The Five Perspectives Of Psychology

Modern psychology is based on five basic perspectives, behavioral, psychoanalytic, humanistic, cognitive, and developmental. With each perspective comes a different view of human behaviors and how humans function on a day to day basis; however, each theory is correct in its own way. Throughout each of these five perspectives, psychologists are able to elaborately study the human mind, feelings, and behaviors.
Behavioral perspective deals with peoples’ mannerisms and visible habits that form as a result of the environment. These certain actions become habitual through learning, incentives, and consequences. For example, as a child I would continuously bite my nails as a nervous habit. To put an end to my practice my parents purchased Bitrex,
a nail adhesive used to prevent nail biting.
If I bit my nails while this adhesive was applied, it would leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Eventually, I trained myself to stop biting my nails while they had Bitrex on them and moved onto teaching myself to completely stop my nervous habit. Looking back at this event, I think it is strange that by having a consequence for biting my nails forced me to stop this habit. Burrhus Frederic Skinner would’ve looked for the particular cause and consequence of the habit; he called this “operant conditioning”. In this situation, B.F. Skinner would come to the conclusion that the cause of the nail biting habit was stress and anxiety while the consequence would be the fact that the adhesive would leave bitter taste in my mouth, making me not want to bite my nails anymore. Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychologist, would follow the theory
http://www.shelovesmath.com/algebra/advanced-algebra/parent-graphs-and-transformations/of “classical conditioning”, similar to John Watson. Both would believe that the neutral stimulus, the bitter taste, would be associated with the unconditioned stimulus, biting my nails. As soon as I would think about the consequence of biting my nails, the thought of the bitter taste would prevent me from continuing my nervous habit.
While behavioral perspective has to do with observable habits, psychoanalytic perspective relate to personality.
The theory developed by psychologist Sigmund Freud states that personalities develop as a result of unconscious internal forces which are formed by childhood events. For example, when I was a child, I had an enormous dog jump on me and knock me from my feet. Since that day, I have had an irrational fear of large dogs due to the fact that at that moment I felt vulnerable and helpless. As the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud would notice that this fear began as a result of an event that occurred during what he called the psychosexual stages. During the time of the accident, I was in the latent stage which has an age range from six to eleven. Due to the fact that this incident occurred so early on in my life, Freud believes that it had a significant affect in shaping my personality. Freud believes that the mind is split in the conscious and unconscious. Any memory that is painful or traumatic is classified as unconscious by Freud’s theory since people want to mask the unpleasant time; therefore, he would see my memory of the attack as an unconscious memory that causes a fear that I am aware of, which is classified as the conscious
mind.
The humanistic perspective, or the third force in psychology,
The cognitive perspective deals with how a mental function, such as the one thinks, memorizes, understands, and applies knowledge to everyday actions. For instance, when I go to the store and pay in cash, I apply what I learned in math over the course of the years to calculate how much change I will receive. Psychologist Jean Piaget, who came up with the theory of cognitive development, would apply his theory directly to this example. He believed that at an early age we develop schemas, which are essentially a blueprint to abstract thoughts and help with application of knowledge. In my case, the building block is the essential math skill to subtract. As I grew older, I went through what Piaget called the stages of development. Throughout the course of many years, my mind developed and was able to apply the schemas to everyday life and “abstract thinking”.
Developmental psychology interprets how kids change as they