Psych 101 - Educational Blog

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MEANING

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psychology, scientific discipline that studies mental states and processes and behavior in humans and other animals.

The discipline of psychology is broadly divisible into two parts: a large profession of practitioners and a smaller but growing science of mind, brain, and social behavior. The two have distinctive goals, training, and practices, but some psychologists integrate the two.

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BEHAVIORISM 

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Beginning in the 1930s, behaviorism flourished in the United States, with B.F. Skinner leading the way in demonstrating the power of operant conditioning through reinforcement. Behaviorists in university settings conducted experiments on the conditions controlling learning and “shaping” behavior through reinforcement, usually working with laboratory animals such as rats and pigeons. Skinner and his followers explicitly excluded mental life, viewing the human mind as an impenetrable “black box,” open only to conjecture and speculative fictions. Their work showed that social behavior is readily influenced by manipulating specific contingencies and by changing the consequences or reinforcement (rewards) to which behavior leads in different situations. Changes in those consequences can modify behavior in predictable stimulus-response (S-R) patterns. Likewise, a wide range of emotions, both positive and negative, may be acquired through processes of conditioning and can be modified by applying the same principles.

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LINKING MIND, BRAIN, AND BEHAVIOR

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Late in the 20th century, methods for observing the activity of the living brain were developed that made it possible to explore links between what the brain is doing and psychological phenomena, thus opening a window into the relationship between the mind, brain, and behavior. The functioning of the brain enables everything one does, feels, and knows. To examine brain activity, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to measure the magnetic fields created by the functioning nerve cells in the brain, detecting changes in blood flow. With the aid of computers, this information can be translated into images, which virtually “light up” the amount of activity in different areas of the brain as the person performs mental tasks and experiences different kinds of perceptions, images, thoughts, and emotions. They thus allow a much more precise and detailed analysis of the links between activity in the brain and the mental state a person experiences while responding to different types of stimuli and generating different thoughts and emotions. These can range, for example, from thoughts and images about what one fears and dreads to those directed at what one craves the most. The result of this technology is a virtual revolution for work that uses the biological level of neural activity to address questions that are of core interest for psychologists working in almost all areas of the discipline.

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THE PERSPECTIVES OF PSYCHOLOGY

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1. Behavioral Perspective: Emerging around the 1910s and 1920s with John Watson’s work, it gained prominence with B.F. Skinner in the 1930s and 1940s. This perspective emphasizes observable behaviors and the environment’s role.

2. Psychodynamic Perspective: Developed in the early 1900s with the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), emphasizing the unconscious mind and early experiences. Freud’s psychoanalysis was the original psychodynamic theory, but the psychodynamic approach as a whole includes all theories that were based on his ideas, e.g., Jung (1964), Adler (1927), and Erikson (1950).

3. Humanistic Perspective: Emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a reaction to behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are primary figures.

4. Cognitive Perspective: Became prominent around the 1950s and 1960s as a response to behaviorism. Key figures include Jean Piaget and Aaron Beck.
5. Biological Perspective: While physiological psychology dates back to early experimental psychology, the more integrative biological/neuroscientific perspective emphasizing genetics and brain structures became dominant in the latter part of the 20th century.

6. Evolutionary Perspective: While Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory dates to the 19th century, its application to psychology as an “evolutionary psychology” perspective gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s.

7. Sociocultural Perspective: Gained prominence in the latter half of the 20th century, emphasizing the influence of social interactions, cultural practices, and environmental contexts on individual behavior and cognitive processes.

8. Ecological Systems Perspective: Introduced by Urie Bronfenbrenner in the 1970s, this perspective examines the multi-layered influences on an individual’s development.