Psychology

Foundations of Psychology

PSY 300/wk1/day 7

February 27, 2012

Mayola Galvan

The foundation of psychology is diverse, that is there are many different perspectives that can explain human behavior. Psychology is used to understand the behavior, thoughts and or feelings of a person. The perspectives include behavioral, humanism, cognitive and psychoanalysis perspective. Each perspective draws from its own theories and includes strong responses that attribute to the origin. Similarities in all these perspectives include being able to understand the person’s action, understand a person’s thoughts, and their feelings.

The behaviorism perspective in known as the theory that states behavior is acquired through conditioning. In turn conditioning is learned by the interaction a person has with his/her environment. One known founder of behaviorism is B.F. Skinner who proposed two types of conditioning: classical and operant. Though Skinner initiated the thought of behaviorism other psychologist such as Ivan Pavlov studied and proposed theories in reference to behaviorism. Pavlov stated the study of classical conditioning was phenomenal and resulted in unexpected results (Kretchamr, 2008).

Pavlov’s theory originated from an experiment dealing with digestion and dogs. Pavlov noticed that the dogs were not only responding to the food but were also responding to the attendants that brought in the food. In Pavlov’s study he presented the ringing of the bell and paired it with food. Pavlov described the food as unconditioned stimulus because it led to an unconditioned response, which was salivation. After several pairing of the food and the bell, the bell in turn became a conditioned stimulus and the salivation response to the bell became the conditioned response. In essence the dogs were conditioned to know that every time they heard the bell, the food became an association with the bell and the same response took place.

On the other hand operant conditioning is a...