1. Psychology is the field of study that deals with examining human mind and the behavioral characteristics of a person in relation to any activity. Mental processes such as thoughts, memories and behaviors cannot be physical observed, however the field of psychology enables understanding people’s internal mental process and rational for specific behavior of individuals (Gerrig et al. 2015).
2. The field of psychology has three distinct eras whose timeline are as follows:
Antiquity to late 1800s- This period is defined as the pre-modern era when psychology was regarded as philosophy and not science. Several intellectual elites like Plato, Aristotle, Heinrich Weber, Democritus, Hippocrates and many others contributed to the development of key psychological theories. In this period, psychology was defined from the ideas of philosophy and a lot of discussion existed on the role and function of human thinking (Cohen 2017). Based on difference discussions by philosophers, the human thought was defined as dual thought which had both physiological as well as spiritual links. Starting from 1870s, the view regarding human mind shifted from psychology to the current theories in conscious and unconscious level of functioning (Strack and Deutsch 2015). In 387 BC, Plato regarded brain as the mechanism for mental processes, whereas the heart was defined as the mechanism of the mental process by Aristotle (Robinson 2014).
Late 1800s to 1980s- This period is defined as the modern era of psychology where the field of psychology was fully regarded as a scientific concept instead of philosophical concept. The developments in the field of psychology in this period resulted in addressing sufferings of people with mental illness. The radical ideas regarding the psychological theories started in this period (Cohen 2017). For example, in 1886, Sigmund Freud laid the foundation for personality theory. Many important psychology theory and modern frameworks was also given in this period by B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and Carl Jung. I903, Ivan Pavlov explained classical conditioning through a dog, whereas the Carl Jung explained about analytical psychology theories. In 1983, B.F. Skinner defined the behavioral therapy, whereas by 1980, the DSM III criteria for mental illness were defined by American Psychiatric Association (Brennan and Houde 2017). Hence, the concept of duality vanished in this period and the task associated with conscious and unconscious level of functioning was given much importance.
Pre-modern psychology: The pre modern era is the period of 1980s till existing date. In this period, more clarity was seen in each of the psychological theories. More research also came up and are coming to give more integrative understanding of the human mind than those given by Freud. Many modern treatment options have now come in the field of psychology such as behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, integrative psychology and the collaboration with inter-disciplinary teams (Cohen 2017).
3. Yes, psychology can be considered a scientific discipline because apart from philosophy, it also contains some elements of modern science. Science is referred as a systematic process to acquire knowledge and learn about new things. Here the focus is on gaining and understanding about cause and effect relationshipthrough identification of the problem, formulating a hypothesis, preparing strategy, data collection and interpretation of findings. Hence, psychology can also be defined as science because it examines cause and effect relationship related to human behavior and its findings can be verified too. However, it does not totally conform to the laws of natural science and certain psychological issues cannot be directly studied in the laboratory. Hence, it is more of social science as it is related to scientific study of behaviors, experiences and mental processes.
The disadvantage of psychology as a scientific discipline is that there is replicability crisis in the field because several published results are not true and cannot be investigated in laboratory setting. For example, several theories explain the effect of a condition on human behavior. However, it is difficult to replicate them. Hence, in the field of psychology, replication crisis is a well-known term because results of many psychology studies are difficult to replicate on further investigation (Stroebe and Strack 2014). Review of several studies in the field of psychology also highlights about the replicability issues in psychology research. There is a need to address this methodological issues in psychology research because reproducibility is the cornerstone of science and the effect is considered reliable only if another research can also get the same results with the same procedure in another setting (Simons 2014).
To define psychology as a scientific discipline, it is also necessary that it includes control in the research process. Control and replication are essential for true experiment and it is reflective of the validity of the research study. Just like other scientific fields, the psychology research also includes control condition in research to understand whether interventions like psychotherapies can work on people with psychological disorders or not (Barker and Pistrang 2015). Hence, randomized controlled trial is a common research method in the field of psychology. For example, a control condition was created in a clinical psychology research done for evaluating the efficacy of mindfulness based cognitive therapy for chronically depressed patients (Michalak et al. 2015).
Objectivity in a scientific research method is an approach to define the reliability and validity of research studies. It is also linked to testability and reproducibility of the study. Hence, objectivity is achieved when all source of biases are eliminated and there is great consideration to address biases in research. This can be achieved when subjective ideas do not affect the results of the study. However, while comparing the field of psychology with other scientific research field, the limitation of scientific psychology becomes evident. High objectivity issues are seen in the field of psychology because the scientific laws are generalizable however psychological explanations are often limited to specific situation. It mainly studies the behavior of people, however the behavior may change overtime (Gross 2015). Therefore, the finding of the research becomes reliable only for a limited period of time and objectivity issues are seen when the research is replicated again in a new setting.
Psychology is a field of study where human behavior and mental processes can be evaluated to understand and predict behavior of individuals. Psychologist employs rigorous and systematic methods to investigate about human behavior. In the pre-modern era of psychology, many different perspectives or approach exist on the basis of which the psychologist evaluates human behavior. The scope of this essay is to focus specifically on three different perspectives that supports psychologist to understand behavior of people and define the best approach needed to treat them.
Different types of approach exist in psychology to evaluate human behavior and each of them takes into account a central idea or theme to explain the impact of certain activities on human behavior. One of the modern and relatively effective perspective or approach in psychology is the behaviorist perspective where the main assumption is that people’s behavior are influenced by their environment and people behave based on what they learn from their environment (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2014). Hence, human behavior has been explained through observation according to the behaviorist perspective. This is in contrast with cognitive approach as cognitive approach focus on the thought process of individual to interpret distinct behavior. Skinner and Pavlov are the main theorist who have demonstrated the role of classical and operation conditioning respectively on the learning and behavioral response of individual person (Grison, Heatherton and Gazzaniga 2015). Therefore, behavior is explained as a consequence of stimulus response according to behaviorism perceptive.
The behaviorist perspective explains that people can learn from their environment either by classical condition or operant conditioning. Ivan Pavlov explained classical conditioning through a dog as he used natural reflexes and neutral stimuli to help the dog salivate on repeated sound of bell and food. Here a biologically potent stimulus was the food and the neutral stimulus was the bell. Through this experiment, Pavlov showed that just like the case of dog, all emotion and other behavior response of human are nothing but simple patterns of stimulus and response (Cambiaghi and Sacchetti 2015). Hence, the learning process and behavior of people results from the pairing of neural stimulus and biologically potent stimulus. Unlike the cognitive perspective, it simply denied the role of mind and consciousness in human behavior. On the other hand, B.F. Skinner gave the concept of operant conditioning which is a learning process where behavior of an individual is modified by means of positive (award) or negative (punishment) reinforcement. He regarded classical conditioning as too simplistic to study about complex human behavior and he assumed that human behavior can be understood by identifying the cause and consequence of such behavior (Skinner 2014). Therefore, the operant conditioning was appropriate to study cause and consequence of human behavior as it focused on studying intentional actions that affect surrounding environment. Hence, the advantage of using operant conditioning to study human behavior is that it helps to identify the process that makes certain behavior more or less likely to occur.
From the overview of behaviorist approach, it can be said that there are numerous advantage of this approach for studying human behavior and enhancing the credibility of science. This can be said because it provides strong arguments to explain different types of behavior by means of observable traits. The arguments according to behaviorist approach is that mind and consciousness cannot be observed, however people’s action, reaction and behavior can be observed to make proper inference about them. There is wide application of behaviorist approach today (Csikszentmihalyi 2014). For example it is practically used to change learning style of students and manage symptoms of people with severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
Another important perspective used in psychological study of human behavior includes the cognitive perspective. It comes under the broad field of cognitive psychology where psychologist mainly explore people’s mind such as consciousness, thinking, perception and memory to judge their behavior. It is also regarded as reductionist approach because all types of complex behavior can be reduced and interpreted according to simple cognitive process like perception and thinking of people. Cognitive perspective has gained much importance after 1950s because of the criticism behaviorist approach due to its focus only on visible behavior without considering about the internal processes of individual. The cognitive approach is regarded as an effective approach to study human behavior because thought process is the major mediator that influences behavior of people. Unlike behaviorist approach which emphasizes on stimuli and response pattern to interpret behavior, it further expands the concept by generating stimuli and response by thought processes.
There are several strengths and limitation of the cognitive approach in psychology. The key strength of cognitive perspective is that it is a viable process that that can easily combined with several other approaches such as behavioral approach. For example, the cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has found wide application in mental health service to treat patients with drug abuse and other mental health issues. It is regarded as an alternative treatment option for patients with treatment resistant depression. It has also become a first-line psychosocial treatment for patients with chronic pain. When patients do not respond to antidepressant, combining CBT with pharmacotherapy is found effective in addressing depression in affected individual (Wiles et al. 2013). The efficacy of such therapy is high also because it can be tailored according to the needs of specific population group such as children and older adults. Research also proposed that for increasing the efficacy of CBT-based programs, it is necessary to integrate psychosocial intervention into routine health care (Ehde, Dillworth and Turner 2014). Despite the advantage, the cognitive approach is criticized by certain psychologist because it does not consider genetic factors for diagnosis of mental disorder in patients.
From the overview and discussion about cognitive perspective to study human behavior, it can be concluded that cognitive approach is beneficial as it has found many practical application in health care field. Jean Piaget is also an eminent psychologist who has given cognitive understanding about human behavior. Jean Piaget mainly has the opinion that how people remember things or how they feel about any event affect their future action in the same event (Oléron et al., 2014). Despite several advantages, the limitation of cognitive approach is that it depends a lot on inference because cognitive process cannot be directly observed. On this basis, it cannot be regarded as a scientific approach as relying on subjective data might lead too internal validity related issues. The reductionist approach in cognitive perspective is also a disadvantage because it just focuses on five cognitive processes of thought, attention, memories, language and perception and ignores other factors like upbringing and socioeconomic factor of client (Habekost and Nielsen 2014). However, reductionism is still an advantage for cognitive approach because it enables understanding complex human behavior in simple terms.
The third most important approach in the field of psychology is the psychodynamic approach proposed by Sigmund Freund. The usefulness of the psychodynamic approach is that it incorporates all important psychology theories and tends to study human function by means of interaction with key drives and forces within the person. Hence, it is a combination of not just Freud’s idea, but also Jung and Erikson’s theory. Unlike the environment or the conscious mind in behavioral and cognitive perspective respectively, the psychodynamic theory focuses on analyzing the unconscious mind to interpret and analyze human behavior. It considers the unconscious mind by focusing on feelings and decision that influence past experience (Luyten et al., 2017). Therefore, the core assumption of psychodynamic approach is that behavior and feelings are rooted in childhood experience and the childhood experience shapes the lives and personality of people.
The cognitive perspective is regarded as reductionist approach in psychology, whereas the psychodynamic theory is strongly regarded as deterministic. It is said so because individual do not have control over unconscious factors and unconscious thought and feeling becomes part of the conscious mind resulting in different behaviors. There are three important assumptions related to psychodynamic approach. The most important assumption is that activities of mind are largely unconscious. Another unique assumption is that childhood experience shapes the personality of people. The last assumption is there is no scope of random thought or feelings and every behavior and emotion has a psychic causality to it (Gabbard 2014). Hence, negative or positive thought in human can arise due to combination of biological and psychological processed.
The strength of psychodynamic perspective is it has found wide application in health and social care because it has addressed the limitation of other approach and incorporated unconscious mind as well apart from conscious mind and stimuli to understand complex behavior. For instance, research has proved that short treat psychodynamic therapy in patients with psychotic disorder has resulted in termination of symptoms on patient and reduction in hospitalization and treatment cost (Abbass et al. 2015). Therefore, the benefit of psychodynamic perspective is that it studies psychological forces underlying human behavior and helps to go back towards abstract concept that affects concrete behavior and action of an individual.
Sigmund Freund had classified the conscious mind into three levels of conscious, preconscious and the unconscious mind. It also overlaps with the three parts of the personality such as the id, ego and super-ego. While conscious level comprises all those factors which people are aware of, the preconscious level stores those things which can be easily retrieved. The most important is the unconscious mind which includes those memories which one is not aware of but which highly affects behavior of individual. Hence, the balance between the three personality traits on the level of consciousness and unconsciousness has been achieved by psychodynamic perspective and the theory has helped to define whether a person is mentally healthy or suffering from mental distress (van der Hart 2016). This explanation also gives idea about the core strength of psychodynamic approach and the reason for it to be regarded as one of the best theory in the field of psychology to treat people with mental illness. However, the criticism that has been received for this approach is that Freud’s concept are subjective and unscientific as it cannot be scientifically tested. Hence, there is scope for further improving the psychodynamic approach so that it can be v tested and validated in future research work.
The essay gave an insight into three different perspectives given by key psychologist to study human behavior. These include cognitive, behavioral and psychodynamic approach to study human behavior. The core assumptions of each approach with evidence about its application have been discussed. There are strength and weakness of each approach, however in the field of psychology, cognitive and psychodynamic approach has been favored a lot as it pays emphasis on conscious and unconscious mind to interpret behavior of people and this is essential because people thoughts and emotions evokes different types of response from an individual.
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