H I S T O RY & S C H O O L S

O F P S Y C H O L O G Y:
P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S ,
HUMANISM AND
COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGY
NIMRAH AHMED
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• Three forces in psychology
• 1. Psychoanalysis
• 2. Behaviorism
• 3. Humanistic psychology (came about in the 1960s)
• Humanistic psychology emphasized human strengths and
positive aspirations, conscious experience, free will (rather
than determinism), the fulfillment of human potential, and
a belief in the wholeness of human nature

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• Why this school came about?
• Went against the mechanical and dehumanizing approach of
the other schools
• By disregarding joy, contentment, ecstasy, kindness, and
generosity, for example, to deal instead with the darker side of
the human personality, psychology was ignoring unique human
strengths

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• Some important figures:
• 1. Viktor Frankl (1905-1997)
• Born in Austria. He studied medicine and later
specialized in neurology and psychiatry
• He was influenced by Adler & Freud and
wrote about his experience in a concentration
camp in Germany
• He wrote about existentialism and meaning of
life
• He came up with logotherapy for existential
crisis
• Eg, the technique of Dereflection- find
meaning and satisfaction by engaging in work
rather than focusing on the problem
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• 2. Carl Rogers (1902-1987)
• Rogers believed that humans naturally
strive towards their potential. He also
believed that psychotherapy was a catalyst
that could assist them in their quest- Hence he
came up with Client-Centered Therapy
• Eg, involves active listening, clarification summarization,
basically hearing the client out
• He spent his last years applying his theories to areas of
national social conflicts

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• 3. Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
• Known for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is a
motivational theory in psychology

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• 4. Fritz Perl (1893-1970)
• Born in Germany. He fled to South
Africa when Hitler came and started
the psychoanalytic training institute
• In 1951, he published Gestalt Therapy
• The reason for mentioning it under
Humanistic school of thought is
because their technique was person
centered
• Eg, one of their principles was
holism, see the person as a whole
keeping in mind their thoughts,
feelings, behaviors etc
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• Difference between Humanism and other schools
• The major difference between the Humanistic perspective and other
theories is the commitment to personal growth. In humanism
emphasis is on the person- their self-esteem, personal growth and
potential
• Emphasis is placed on the present rather than the past or the future
• Emphasizes on the individual's perception and experience of his/her
own world
• Since focus is on personal growth in humanism, clients are
encouraged to take control of their lives
• The therapy plan depends on the client and their situation
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• Summary
• 1. Goal of humanistic psychology
• Find personal meaning in life
• Increase congruence between how one is and how they would
ideally like to be through integration
• 2. Important people and their techniques ->

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• Carl Rogers: Client-Centered Approach:
• Emphasized therapist empathy, unconditional positive regard,
congruence, intensive active listening, and support to help
individuals and groups reach their full human potential. Roger’s
believed that psychotherapy could be used as a catalyst to help
humans strive toward their potential.
• Abraham Maslow: Self Actualization Approach:
• Involves one’s impulse and desire to develop one’s fully
potential. Maslow developed a hierarchy of needs (beginning
with food and water and ending with self actualization).
• Fritz Perls: Gestalt Approach:
• Notion that problems occur due to our inability to be truly aware
of our current feelings, thoughts, and behavior. This theory
focuses on being keenly aware of one’s personal experiences
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• Positive Psychology
• Positive psychology (1988) is always linked to humanistic
psychology because it has its root in humanistic psychology
• Humanistic psychology was all about the positive side of
humans, their self-esteem, identity etc
• Positive psychology was a method of bringing scientific study to
the idea of optimal human functioning
• Eg, Positive psychology introduced the subjective well being
scale
• Additionally, they focus on what is right with people rather than
what is wrong with them
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• Initial work was on learned helplessness with dogs-
Martin Seligman

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•Cognitive Psychology

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• The most important question: What is cognition
• The collection of mental processes and activities used in
perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, and understanding,
and the act of using those processes
• What is cognitive psychology then?
• Cognitive psychology is the study of how people perceive, learn,
remember and think about information. (Sternberg,2006)
•Examples of cognitive psychology: Why they remember some facts
and forget others?, How they learn language?

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• Topics that come under cognitive psychology:
• Perception: interpreting sensory information to yield meaningful
information
• Problem solving/decision making- making a conclusion from
info/selecting a course of action from different possibilities
• Memory- storage and retrieval of cognitions
• Language- communication between two subjects, that has 1) rules
(grammar) and 2) ways of communicating novel
ideas/thoughts/etc
• Attention: mentally focusing on a stimulus

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• If you stop and think for a second, all the aforementioned
concepts seem very automatic. Example:
• Q. What time does our History and Schools of Psychology class
start?
• Q. What building is our class usually at?
• Q. How much is 7 times 12
• Your cognition works up these daily life tasks pretty
automatically
• However, it is not always that easy

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• Say the name of the ink NOT what the word says

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• The Stroop test shows that for a task that is incongruent, we
require more time to respond. It also shows that sometimes,
we are required to pay more attention to some tasks in order to
understand them better
• Attention is one area researched extensively in cognitive
psychology. One specific type of attention is selective
attention, which is when people are instructed to respond
selectively to certain kinds of information while ignoring other
information
• Stroop test is relevant in the field of clinical psychology also

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• For a number of years, the Stroop Effect has been helpful in
testing people with mental disorders like Schizophrenia and
different Phobia Disorders. For instance, Schizophrenia is a
psychological disorder characterized by severely disordered
thoughts and therefore patients have a very difficult time
controlling their attention. Once on medications, a psychiatrist
can use the Stroop Task to evaluate their patient's progress and
see if his or her attention improves. Also, the Emotional Stroop
Task was created, which instructs people to name the ink colors
of printed words like "hairy" or "slither". It has been found that
people with various phobias are much slower when working with
anxiety related words
• Two theories explain the above phenomenon related to attention
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• Selective Attention Theory: According to this theory,
naming the actual color of the words requires much more
attention that simply reading the text

• Speed of Processing Theory: According to this theory,

people can read words much faster than they can name
colors. The speed at which we read makes it much more
difficult to then name the color of the word.

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• How Cognitive Psychology came about?
• Until the 1950s, behaviorism was the dominant school of thought
in psychology
• Between 1950 and 1970, the tide began to shift against behavioral
psychology to focus on topics such as attention, memory and
problem-solving. Often referred to as the cognitive revolution
• The term "cognitive psychology" was first used in 1967 by
American psychologist Ulric Neisser in his book Cognitive
Psychology
• It stemmed from a dissatisfaction of the behaviorist approach.
Earlier, Karl Lashley (1890-1958), argued that not every
behavior can be explained through observation. E.g. Playing a
piano 22
• Some important people in Cognitive Psychology
• Chomsky (1928-)
• Known for his theory of the Language Acquisition Device
(LAD)
• He said that every infant is born with this box in their brain that
carries the universal language rules. Thus the LAD, enables a
child to listen to and learn language. The brain interprets what
is heard according to the rules bestowed through the LAD
• He also stated that all human languages share common
principles. (For example, they all have words for things and
actions - nouns and verbs.) It is the child's task to establish how
the specific language s/he hears expresses these underlying
principles
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• Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology
• Controlled laboratory experiments
• Self reports
• Case studies
• Naturalistic observations and etc

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• Aims and Goals of Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive psychology attempts to understand the nature of human
intelligence and how people think and perceive

• Using computer information processing as an analogy, it aims at

arriving at testable models of how the brain works and then
applying methods to study those models

• The research can produce solutions to real problems, providing us

with knowledge and insight that can be used in real world

• One therapy where we see cognition into play is CBT 25

• Thank you.
• Good luck for presentations next week and for your finals

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