Aspects of Psychology

Aspects of Psychology

Derek McMahan

American InterContinental University

Abstract

The science that focuses on studying the mind, mental processes, and human behavior is known as psychology and has been studied for hundreds of years dating back to the time of Plato and Aristotle. Psychology is something that continues to evolve and develop even today and although there are many aspects, three fields in particular continue to shape the psychology field today; the behaviorism approach, the cognitive approach, and humanistic approach.

Aspects of Psychology

Research in psychology has evolved out of philosophy and biology and seeks to understand and explain how people think, act, and feel. Functions of psychology include mental health treatment, performance enhancement, self-help, and many other areas affecting health and daily lives. In today’s society, psychological studies are highly structured and are more of an objective based study with the goal of understanding, explaining, and predicting human behavior. There are several major schools of thought for psychology but three that contributed to early psychology, and continue today, are the behaviorist approach, the cognitive approach, and the humanistic approach.

A Russian physiologist by the name of Ivan Pavlov is credited with the discovery of learning through association while investigating digestion in dogs. Pavlov rang a bell before serving the dogs food and noted that the dogs began to produce saliva even before the food was presented. With the ringing of a bell, Pavlov suggested that the dogs associated the food with a bell and this theory marked the beginning of the behaviorist approach to psychology. This approach suggests that learning comes from rewards or punishment associated with particular action or behavior.

The behaviorist approach can also be broken down into two main processes, classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning entails learning through...