with each year I live, with each book I read, with each observation I initiate or confirm, I am more deeply convinced that psychology should be conceived as the science of the self, or person, as related to its environment, physical and social” (Calkins, 1930, pp. 42-43).