Biological Psychology

Personal Reflection

Denise Haynes

University of Phoenix

PSY405: Theories of Personality  

Dr. Lateefah Wielenga

January 20th, 2011

Personal Reflection

        Denise personal reflection of what she has learned so far in theories of personality. Denise can relate to Abraham Maslow view of motivation. Denise works for a non-profit sector with young adult’s ages 18 – 24 years old. These individuals are considered at-risk youth, looking for a second chance at earning their high school diploma, while gaining work experience. Denise job is to help these young adults earn work experience by providing them with all the resources and training. Denise believes she has to stay positive and motivated at all times, because once a person sees that her behavior changed, that individual may come unmotivated.

        Maslow states “motivation is usually complex”. Denise has to stay motivated everyday while she is at work. She has to stay positive, happy and willing to help at all times. Denise believes behavior plays a big part in a person motivation. There are a lot of motives that could give a person the will to accomplish a goal or task. Denise has to smile and be jolly everyday when she is instructing training. Denise sometimes feel that her job definitely strain her sanity and drain her ego. She feels like everyone wants a piece of her. Yet many people around her question her existence or just plain do not believe in her. And the ones who do believe often expect the impossible and rarely care about what she has to do or go through, to meet their expectations. Denise knows everybody has expectations but she often wonders when someone will accept hers.  

        Maslow’s motivation theory is that people are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that certain lower factors need to be satisfied before higher needs can be satisfied.  is  in her heart everyday to come to work on a positive theory Defining just what is Biological Psychology has to be done in two parts and can be understood by reading a book written by Andrew Wickens, “Foundations of Biopsychology.” In this book in chapter one, a descriptive definition is specified to help explain just what biological psychology is? It first starts out by breaking it down into   two different parts. First, there is psychology and what that is as it has been defined by the Greeks for centuries.  Psychology: is a combination of two Greek words psych meaning ‘mind’ and logos meaning ‘reason’.  Putting those two words together it becomes the study of the mind giving the term psychology.

        Biology, were the study of the body and how the mind and body interact and the affects of that. Thus once these two were assembled it comes out to be a clear study of how the mind is affected by the actions of the body and the body is affected by the mind. The second or alternative for a definition as stated in “Foundations of Biopsychology” by Andrew Wickens, “is therefore the study of the brain and how it causes or relates to behavior” (pp. 3-45).

History

A little of the history on psychology, the first signs of development of psychology began in the early eighteenth century. For there was not really such a thing as psychology, it had to branch from the field of philosophy. This form of psychology was the study of the thought process and the way this was done was by the technique of introspection (self-reflection) (Wickens, 2005).