Contemporary Psychological Perspectives and fields of study PDF

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INSTITUTE FOR THEOLOGICAL & LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Lecturer: LOI PERRY Course: INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY

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CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES What is a psychological perspective? Basically, it is an approach, a way of looking at topics within psychology. Any topic in psychology can be approached from different perspectives. Indeed, this is true of any action a person takes. Suppose that, following an insult, you punch someone in the face. From a biological perspective, we can describe this act as involving certain brain areas and as the firing of nerves that activate the muscles that move your arm. From a behavioral perspective, we can describe the act without reference to anything within your body; rather, the insult is a stimulus to which you respond by punching, a learned response that has been rewarded in the past. A cognitive perspective on this action would focus on the mental processes involved in producing the behavior, and we might explain your punch in terms of your goals and plans: Your goal is to defend your honor, and aggressive behavior is part of your plan for achieving that goal. From a psychoanalytic perspective, your action could be described as an expression of an unconscious aggressive instinct. And finally, from a subjectivist perspective, your aggressive act can be understood as a reaction to interpreting the person’s utterance as a personal insult. Despite the many possible ways to describe any psychological act, these five perspectives represent the major approaches to the contemporary study of psychology. Keep in mind that these approaches need not be mutually exclusive; rather, they may focus on different aspects of the same complex phenomenon. In fact, understanding many psychological topics requires an eclectic approach that spans multiple perspectives. The biological perspective The human brain contains well over 10 billion nerve cells and an almost infinite number of interconnections between them. It may be the most complex structure in the universe. In principle, all psychological events can be related to the activity of the brain and nervous system. The biological approach to the study of human beings and other species attempts to relate overt behavior to electrical and chemical events taking place inside the body. Research from the biological perspective seeks to specify the neurobiological processes that underlie behavior and mental processes. The biological approach to depression, for example, tries to understand this disorder in terms of abnormal changes in levels of neurotransmitters, which are chemicals produced in the brain that make communication between nerve cells possible. We can use one of the problems described earlier to illustrate this perspective. The study of face recognition in patients with brain damage indicates that particular regions of the brain are specialized for face recognition. The human brain is divided into right and left hemispheres, and the regions devoted to face recognition seem to be located mainly in the right hemisphere. There is considerable hemispheric specialization in humans. In most right-handed people, for example, the left hemisphere is specialized for understanding language, and the right hemisphere is specialized for interpreting spatial relations. The biological perspective has also assisted in the study of memory.

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It emphasizes the importance of certain brain structures, including the hippocampus, which is involved in consolidating memories. Childhood amnesia may be partly due to an immature hippocampus, a structure that is not fully developed until a year or two after birth.

The behavioral perspective As described in our brief review of the history of psychology, the behavioral perspective focuses on observable stimuli and responses and regards nearly all behavior as a result of conditioning and reinforcement. For example, a behavioral analysis of your social life might focus on which people you interact with (the social stimuli), the kinds of responses you make to them (rewarding, punishing, or neutral), the kinds of responses they in turn make to you (rewarding, punishing, or neutral), and how the responses sustain or disrupt the interaction. We can use our sample problems to further illustrate this approach. With regard to obesity, some people may overeat (a specific response) only in the presence of specific stimuli (such as watching television), and learning to avoid these stimuli is part of many weight-control programs. With regard to aggression, children are more likely to express aggressive responses, such as hitting another child, when such responses are rewarded (the other child withdraws) than when their responses are punished (the other child counterattacks). Historically, the strict behavioral approach did not consider the individual’s mental processes at all, and even contemporary behaviorists usually do not conjecture about the mental processes that intervene between the stimulus and the response. Nevertheless, psychologists other than strict behaviorists often record what people say about their conscious experiences (a verbal self-report) and draw inferences about their mental activity from these subjective data. Although few psychologists today would define themselves as strict behaviorists, many modern developments in psychology have evolved from the work of the earlier behaviorists (Malone, 2003; Skinner, 1981). The cognitive perspective The contemporary cognitive perspective is in part a return to the cognitive roots of psychology and in part a reaction to the narrowness of behaviorism, which tended to neglect complex human activities like reasoning, planning, decision making, and communication. Like the nineteenthcentury version, the contemporary cognitive perspective is concerned with mental processes such as perceiving, remembering, reasoning, deciding, and problem solving. Unlike the nineteenthcentury version, however, the contemporary cognitive approach is not based on introspection. Instead, it assumes that (1) only by studying mental processes can we fully understand what organisms do, and (2) we can study mental processes in an objective fashion by focusing on specific behaviors (just as behaviorists do) but interpreting them in terms of underlying mental processes. In making these interpretations, cognitive psychologists have often relied on an

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analogy between the mind and a computer. Incoming information is processed in various ways: It is selected, compared, and combined with other information already in memory, transformed, rearranged, and so on. Consider the phenomenon of childhood amnesia described at the beginning of the chapter. Perhaps we cannot remember events from the first few years of life because of a major developmental change in the way we organize our experience in memory. Such changes may be particularly pronounced at about age 3, when our language abilities increase immensely, and language offers us a new way of organizing our memories.

The psychoanalytic perspective Sigmund Freud developed the psychoanalytic conception of human behavior in Europe at about the same time that behaviorism was evolving in the United States. In some respects, psychoanalysis was a blend of the nineteenth century versions of cognition and physiology. In particular, Freud combined cognitive notions of consciousness, perception, and memory with ideas about biologically based instincts to forge a bold new theory of human behavior. The basic assumption of the psychoanalytic perspective is that behavior stems from unconscious processes, meaning beliefs, fears, and desires that a person is unaware of but that nonetheless influence behavior. Freud believed that many of the impulses that are forbidden or punished by parents and society during childhood are derived from innate instincts. Because each of us is born with these impulses, they exert a pervasive influence that must be dealt with in some manner. Forbidding them merely forces them out of awareness into the unconscious. They do not disappear, however. They may manifest themselves as emotional problems and symptoms of mental illness or as socially approved behavior such as artistic and literary activity. For example, if you feel a lot of anger toward your father but you cannot afford to alienate him, your anger may become unconscious, perhaps expressed in a dream about him being hurt in an atrocious accident. Freud believed that we are driven by the same basic instincts as animals (primarily sex and aggression) and that we are continually struggling against a society that stresses the control of these impulses. The psychoanalytic perspective suggests new ways of looking at some of the problems. For example, Freud claimed that aggressive behavior stems from an innate instinct. Although this proposal is not widely accepted in human psychology, it is in agreement with the views of some biologists and psychologists who study aggression in animals. The subjectivist perspective The subjectivist perspective contends that human behavior is a function of the perceived world, not the objective world. Like the cognitive approach, the subjectivist perspective drew from the

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Gestalt tradition and reacted against the narrowness of behaviorism. Although allied with cognitive psychology, subjectivism has been most pervasive within social and personality psychology. To understand human social behavior, this view holds, we must grasp the person’s own ‘definition of the situation’, which is expected to vary by culture, personal history, and current motivational state. This perspective, then, is the most open to cultural and individual differences and to the effects of motivation and emotion. In one sense, the idea that people actively construct their own subjective realities calls for introspective methods. Even so, subjectivists do not rely exclusively on subjective self-reports because they also assume that people fail to see their subjective realities as personal constructions. This naïve realism refers to people’s tendency to take their constructed, subjective realities to be faithful renderings of an objective world. Therefore, a subjectivist approach also involves systematic observation of judgments and behaviors. A subjectivist perspective is illustrated by a classic early study that found that people reliably overestimate the physical size of valuable coins, more so than for coins of lower value. This tendency is exaggerated among poor children (Bruner & Goodman, 1947; note that coins in general probably seemed much more valuable in the 1940s!). Consider again the problem of trait attribution. The study of how people make sense of other people’s actions – in the example mentioned earlier, donating money to charity – emerged from a subjectivist emphasis on how situations are defined by the people in them (Heider, 1958). One contemporary explanation for the pervasive tendency to attribute other people’s actions to their personality traits suggests that, because Western cultures have long emphasized personal agency, Westerners often fail to see the influence of situations (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001; see Chapter 18). Likewise, a subjectivist view of the link between media violence and aggression suggests that habitual consumption of violent media instills and strengthens aggressive schemas and scripts, which are later used to define subsequent interpersonal encounters (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). Relationships between psychological and biological perspectives The behaviorist, cognitive, psychoanalytic, and subjectivist perspectives all rely on concepts that are purely psychological (such as perception, the unconscious, and attributions). Although these perspectives sometimes offer different explanations for the same phenomenon, those explanations are always psychological in nature. The biological perspective is different. In addition to using psychological concepts, it employs concepts (such as neurotransmitters and hormones) drawn from physiology and other branches of biology. There is a way, though, in which the biological perspective makes direct contact with the psychological perspectives. Biologically oriented researchers attempt to explain psychological concepts and principles in terms of their biological counterparts. For example, researchers might attempt to explain the normal ability to recognize faces solely in terms of neurons and their interconnections in a

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certain region of the brain. Such attempts are termed reductionism because they involve reducing psychological notions to biological ones. Throughout this book, we present examples of successful reductionism – situations in which what was once understood at only the psychological level is now understood at least in part at the biological level. If reductionism can be successful, why bother with psychological explanations at all? Is psychology just something to do until the biologists figure everything out? The answer is clearly no. First, psychological findings, concepts, and principles direct biological researchers in their work. Given that the brain contains billions of brain cells and countless interconnections between these cells, biological researchers cannot hope to find something of interest by arbitrarily selecting some brain cells to study. Rather, they must have a way of directing their efforts to relevant groups of brain cells. Psychological findings can supply this direction. For example, psychological research indicates that our ability to discriminate among spoken words and our ability to discriminate among spatial positions obey different principles. So, biological psychologists might look in different regions of the brain for the neural basis of these two kinds of discrimination capacities (the left hemisphere for word discrimination and the right hemisphere for spatial-position discrimination). As another example, if psychological research indicates that learning a motor skill is a slow process that is hard to undo, biological psychologists can direct their attention to brain processes that are relatively slow but permanently alter connections between neurons (Churchland & Sejnowski, 1988). Second, our biological ways acts in concert with our past circumstances and current environment. For example, obesity can be the result of (1) a genetic predisposition to gain weight (a biological factor), (2) learning bad eating habits (a psychological factor), or (3) a reaction to cultural pressures toward extreme thinness (a sociocultural factor). The biologist can seek to understand the first factor, but it is still up to the psychologist to explore and explain the past experiences and current circumstances that influence a person’s eating habits. Nevertheless, the push for reductionism goes on at an ever-increasing rate. For many topics in psychology, we now have both psychological explanations and knowledge about how the relevant psychological concepts are implemented or executed in the brain (for example, what particular parts of the brain are involved and how they are interconnected). This kind of biological knowledge typically falls short of total reductionism, but it is still very important. Memory researchers, for example, have long distinguished between working memory and long-term memory (which are psychological notions), but now they also know something about how these two kinds of memory are actually coded differently in the brain. So, for many of the topics discussed in this book, we review what is known at the biological level as well as at the psychological level. Indeed, a central theme of this book – and of contemporary psychology in general – is that psychological phenomena can be understood at both the psychological and biological levels. The biological analysis shows us how the psychological notions can be implemented in the brain.

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Both levels of analysis are clearly needed (although for some topics, including many dealing with social interactions, biological analyses have only just begun).

CONCEPT REVIEW TABLE Five perspectives within psychology Biological perspective An orientation toward understanding the neurobiological processes that underlie behavior and mental processes. Behavioral perspective An orientation toward understanding observable behavior in terms of conditioning and reinforcement. Cognitive perspective An orientation toward understanding mental processes such as perceiving, remembering, reasoning, deciding, and problem solving and their relationship to behavior. Psychoanalytic perspective An orientation toward understanding behavior in terms of unconscious motives stemming from sexual and aggressive impulses. Subjectivist perspective An orientation toward understanding behavior and mental processes in terms of the subjective realities people actively construct. FIELDS OF STUDY IN PSYCHOLOGY

Major subfields of psychology So far, we have gained a general understanding of the nature of psychology by looking at its topics and perspectives. We can further our understanding by looking at what different kinds of psychologists do and at emerging fields of emphasis in twentyfirst-century psychology (see the Cutting Edge Research feature). About half the people who have advanced degrees in psychology work in colleges and universities. In addition to teaching,

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they may devote much of their time to research or counseling. Other psychologists work in schools, hospitals or clinics, research institutes, government agencies, or business and industry. Still others are in private practice and offer their services to the public for a fee. We now turn to a brief description of some of the subfields of psychology.

Biological psychology Biological psychologists (also referred to as physiological psychologists) look for the relationship between biological processes and behavior. Cognitive psychology Cognitive psychologists are concerned with people’s internal mental processes, such as problemsolving, memory, and language and thought. Developmental psychology Developmental psychologists are concerned with human development and the factors that shape behavior from birth to old age. They might study a specific ability, such as how language develops in children, or a particular period of life, such as infancy. Social and personality psychology These two subfields overlap. Social psychologists are interested in how people perceive and interpret their social world and how their beliefs, emotions, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others. They are also concerned with the behavior of groups and with social relationships between and among people. Personality psychologists study the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that define an individual’s personal style of interacting with the world. Accordingly, they are interested in differenc...