The Behaviorist, Psychodynamic and Humanistic Contributions to Psychology

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This essay will in turn look at the behaviorist, Psychodynamic, and

Humanistic approaches to Psychology. It will evaluate the assumptions

and contributions for each approach.

Behaviorists emphasize the relationship between the environment

surrounding a person and how it affects a person’s behavior. They are

primarily concerned with observable behavior, as opposed to internal

events like thinking and emotion. This is a criticism of the

behaviorist approach; it is seen as mechanistic and oversimplified,

because it ignores mental processes or reinterprets them as just types

of behavior. John Watson saw emotions as the secretion of glands and

thinking as the movement of our vocal chords without actual speech.

However studies have been carried out and it has been found that

people can still think even when their vocal chords are paralyzed.

Behaviorists make the assumption that in humans; virtually all

behaviors are caused by learned relationships between a stimulus that

excites the sense organs and a response which is the reaction to the

stimulus.

John Watson was strongly influenced by the work of Pavlov on classical

conditioning. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate whenever he rang a

bell. An unconditioned Stimulus (the bell) leads to an unconditioned

Response (salivation). When the unconditioned stimulus is paired with

another Stimulus (food), this stimulus will eventually produce the

response on its own and is then called the conditioned stimulus which

produces a Conditioned response. Behaviorists propose that phobias

come about in a similar way, for example, somebody who is

spider-phobic, might have learned to be scar...

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This essay has evaluated the assumptions and contributions of the

behaviourist, psychodynamic and humanistic approaches to psychology.

The behaviourist approach focuses on the behaviour of people and seeks

to explain behaviour as being learnt. The psychodynamic and humanist

approaches are more concerned with the emotional aspects of people’s

lives rather than their behaviour. The psychodynamic approach places

importance on childhood experience. The humanist approach places more

emphasis on the importance of our self image.

Bibliography

Basic Psychology by Henry Gleitman (First Edition)

Psychology, third edition by Cardwell, Clark and Meldrum

Psychology – A New Introduction by Richard Gross, Rob McIlveen, Hugh

Coolicun, Alan Clamp and Julia Russell (Twelfth Edition)

Class lectures and handouts

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