Perspectives in Psychology

1. Behaviorism: focus on how people behave, it’s concerned with how the environmental factors affect observable behavior, and it rejects that people have a free will.

2. Psychodynamic: was first mentioned by Freud, tells us that our behavior is determined by the unconscious mind and childhood experiences.

Three methods to access the unconscious mind, free association,

Dream analysis

Slips of the tongue

Criticism: they view humans as controlled by environment and rejects that humans have a free will and can’t make their own choices and rejects the idea that humans are born blank slate, and focus extremely on the observable behavior.

3. Humanistic: individuals are unique, and they can reach their full potential but they have to fulfill their needs according to Maslow’s hierarchy (achieving self-actualization)

Criticism: the critics believe that the concepts of the humanistic perspective are vague and that the human feelings are difficult to objectify, and that every human feelings differ from one individual to another, according to that the conclusions drawn from those experiences are difficult to verify.

4. Neuroscience: its studying the human condition and looks inside the body, examining the brain and

the physical health and try to understand how the body influence the behavior.

Criticism: other perspectives doesn’t believe that its only the genes and body are the ones to determine one’s behavior.

5. Sociocultural: seeks to understand human behavior and personality development by examining the rules of the social groups in which the individual belongs to.

Criticism: sociocultural perspective ignores the development stages and it doesn’t explain how personality changes and develops over time.

6. Cognitive psychology: individuals behave according to their thoughts, psychologists study the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired.

Criticism: psychologists create an artificial environment to examine the thoughts which means that the response can change by the change of the environment.