The Five Perspectives Of Psychology

Psychology has made tremendous progress since its humble beginnings in the late 19th century. Some schools such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis have undergone a lot of changes but are still popular and have a large number of followers.

Contemporary or present day psychology is a combination of the best ideas drawn from the contributions of all its founders. Some new ideas or perspectives have been added too.

Psychology perspectives refer to how psychology approaches or looks at different topics within its field. Modern psychology looks at the various issues relating to human behavior from five perspectives. These five major perspectives discussed by Teachers Training Program are:

1. The Biological Perspectives.
2. The Behavioral Perspectives.
They have been especially keen to know the role of the brain with regard to human behavior. The brain which contains over 10 billion nerve cells with infinite connections between them, is, perhaps, the most complex structure in the universe.

The biological approach is concerned with understanding the role played by our brain in various psychological processes such as emotion, reasoning, learning, motivation and so on. It seeks to describe the neurological process that underline behavior and mental processes. For example, the biological perspective would attempt to understand and look at depression in terms of what chemical are produced in the brain and whether they are any abnormal changes in the levels of neurotransmitters. It would also study face recognition with regard to role played by the particular region of the brain such as the left or right hemisphere.

Thus, biological approach attempts to know which are the specific areas of the brain that influence or affect our behavior and how the nerves system, the hormones secreted by the different glands and other changes in our body affect the way we think, feel and behave.

The Behavioral
According to this approach human behavior does not depend on the objective world but it is a function of the perceived world.

The objective world is what truly exits in the real world. The perceived world is what the individual experiences and the meaning he gives to those experiences. How a person perceives the world or a situation depends on his culture, personal history, and present motives.

According to the subjectivist approach, perceptions are very important in understanding behavior because an individual's behavior at any time is based in part on perceptions of the situation. Our responses to the various stimuli in the environment are based on our perceptions. We define reality based on our perceptions. For example, studies have found that people tend to overestimate the physical size of higher value coins than for coins of lower value.

An interesting psychological phenomenon that this approach highlights is native realism-the tendency of people to see their subjective construction of the world, as a true and accurate picture of the objective