Psychodynamic Approach Essay

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A follow on from the psychodynamic approach is the cognitive approach. This approach analyses how we get our information and how we develop this to adapt to our environment. In its first design it was a theory used to treat depression, but today it is well known as looking at mental illnesses. It was formed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget during the 1950s. It’s a theory set up to test behaviourism. Skinner (1975) and Chomsky (1977) were the main figures who challenged this. Kohler discussed that we organise things in our minds based on experience, he conducted a study on the mentality of apes using a stick to get the banana. He clearly stated this isn’t shaping and that it was trial and error. Tolman used latent learning which is unobservable while it happens. The metaphor of a computer is used to draw a comparison of our internal …show more content…

They commented on the memory and said that memory is made up of 3 stores; Sensory Memory, Short term memory (STM) and Long term memory (LTM). The sensory memory has a set of registers - one for each sense - that stores information temporarily and it‘s moved into the STM. Here the information is recognised from Sensory memory and it lasts for around 15-30 seconds unless it’s rehearsed where it then would travel to the LTM. Miller 1956 studied the STM capacity and found it was the “magic numbers 7 plus or minus 2” and that it only retains 5-9 pieces of information. Another form of memory is chunking, where pieces of information are grouped together into chunks and it is known to increase the amount of items stored. The LTM has an unlimited capacity and can hold up to a lifetime of information. Continuing on from this, the memory has 3 processes which include encoding - transfer of information from one part to another, storage - holding the information and retrieval - travelling of information from LTM to STM when it is

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