This area of psychology focuses on mental processes like memory, thinking, problem-solving, language, and decision-making. Influenced by psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Albert Bandura , the cognitive perspective has grown tremendously in recent decades. Cognitive psychologists often utilize an information-processing model comparing the human mind to a computer to conceptualize how information is acquired, processed, stored, and utilized. The study of physiology played a major role in the development of psychology as a separate science.
Today, the perspective is known as biological psychology also called biopsychology or physiological psychology. The point of view emphasizes the physical and biological bases of behavior. Researchers with a biological perspective on psychology might look at how genetics influence behavior or how damage to specific areas of the brain affect personality.
The nervous system, genetics, the brain, the immune system, and the endocrine system are just a few subjects of interest to biological psychologists. Over the last few decades, the perspective has grown significantly with advances in our ability to explore and understand the human brain and nervous system. Magnetic resonance imaging MRI and positron emission tomography PET scans give researchers tools to observe the brain under a variety of conditions.
Scientists can now look at the effects of brain damage, drugs, and disease in ways that were not possible in the past. Cross-cultural psychology is a fairly new perspective that has grown significantly in the last twenty years.
Psychologists and researchers in this school of thought look at human behavior across different cultures. By looking at these differences, we can learn more about how culture influences our thinking and behavior. Evolutionary psychology focuses on the study of how the theory of evolution can explain physiological processes.
The evolutionary perspective suggests that these mental processes exist because they serve an evolutionary purpose—meaning that they aid in human survival and reproduction. In the s, a school of thought known as humanistic psychology arrived. It was greatly influenced by the work of prominent humanists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.
The humanistic perspective emphasizes the role of motivation in thought and behavior. Concepts such as self-actualization are essential. Psychologists with a humanist perspective focus on what drives humans to grow, change, and develop their personal potential. Positive psychology which focuses on helping people live happier, healthier lives is a recent movement in psychology with roots in the humanist perspective.
There are many ways to think about human thought and behavior. The different perspectives in modern psychology give researchers and students tools to approach problems and answer questions. They also guide psychologists in finding new ways to explain and predict human behavior. This exploration and deeper understanding can even lead to the development of new treatment approaches. Pavlov's contributions to behavior therapy.
The obvious and not so obvious. Am Psychol. Operant Conditioning. Annu Rev Psychol. Becoming who you are: An integrative review of self-determination theory and personality systems interactions theory. J Pers. Block M. Contributions of Women to Psychology. Ann Rev Psychol. Fancher RE, Rutherford A. Pioneers of Psychology. New York: W. Norton; A History of Psychology.
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Table of Contents. Importance of History. The Third Force. Cognitive Psychology. How Psychoanalysis Influenced the Field of Psychology. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles.
Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Related Articles. What Were Functionalism and Structuralism in Psychology? The History of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. An approach is a perspective i. There may be several different theories within an approach, but they all share these common assumptions.
The five major perspectives in psychology are biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and humanistic. You may wonder why there are so many different psychology approaches and whether one approach is correct and others wrong. Most psychologists would agree that no one approach is correct, although in the past, in the early days of psychology, the behaviorist would have said their perspective was the only truly scientific one.
Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and brings something different to our understanding of human behavior. For this reason, it is important that psychology does have different perspectives on the understanding and study of human and animal behavior. Below is a summary of the six main psychological approaches sometimes called perspectives in psychology.
If your layperson's idea of psychology has always been about people in laboratories wearing white coats and watching hapless rats try to negotiate mazes in order to get to their dinner, then you are probably thinking about behavioral psychology. Behaviorism is different from most other approaches because they view people and animals as controlled by their environment and specifically that we are the result of what we have learned from our environment. The behaviorist perspective is concerned with how environmental factors called stimuli affect observable behavior called the response.
The behaviorist perspective proposes two main processes whereby people learn from their environment: namely classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning involves learning by association, and operant conditioning involves learning from the consequences of behavior. Though looking into natural reflexes and neutral stimuli he managed to condition dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell through repeated associated with the sound of the bell and food.
Skinner investigated operant conditioning of voluntary and involuntary behavior. Skinner felt that some behavior could be explained by the person's motive. Therefore behavior occurs for a reason, and the three main behavior shaping techniques are positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment. Behaviorism also believes in scientific methodology e. Behaviorism rejects the idea that people have free will, and believes that the environment determines all behavior.
Behaviorism is the scientific study of observable behavior working on the basis that behavior can be reduced to learned S-R Stimulus-Response units. Behaviorism has been criticized in the way it under-estimates the complexity of human behavior. Many studies used animals which are hard to generalize to humans, and it cannot explain, for example, the speed in which we pick up language.
There must be biological factors involved. Who hasn't heard of Sigmund Freud? So many expressions of our daily life come from Freud's theories of psychoanalysis - subconscious, denial, repression and anal personality to name only a few.
Thus, cognitive psychology is the area of psychology that focuses on studying cognitions, or thoughts, and their relationship to our experiences and our actions.
Like biological psychology, cognitive psychology is broad in its scope and often involves collaborations among people from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds. This has led some to coin the term cognitive science to describe the interdisciplinary nature of this area of research Miller, Cognitive psychologists have research interests that span a spectrum of topics, ranging from attention to problem solving to language to memory.
The approaches used in studying these topics are equally diverse. Given such diversity, cognitive psychology is not captured in one chapter of this text per se; rather, various concepts related to cognitive psychology will be covered in relevant portions of the chapters in this text on sensation and perception, thinking and intelligence, memory, lifespan development, social psychology, and therapy. View a brief video recapping some of the major concepts explored by cognitive psychologists. Developmental psychology is the scientific study of development across a lifespan.
Developmental psychologists are interested in processes related to physical maturation. However, their focus is not limited to the physical changes associated with aging, as they also focus on changes in cognitive skills, moral reasoning, social behavior, and other psychological attributes. Early developmental psychologists focused primarily on changes that occurred through reaching adulthood, providing enormous insight into the differences in physical, cognitive, and social capacities that exist between very young children and adults.
For instance, research by Jean Piaget figure below demonstrated that very young children do not demonstrate object permanence. Object permanence refers to the understanding that physical things continue to exist, even if they are hidden from us.
If you were to show an adult a toy, and then hide it behind a curtain, the adult knows that the toy still exists. However, very young infants act as if a hidden object no longer exists. The age at which object permanence is achieved is somewhat controversial Munakata, McClelland, Johnson, and Siegler, While Piaget was focused on cognitive changes during infancy and childhood as we move to adulthood, there is an increasing interest in extending research into the changes that occur much later in life.
This may be reflective of changing population demographics of developed nations as a whole. As more and more people live longer lives, the number of people of advanced age will continue to increase.
Indeed, it is estimated that there were just over 40 million people aged 65 or older living in the United States in However, by , this number is expected to increase to about 55 million. By the year , it is estimated that nearly 90 million people in this country will be 65 or older Department of Health and Human Services, n.
Personality psychology focuses on patterns of thoughts and behaviors that make each individual unique. Several individuals e. For example, Freud proposed that personality arose as conflicts between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind were carried out over the lifespan. Specifically, Freud theorized that an individual went through various psychosexual stages of development.
According to Freud, adult personality would result from the resolution of various conflicts that centered on the migration of erogenous or sexual pleasure-producing zones from the oral mouth to the anus to the phallus to the genitals. More recently, the study of personality has taken on a more quantitative approach. Rather than explaining how personality arises, research is focused on identifying personality traits, measuring these traits, and determining how these traits interact in a particular context to determine how a person will behave in any given situation.
Personality traits are relatively consistent patterns of thought and behavior, and many have proposed that five trait dimensions are sufficient to capture the variations in personality seen across individuals. Each of these traits has been demonstrated to be relatively stable over the lifespan e. Social psychology focuses on how we interact with and relate to others. Social psychologists conduct research on a wide variety of topics that include differences in how we explain our own behavior versus how we explain the behaviors of others, prejudice, and attraction, and how we resolve interpersonal conflicts.
Social psychologists have also sought to determine how being among other people changes our own behavior and patterns of thinking. There are many interesting examples of social psychological research, and you will read about many of these in a later chapter of this textbook. Until then, you will be introduced to one of the most controversial psychological studies ever conducted.
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