Foundations of Psychology

For most individuals when they hear or speak of “Psychology” they do not view it as being a science. When it comes to psychology and its science it is based around different individual’s behavior, mental processes, and occasionally for some situations, animals. Psychology is founded around four separate schools of though. These schools consist of the perspectives: cognitive, psychodynamic, evolutionary, and behaviorist (Kowalski & Westen, 2009). At the same time there also is the biopsychological approach to psychology and although it is not believed or seen as one of the primary schools of thought it does have an important role within the foundation of psychology. Within each of the perspectives of the schools of thought for psychology they provide different theories and ideas about psychology.

Through the cognitive perspective it is focused on the affects an individual’s thoughts have towards how they obtain, acknowledge, and understand information (Kowalski & Westen, 2009). With this perspective, cognitive psychologists compare and contrast the human beings thought process to that of the way in which computers process information. Based on the information being obtained the human mind will process it in different ways in order to understand, translate, obtain, and keep that information. This process will determine the outputs for the information in the same manner as a computer (Kowalski & Westen, 2009).

The primary concepts of the cognitive perspective are decision making and memory functioning. Through the use of the internal though process individuals are then able to understand external stimuli like an image or speech. With this process each individual is able to make rational decisions and retrieve memories. When it comes to psychology’s cognitive perspective the brain is the primary factor and has the biggest role. The primary method for study with the cognitive perspective is the use of the experimental method due to the ability...