Question

Within psychology, there are several perspectives used to describe, predict, and explain human behavior. The seven major perspectives in modern psychology are psychoanalytic, behaviorist, humanist, cognitive, neuroscientific/biopsychological, evolutionary, and sociocultural. Describe the perspectives, using two to three sentences each. Select one major figure associated with one of the perspectives and describe his or her work in two to three sentences. Type your response in the space below.

Answer 1

Psychoanalytic perspective: It is a theory of personality which aims to explain behavior through resolving the unconscious conflicts that may be prevailing. For instance, as per Freud a child that may have had a traumatic childhood may end up having interpersonal challenges or social skill challenges in his/her later life in adulthood.

Behavioristic perspective on the other end believes in learning from environment through various means and it disregards any role of other psyche practices that may end up with those choices. For instance, it disregards the role of cognition to make choices but only considers behavior. One of the classic experiments on rats was done by Skinner wherein they pressed lever for food eventually learning their association. Similarly, natural and automatic responses are learned through classical conditioning from the environment by creating a connection between the stimulus and its response.

Humanistic perspective is often called the third force and offers a completely picture of explaining behavior. It views an individual as a whole who is unique and completely capable of making their informed choices. In fact it aims as providing a non-judgmental view of each individual, claiming that each person is the way he/she is due to their unique bio-psycho-sociocultural factors.

Cognitive theories on the other hand explain behavior as a result of cognitive processes such as information processing, attention and memory that lead to ingraining of events, formation of belief systems, perceptions, thoughts, etc. Behavior is therefore a result of the cognitive processes occurring on day to day basis.

Biopsychological perspective explains behavior through neuropsychological factors. It uses methods from experimental psychology to uncover the relationship between the nervous system and cognitive function. The majority of work involves studying healthy humans in a laboratory setting, although a minority of researchers may conduct animal experiments.

Evolutionary perspective looks at behavior from a historical standpoint. For instance, the instinct based aspect of that behavior. Monogamy and familial systems along with other notions are seen from an evolutionary perspective wherein the aim was to have good genes and propagate the same to have their lineage.

Similarly the sociocultural perspective explains behavior from and environmental point of view where a person’s actions, thoughts and choices culminate from the kind of cultural and societal upbringing they are exposed to.