1. Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental process. Psychology analyzes the things people do and why they do those certain things. It looks into why children grow up and act the way they do. The goals of psychology are to describe, understand, predict, and control behavior. Describing behavior is important because detailed records are the basis to answering important questions. It is important to be able to understand behavior in order to explain why certain behaviors were demonstrated. Prediction is the ability to forecast behaviors accurately. Psychologists want to be able to control behavior, so they can alter the conditions that affect behavior. 2. The scientific method is applied in psychological research through the use of making observations, defining a problem, proposing a hypothesis, …show more content…
gathering evidence and testing a hypothesis, publishing results, and building a theory. It is important for all scientists to have a universal systematic way of answering questions and conducting research. 3.The contemporary perspectives of psychology are the biological, psychological, and sociocultural perspectives.
The biological perspective seeks to explain the behavior of people in terms such as brain processes, evolution, and genetics. The psychological perspective says that behavior is the result of psychological processes within individual people. This perspective wants to explain how mental processes affect thoughts, actions, and feelings. The sociocultural perspective stresses the impact that social and cultural context have on people. In america alone there are multiple cultures that people interact with every day. The sociocultural perspective wants to explain how this shapes people. 4. An experiment is performed by directly varying a condition that you may think may be the cause of a behavior, create two or more groups of subjects to be tested, and record whether the varying condition has any affect on the behavior. There must be an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group is exposed to the variable believed to alter behavior. The control group is in all the same conditions, except they do not receive the altering
variable. 5. Radical behaviorist B. F. Skinner believed that human actions were controlled by rewards and punishments. Skinner thought that positive reinforcement and encouragement would produce positive behavior. I think this is a reasonable thing to believe. When children are rewarded for their actions, they are more likely to repeat those same actions. Most children like to please their parents, and if they get rewarded for their actions then they will repeat those actions that they know are good and pleasing. Skinner believed the way humans think is not necessary to explain human behaviors. I disagree with this. I think the way humans develop ideas is very important in explaining why people do what they do. Skinner created the "Skinner Box". This was a conditioning chamber where he could study the responses animals gave certain stimuli. Skinner worked with rats and pigeons. Behaviorist John Watson objected the study of the mind and believed only in the study of behavior. He studied the relationship between stimuli and responses to stimuli. I think observing behavior is important, however I believe there also needs to by study of the mind. Watson believed in conditioning. He thought he could take humans, raise them from babies, and train them to grow into whatever he chose. I think that some children could be conditioned to grow in to what you wanted, but not every child would turn out how you planned. 6. There are several things I really like about psychology so far. I enjoy learning about the mind, and why certain scientists think people turn out the way they do. I think studying the mind is very interesting. Every single person is different, so there is a lot of different explanations for why people act certain ways. I like learning about the impact society and parents have on children. It is very interesting to me to learn about the experiments that have been performed on people and animals. The human mind has so much to offer, and I really enjoy learning all there is inside it. I dislike how complicated some scientist seem to make the simplest things about humans. Some things should just be common sense, and I do not think that every single aspect of life needs to be experimented and tested.
The birth of psychology was in December of 1879, at Germanys University of Leipzig (Myers, 2014, p.2). In 1960, Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener defines psychology as “the science of mental health” (Myers, 2014, p.4). However, two provocative American psychologists, John Watson and B.F Skinner, redefined psychology in 1920. They redefined psychology as “the scientific study of observable behavior” (Myers, 2014, p.4). The problem arose when psychologists realized people could not observe feeling or thought so they needed to come up with a new definition for psychology. We define psychology today as “the science of behavior and mental processes” (Myers, 2014, p.4). Psychology includes many subfields such as human development, social behavior,
Psychology can be broadly defined as the scientific and systematic study of people’s behavior and mental processes.
The scientific method is how psychologists gain knowledge about the mind and behavior. It is used by all scientists. The experimental method is the one way to engage the scientific method, and the only way to find a cause and effect in relationships. It is summarized in five steps, observing some phenomenon in the world, forming a hypothesis which is an educated prediction about relationships between two or more variables, examining the gathered information by using empirical research, determining what the results are and drawing them, and evaluating the results whether it will support the hypothesis or not. Researchers, at the end, submit their work for publication for all to see and read (King, 2016). There are three types of psychological research in the scientific method, descriptive research, correlation, and experimental research (King, 2016). The article The Effects of Negative Body Talk in an Ethnically Diverse Sample of College Students (Katrevich, Register, & Aruguete, 2014) is an example of the experimental method.
Psychology is a social science that aims to study the mind and the behaviors of humans. It aims to understand what drives humans to act the way they do. It differs from sociology and anthropology in that it takes accounts the individual rather than society as a whole.
Psychology is the study of the behavior of living organisms. The people that study the behaviors are called psychologists. There have been many studies done by these people to try and figure out why people or animal do the things they do. Psychology's four main goals are to describe what occurred, explain why it occurred, predict what event is likely to occur next, and to change to prevent unwanted outcomes. Psychologists study the process of thinking, learning, cognition, emotions, motivations, and personalities. An example of one study that has been done would be why a dog salivates to the sound of a bell and show. This behavior is due to a conditioned stimulus becoming a conditioned response. Another experiment done was with a baby and a white mouse to see if the baby would be scared if something happened while grabbing for the mouse.
Biological and cognitive are both different theoretical perspectives. They both have unique differences. The biological and cognitive approaches differ in their view on the nature versus nurture debate. The biological approach focuses on nature rather than nurture. It believes that behavior is determined by internal physiological processes such as the structure and functions of the neurons, hormones, DNA and structure of the brain. The cognitive perspective goes into the domain of mental processes to understand human nature. This perspective shows how we learn, make decisions, use language, plan for future, and form judgments.
The laboratory experiment gives the experimenter a greater chance to control the conditions and enables you to measure behaviour with greater precision. This method also allows for quantative research and also enables greater control of variables. Although it gives the experimenter greater control, this can also seem daunting to the subject who may feel more uncomfortable and is less likely to ...
The term psychology has many meanings to different people, even to those who work within the psychological field. The word psychology derives from two Greek roots; 'psyche' refers to 'soul' or 'mind' and logo refers to 'the study of'. A more update definition of the word psychology can be found from Atkinson, et al (1991) “The scientific study of behaviours and mental processes.” However on Google Definitions the definition of psychology is “the mental characteristics and attitudes of a person” [accessed 16 September 2011], which gives somewhat of a contradiction. In this assignment I will be outlining and evaluating four key psychological perspectives. The psychological perspectives I have chosen are the behavioural approach, biological approach, cognitive approach and the psychodynamic approach.
"The premise behind the biological perspective in psychology is that all actions, feelings, and thoughts are associated with bodily events." Biological psychologists examine how all of the electrical impulses, hormones, and chemicals flowing through the body can effect behavior and how changes to these bodily functions can change behavior. They are concerned with how the aspects of biology effect peoples' emotions, learning abilities, and their perception of events.
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. In psychology, and all of the other sciences, relying on opinions is abandoned in order to find out which explanations best fit the evidence or data given. Science continually forces us to question our findings and conclusions. Over time, psychology has advanced greatly and a main reason for such progressiveness is because of the change in the research model used.
Psychology itself is a broad term where everyone may be ambiguous to it. There’s a lot of subjects psychology talks about, but it’s main definition is the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. The brain is the function to life and without it, there is no life. The brain has so many functions such as the ability for a person to see, hear, make decisions, sensing and touching, and many more. The brain regulates and sends signals to the body from birth to death. It was said, “ A person only uses 10% of it’s brain” which is completely false, everyone uses 100% of the brain even when they don’t realize it. No matter what situation anyone is dealing with, it’s how the brain would interpret the problem and that’s how one would act upon
There are six main perspectives in psychology; cognitive, biological, humanistic, psychodynamic, behavioral, and social cultural. The cognitive perspective studies how the brain processes and perceives information while the biological perspective studies things that affect behavior. The psychodynamic perspective digs into subconscious thoughts and behaviors based off of childhood experiences and the behavioral perspective studies behavior learned by experiences and interactions with the world. Finally, the social cultural perspective studies how social and cultural factors influence behavior. In this essay, I will go over the strengths and weaknesses of the social cultural perspectives in psychology. The social cultural perspective in psychology helps recognize patterns in behaviors through social cognition and helps build communities through social influence, but falls short in recognizing individuality.
Personal observations of human behavior are often unreliable because their interpretations are not conducted in an objective, unbiased manner. The observations will often be subjective, and may reflect that person’s feelings or perspectives. When a personal observation is made of human behavior, prior life experiences, personal feelings and perceptions render the results unreliable, because they cannot be viewed or interpreted by anyone else. The general purpose of psychology is to describe, explain, predict and control or influence behavior and mental processes. Psychologists use these goals to observe and research, along with the use of the scientific method. The scientific method is a way of conducting research, and is used to guide scientists by demanding that the evidence is always valid and verifiable, and not subjective. The scientific method serves as a guideline for researchers and assists in lessening the possibility of unreliable results or errors in their conclusions.
The first method to be discussed and analysed are experimental methods. There is a variety of experimental methods including; laboratory, field and natural experiments. These methods are the most scientific method due to them being highly objective and systematic. In addition, this method is regarded as the most powerful research method used in psychology because of the potential to investigate the causes of events and therefore, identifying the cause and effect relationship. When carrying out an experiment the researcher intervenes directly in the situation being investigated. The researcher manipulates an independent variable (IV) in order to investigate whether there is a change in the dependent variable (DV). Any other variables that could have an
Introduction to Psychological Perspective: There are numerous different methods in psychology that involves various assumptions regarding human/animal behavior. For every perspective, it has its own strengths and weaknesses, and brings something different to our understanding of human (animal) behavior. It is important that psychology does have diverse perspectives to understanding and study of human and animal behavior.