Mary Cover Jones

Mary Cover Jones (1897 to 1987) was an American developmental psychologist and a pioneer of behavior therapy. After graduating from Vassar College she heard John B. Watson lecture in New York and wondered whether conditioning could be used to remove fears, which led to her best known work, a study of a three-year-old boy called Peter who was afraid of a white rabbit. By pairing the rabbit with a pleasant stimulus, food, and bringing it gradually closer, she reduced his fear, developing the method of direct conditioning and desensitization. Joseph Wolpe called her the mother of behavior therapy, although her work received little attention until the 1960s. She earned her doctorate at Columbia in 1926, worked for many years at the Institute of Human Development at Berkeley, took part in the Oakland Growth Study, and received the G. Stanley Hall Award from the American Psychological Association in 1986.