DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGY

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Abstract:

The following paper consists of an explanation, of what the history of psychology taught us about the human behaviour. This explanation consists of summarising the different perspectives in psychology. Each perspective is trying to view the human mind and behaviour from a different angle, i.e. the biological perspective tries to analyse the human behaviour by understanding the biological and physical structure of the brain and the nervous system, whereas the psychodynamic perspective focuses on, how the behaviour changes according to our infant and child experiences. The different perspectives are shown below with the following order: a) Psychodynamic b) Humanistic c)
Humanistic psychologists also thought that scientific methods are inappropriate for studying human behaviour. The two greatest theories in humanistic psychology are composed by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE:
In 1875 Wilhelm Wundt was the creator of the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig after that European and American Universities followed this example.
Nowadays, what is meant to be cognitive psychology has already been explored by ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato. These main ideas have been evolved by Wundt who conducted experiments to explore brain areas such as memory and sensory perception. Wundt believed that these areas are related to physiological processes in the brain.
The cognitive perspective is concerned with mental functions such as memory, perception, attention etc. It views people as being similar to computers in the way we process

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGY

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information, store data and have input and output procedures. This had led cognitive psychologists to explain that memory comprises of three stages:
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Encoding-where information is received and attended to.

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Storage-where the information is retained.

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Retrieval-where the information is recalled.

Cognitive approach is an extremely scientific approach and typically uses lab experiments to study human behaviour.

BEHAVIORIST PERSPECTIVE:
The founder