Foundations of Psychology

Foundations of Psychology

Psychology is a vast field with a plenitude of topics. In the literal sense, it means ‘study of the mind'. Nevertheless there are several approaches and schools of thoughts of psychology that were established by early psychologists each having an underlying assumption.

One of the broad perspectives that developed early in the twentieth century is behaviorism. Behaviorism focuses on the way objects or events in the environment (stimuli) come to control behavior through learning (Kolawski & Westen , 2009, p. 14). This perspective focuses on the relationship between environment and observable behavior, and essentially holds that all human behavior is learned from one’s surroundings, context, and environment. The primary research method for behaviorism is laboratory experimentation.

In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud a Viennese physician introduced an approach to treating psychological disorders known as psychoanalysis, and a relationship between mental life and behavior. Since then, psychologists have continued Freud’s school of thought known as the psychodynamics perspective. The psychodynamic perspective focuses on three key elements. First, people’s actions are determined by the way thoughts feelings, and wishes are connected in their minds. Second, many of these events people are not aware of. Third, these mental processes may conflict with one another causing compromising of competing motives (Kolawski & Westen, 2009, p. 12). Psychodynamic psychologists relied primarily on case study as their research method.

Although there are questions as to where the knowledge of the Ancient Greek philosophers came from, the Ancient Greek philosophers are the first known to study the cognitive perspective, and then for the last four centuries it has been pondered by the English and European philosophers. Cognitive perspective focuses on the way people process, store, and retrieve information. This psychology is based on the concept that behavior is directed by the way we know, understand and think about the world. The Cognitive psychologist assumes that psychology should be concerned with a person’s internal thoughts of the world and with the functional organization of the mind. The primary method of research is experimentation.

The evolutionary perspective rooted by Charles Darwin in 1872, is another major school of thought. The evolutionary perspective argues that many human behavioral proclivities exist because they helped our ancestors survive. The basic notion of evolutionary theory is the evolution selects organisms that maximize their reproductive success. The primary methods of research have been deductive