Richard M.

Galicia

What is your impression on this?

Consult a psychologist.

Definition of Psychology
Psychology is the systematic, scientific study of

behaviors and mental processes. Behaviors refer to observable action or responses in both humans and animals; e.g., eating, speaking, laughing, running, reading, and sleeping. Mental processes which are not readily and directly observable refer to a wide range of complex mental processes such as thinking, imagining, studying, and dreaming.

Goals of Psychology
The first goal of psychology is to describe the different ways in which organisms behave. 2. The second goal of psychology is to explain the causes of behavior. 3. The third goal of psychology is to predict how organisms will behave in certain situations. 4. For some psychologists, the fourth goal of psychology is to control an organisms behavior.
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Approaches to Understanding Behavior

Biological Approach focuses on how our genes, hormones, and nervous system interact with our environments to influence learning, personality, memory, motivation, emotions, and coping techniques. 2. Cognitive Approach examines how we process, store, and use information and how it influences what we attend to, perceive, learn, remember, believe, and feel.
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3. Behavioral Approach studies how organisms learn

new behaviors or modify existing ones, depending on whether events in their environments reward or punish these behaviors. 4. Psychoanalytic Approach stresses the influence of unconscious fears, desires, and motivations, on thoughts, behaviors, and the development of personality traits and psychological problems later in life. 5. Humanistic Approach emphasizes that each individual has great freedom in directing his or her future, a large capacity for personal growth, a considerable amount of intrinsic worth, and enormous potential for self-fulfillment.

6. Cross-cultural Approach examines the influence of

cultural and ethnic similarities and differences on the psychological and social functioning of a cultures members. 7. Evolutionary Approach studies how evolutionary ideas, such as adaptation and natural selection, explain human behaviors and mental processes. By using one or more of these seven approaches, psychologists can look at behaviors from different viewpoints and stand a better chance of reaching psychologys four goals: describing, explaining, predicting, and controlling behaviors.

The Eclectic Approach

Rather than strictly focusing on one of the seven

approaches, most of todays psychologists use an eclectic approach, which means they use different approaches to study the same behavior. By combining information from the biological, cognitive, behavioral, psychoanalytic, humanistic, cross-cultural, and evolutionary approaches, psychologists stand a better a chance of reaching the goals of psychology.

Historical Approaches to Psychology

A. Structuralism: Elements of the Mind

Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory in 1879, in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt, now considered the Father of Psychology, would ask subjects to drop balls from the platform or listen to metronome and report their own sensations. He and his followers were analyzing the structure of the mind. For this reason they were called structuralists and their approach was called structuralism.

 Structuralism is the study of the most basic

elements, primarily sensations and perceptions, that make up our conscious mental experiences. Structuralists then attempt to combine hundreds of sensations into a complete conscious experience. Introspection is a method of exploring conscious mental processes by looking inwards and being aware of ones sensation and perception. However the method of introspection was highly criticized for high possibility of bias. This criticism resulted in another new approach, called FUNCTIONALISM.

B. Functionalism: Functions of the Mind

-Unlike Wundt, who saw mental activities as composed of basic elements, William James viewed mental activities as having developed through ages of evolution because of their adaptive functions, such as human beings survive. James was interested in the goals, purposes, and functions of the mind, an approach called functionalismwhich was the study of the function rather than the structure of consciousness, focusing in how our minds adapt to our changing world.

 About the same time that James was criticizing

Wundts structuralism, another group also found reasons to disagree with Wundt, this group was called the Gestalt Psychologists.
C. Gestalt Approach: Sensation Vs. Perception

This approach was introduced in 1912 by three psychologists: Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka. They reported that they had created the perception of movement by briefly flashing one light and then, a short time later, a second light. Although the two bulbs were fixed, the light actually appeared to move from one to the other. They called this the phi phenomenon; today it is known as apparent motion.

Wertheimer and his colleagues believed that the perception of apparent motion could not be explained by the structuralists, who said that the movement resulted from simply adding together the sensations from two fixed lights. Instead, Wertheimer argued that perceptual experiences, such as perceiving moving lights, resulted from analyzing a whole pattern or in German, a GESTALT. Gestalt approach emphasized that perception is more than the sum of its parts and the manner by which sensations are assembled into meaningful perceptual experiences.

D. Behaviorism: Observable Behaviors

In 1913 John B. Watson published a landmark paper entitled: Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It. In it, he rejected Wundts structuralism and its study of mental elements and conscious processes. He also rejected introspection as a psychological technique because its results could not be scientifically verified by other psychologists. Instead, John Watson boldly stated that psychology should be considered an objective, experimental science, which goal should be the analysis of observable behaviors and the prediction and control of those behaviors.

 From the 1920s to the 1960s behaviorism was the

dominant force in American psychology. Part of this dominance was due to the work of B.F. Skinner and other behaviorists, who expanded and developed Watsons ideas into the modern-day behavioral approach. However beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the present, behaviorisms dominance was challenged by the cognitive approach, which popularity now surpasses behaviorism.