5 Main Approaches of Psychology

 An approach is a perspective or view that involves certain assumptions or beliefs about human behaviour regarding the way they function, which aspects of them are worthy of study and what research methods are appropriate for undertaking this study. While psychologists may differ on which kinds of behaviour are important, they do agree that the study of behaviour must be systematic. The use of a systematic method of asking and answering questions about why people think, act, and feel as they do reduces the chances of coming to false conclusions. Many different approaches are necessary to understand the complex richness of human behaviour. There may be several different theories within an approach, but they all share these common assumptions.

A brief summary of the 5 main approaches of psychology (sometimes called perspectives) in psychology, is given in this article.

1    PSYCHOLOGY AS A STUDY OF MIND

Structuralism: The establishment of psychology as a separate, formal field of study is widely thought to have begun in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany when Wilhelm Wundt started his Laboratory of Psychology. In his laboratory, he modelled his research on the mind after that he had studied in other natural sciences. He developed a method of self-observation called introspection to collect information about the mind. In carefully controlled situations, trained subjects reported their thoughts, and Wundt tried to map out the basic structure of thought processes. Wundt’s experiments were very important historically, not so much because he advanced our understanding of the mind, but because his work attracted many students who carried on the tradition of psychological research.

Functionalism: Regarded as a close rival for the honour of founder of psychology, the American psychologist William James. In his text Principles of Psychology (1890), James speculated that thinking, feeling, learning, remembering and all activities of the mind, serve one major function, to help us survive as a species. Rather than focusing on the structure of the mind as Wundt did, James focused on the functions of the conscious mind and the goals or functions of behaviours. Although James did not produce any significant experimental findings, his writings and theories are still influential.

2. PSYCHOLOGY AS THE STUDY OF UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSES

Psychoanalysis: While the first psychologists were interested in understanding the conscious mind, Sigmund Freud, a physician who practiced in Vienna until 1938, was more interested in the unconscious mind. He believed that our conscious experiences are only the tip of the iceberg, that beneath the surface are primitive biological urges that are in conflict with the requirements of society and morality. According to Freud, these unconscious motivations and conflicts are responsible for most human behaviour. He thought that they were responsible for many medically unexplainable physical symptoms that troubled his patients.

Freud used a new method for indirectly studying unconscious processes. In this technique, known as free association, a patient said everything that came to mind, no matter how absurd or irrelevant it seemed, without attempting to produce logical or meaningful statements. The person was instructed not to edit or censor the thoughts. Freud’s role, that of psychoanalyst, was to be objective; he merely sat and listened, then interpreted the associations. Free association, Freud believed, revealed the operation of unconscious processes. Freud also believed that dreams are expressions of the most primitive unconscious urges. To learn more about these urges, he developed dream analysis which is basically an extension of free association in which the patient applied the same technique to his or her dreams (Freud, 1940).

While working out his ideas, Freud took careful, extensive notes on all his patients and treatment sessions. He used these records, or case studies, to develop and illustrate a comprehensive theory of personality (Ewen, 1993).

In many areas of psychology today, Freud’s view of unconscious motivation remains a powerful and controversial influence. Modem psychologists may support, alter, or attempt to disprove it, but most have a strong opinion about it. The technique of free association is still used by psychoanalysts, and the method of intensive case study is still a major tool for investigating behaviour.

Nevertheless, this approach has been criticised in the way that it over emphasises of importance of sexuality and under emphasised of the role of social relationships. The theory is not scientific, and cannot be proved as it is circular. Nevertheless psychoanalysis has been greatly contributory to psychology in that it has encouraged many modern theorists to modify it for the better, using its basic principles, but eliminating its major flaws.

3. Psychology as the Study of Individual Differences

Sir Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century English mathematician and scientist, wanted to understand how heredity (inherited traits) influences a person’s abilities, character, and behaviour. Galton (1869) traced the ancestry of various eminent people and found that greatness runs in families. (This was appropriate, since Galton himself was considered a genius and his family included at least one towering intellectual figure, a cousin named Charles Darwin). He therefore concluded that genius or eminence is a hereditary trait. This conclusion was like the blind men’s ideas about the elephant. Galton did not consider the possibility that the tendency of genius to run in eminent families might be a result of the exceptional environments and socioeconomic advantages that also tend to run in such families.

The data Galton used were based on his study of biographies. However, not content to limit his inquiry to indirect accounts, he went on to invent procedures for directly testing the abilities and characteristics of a wide range of people. These tests were the primitive ancestors of the modem personality tests and intelligence tests that virtually all of you have taken at some time.

Although Galton began his work shortly before psychology emerged as an independent discipline, his theories and techniques quickly became central aspects of the new science. In 1883 he published a book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, which is regarded as the first study of individual differences. Galton’s writings raised the issue of whether behaviour is determined by heredity or environment, a subject that remains a focus of controversy. Galton’s influence can also be seen in the current widespread use of psychological tests.

Evolutionaryapproach: This studies how evolutionary ideas, such as adaptation & natural selection, explain behaviours & mental processes.

A central claim of evolutionary psychology is that the brain (and therefore the mind) evolved to solve problems encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors during the upper Pleistocene period over 10,000 years ago.

The Evolutionary approach explains behaviour in terms of the selective pressures that shape behaviour. Most behaviours that we see/display are believed to have developed during our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptation) to help us survive.

Observed behaviour is likely to have developed because it is adaptive. It has been naturally selected, i.e., individuals who are best adapted survive and reproduce. Behaviours may even be sexually selected, i.e., individuals who are most successful in gaining access to mates leave behind more offspring. The mind is therefore equipped with ‘instincts’ that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce.

A strength of this approach is that it can explain behaviours that appear dysfunctional, such as anorexia, or behaviours that make little sense in a modern context, such as our biological stress response when finding out we are overdrawn at the bank.

4. Psychology as the Study of Observable Behaviour

Behaviourism. The pioneering work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his studies related to the physiology of digestion, charted another new course for psychological investigation. In a now-famous experiment, Pavlov rang a tuning fork each time he gave a dog some meat powder. The dog would naturally salivate when the powder reached its mouth. After Pavlov repeated the procedure several times, the dog would salivate when it heard the tuning fork, even if no food appeared. It had been conditioned to associate the sound with the food.

The conditioned reflex was a response (salivation) elicited by a stimulus (the tuning fork) other than the one that first produced it (food). The concept was used by psychologists as a new tool, as a means of exploring the development of behaviour. Using this tool, they could begin to account for behaviour as the product of prior experience. This enabled them to explain how certain acts and certain differences among individuals were the result of learning.

Psychologists who stressed investigating observable behaviour became known as behaviourists. Their position, as formulated by American psychologist John Broadus Watson (1924), was that psychology should concern itself only with the observable facts of behaviour. Watson further maintained that all behaviour, even apparently instinctive behaviour, is the result of conditioning and occurs because the appropriate stimulus is present in the environment.

Although it was Watson who defined and solidified the behaviourist position, it was Frederic B. Skinner, another American psychologist, who refined and popularised it. Skinner attempted to show how, in principle, his laboratory techniques might be applied to society as a whole. In his classic novel Walden Two (1949), he portrayed his idea of Utopia, i.e. a small town in which conditioning, through rewarding those who display behaviour that is considered desirable, rules every conceivable facet of life.

Skinner exerted great influence on both the general public and the science of psychology. His face was familiar to television audiences, and his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) became a bestseller. A number of Walden Two communities have been formed in various parts of the country, and many people toilet-train their children, lose weight, quit smoking, and overcome phobias by using Skinner-inspired methods.

Skinner was widely criticised, for many people were convinced that his “manipulative” conditioning techniques are a means of limiting personal freedom. He has also been heartily applauded as a social visionary. In any event, his theories and methods have been highly influential in psychology. Behaviourist-inspired techniques compete with more traditional psychotherapy for use in the treatment of various psychological disorders. The techniques of reinforcement, or controlled reward and punishment, have become increasingly popular in education, and Skinner’s teaching machine was the forerunner of modem computer-assisted instruction. Moreover, a vast number of today’s psychologists use Skinner’s research methods to obtain precise findings in their laboratory experiments.

Behaviourism has been criticised in the way it underestimates the complexity of human behaviour. Many studies used animals which are hard to generalise to humans and it cannot explain, for example the speed in which we pick up language. There must be biological factors involved.

Humanism. Humanistic psychology developed as a reaction to the behavioural movement. Humanistic psychologists, notably Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May, describe human nature as active and creative rather than passively reacting to external stimuli. Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that emphasises the study of the whole person (known as holism). Humanistic psychologists look at human behaviour, not only through the eyes of the observer but through the eyes of the person doing the behaviour. The humanistic perspective centres on the view that each person is unique and individual, and has the free will to change at any time in his or her life.

The humanistic perspective suggests that we are each responsible for our own happiness and well-being as humans. We have the innate (i.e. inborn) capacity for self-actualisation, which is our unique desire to achieve our highest potential as people. Unlike behaviourists, humanists feel that the human mind is able to influence and change the world in which it functions.

5 PSYCHOLOGY AS THE STUDY OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES

Another reaction to the narrow perspective of S-R (Stimulus-Response) explanations of behaviour has been of growing importance since the mid-1970s, of internal, or cognitive, explanations of behaviour. Sometimes using computer-based models of behaviour for their studies, cognitive psychologists recognise that some of the processes that govern human and animal behaviour are internal. We perceive and interpret our world, we think about problems, we constantly assess our knowledge of ourselves and others, and we use language to communicate with one another.

The cognitive approach is concerned with “mental” functions such as memory, perception, attention etc. It views people as being similar to computers in the way we process information (e.g. input-process-output). For example, both human brains and computers process information, store data and have input and output procedure.

This had led cognitive psychologists to explain that memory comprises of three stages:

–          encoding (where information is received and attended to),

–          storage (where the information is retained) and

–          retrieval (where the information is recalled).

It is an extremely scientific approach and typically uses lab experiments to study human behaviour. The cognitive approach has many applications including cognitive therapy and eyewitness testimony.

If, for example, you need a favour from a brother or sister who is almost your age, you will probably ask for it. If you know, however, that he or she is studying for a big test or has just had an argument with a boyfriend or girlfriend, you are likely to delay making your request. Your knowledge of his or her condition or your memory of the results of asking for a favour last time has altered your behaviour.