Psychology: Concept, Important Figures, Perspectives
What is Psychology?
When people think of psychology, some might think that it is mainly studied to help with people with a mental illness or to help cure people. Even though this is partly true, there is more to it. Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Modern psychology is now mainly about the studies of the topics memory, free will, and attraction. Not only does psychology fall under health reasons, the field is also used in human development, sports, clinical, social behavior, and cognitive processes. Psychology is relatively new to the science field. The high tech advances that the field has acquired are all in the last 150 years. The beginning of this field however started back in the BC period. Psychologists are all about the cause of something happening to someone rather than think how and why is happens.
Psychology is all about investigating causes of people’s behaviors systematic procedures. Using predictions, explanations, and theoretical interpretations are all very important when it comes to this specific field. Psychology is very important when it comes to diagnosing people and trying to help the human population. This newly popular field of science helps many other fields of medicine for all ages. It is not all about why someone might be acting a certain way but it is about helping that person and knowing how it all came to be. Psychology is all about helping an individual if they feel they have something mentally wrong and want to fix it. No matter if you are an athlete or a regular person walking down the street, psychology will help diagnose you and figure out what is going on. It is all about helping, not judging.
15 Important Figures in Psychology
Albert Bandura- a Canadian born American psychologist who was the originator of the social cognitive theory. He is best known for his study on aggression, which he had the “Bobo doll” experiment. Adults would abuse an inflatable clown toy in front of a child which led to the child repeating the action of the adult to the toy. This showed that children can learn some of their behaviors from observing adults. Bandura was invited to testify against the Federal Trade Commission when children sustained multiple injuries when mimicking the violent advertisements and news coverages on television, for example the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Abraham Maslow- an American psychologist and philosopher best known for his contributions to humanistic psychology and his self theory of psychology.Maslow believed that people focus too much on the psychology of the sick and not enough on the healthy.The theory that Maslow came up with was known as the development of hierarchy. This theory was made up of five needs, psychological, love, safety, esteem, and self actualization in a pyramid shape. The first level is the most important to the fifth level being least important. Self actualization is at the top then comes esteem, love, safety, and psychological. This pyramid is used to help hospices, urban planning, development, and management.
Carl Rogers- An American psychologist who originated the non direct “client centered” approach to psychotherapy. He wanted to form more of a relationship with the client and the therapist. Wrote a book called The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child. This is all about his experience working with troubled children. Rogers suggested that clients, establishing a relationship with their therapist, can resolve issues and gain ideas and ways to help their life in the future.
Howard Gardner- a developmental psychologist known for his theory of multiple intelligence. After working with normal and gifted children, he started to believe that people’s IQs do not show all of the intelligence that one person might have. His book Frames of Mind, described his theory which included his eight major types of intelligence: visual- spatial, linguistic- verbal, mathematical, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Gardner proposed adding a ninth type, existential. His theory helped the education field the most. Teachers and educators wanted to find new ways of teaching their students to aim at the different kinds of intelligences.
Erik Erikson- an American psychoanalyst who wrote a lot on social psychology, individual identity, what the interactions that psychology has on culture, politics and history which helped other professionals approach psychological problems. Erikson’s theory was solutions to problems and the types of problems are all different based on society. Erikson came up with eight stages of development. These stages each approached the individual with it’s own psychosocial demands. He used both of his interests in history and psychoanalysis theory to look into how Martin Luther was able to create a new way of looking at life.
Ivan Pavlov- a Russian physiologist who developed the concept of conditioned reflex. The laws that were created were all based on his observations of irregularities in animals. He trained a hungry dog drool at the sound of a bell, which helps him connect the human behavior to the nervous system. Pavlov used the salivary secretion to really make his observations more accurate and emphasize his findings. He received the Nobel Prize for psychology.
Sigmund Freud- an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, aims to help treat mental disorders by evaluating their patients when their conscious and unconscious. Freud is sometimes known as the most influential intellectual legislator of his age. His finding of psychoanalysis was once a theory of the human psyche. Even after his death, his findings and work still remains very important and influential in today’s studies in many fields other than psychology.
William James- an American psychologist and philosopher who was the leader of the philosophical Pragmatic movement and psychological movement functionalism. He was also the first teacher to give people an option to take a psychology class in the United States. James also created the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James wrote many books that would help both the philosophical and psychological fields. He is known as the most influential American philosopher and he also earned himself the nickname “Father of American psychology.”
B.F. Skinner- an American psychologist and influencer of the concept behaviourism, which views kinds of behavior based on different variables being stimulated and controlled. He was big on actions being repeated. He believed that good actions will continuously be repeated why bad actions are less likely to be repeated. It all has to do with consequences and what the person will get out of their actions. He developed behavior analysis and operant conditioning chamber that was a very successful and helpful experiment that he wrote a lot about in his books.
Jean Piaget- a Swiss psychologist that is known for his work in child development. His work that he is most known for is genetic epistemology. This piece of work is combined with a lot of Piaget’s theories put together. His theory is all about educators being the only ones to be able to keep society from collapsing. A lot of educators use his child development work into consideration when it comes to the children. In colleges, professors will teach his theories and his work in their education programs.
Wilhelm Wundt- a German psychologist that who was one of the founding fathers of psychology. He is the one who stated that psychology is a science rather than biology or a philosophy. He was the first person to call himself a psychologist. He founded the first lab for psychology which helped psychology be separated from other sciences and being its own thing. He was the founder of “experimental psychology”. Wundt also created the first academic journal for psychological research, “Philosophische Studien”. Philip Zimbardo- an American psychologist and professor at Stanford University. He is known for his Stanford prison experiment which is now in college textbooks along with a lot of his other work. His experiment contained randomly selected male students to either be a prisoner or guard in his mock prison. This experiment was all about see how the prisoner or guard feels being that particular part to see what it is like in real life. He wanted the guards to be dominant over the prisoners and be aggressive. After a day, one of the prisoners began to have depression and anxiety and needed to be removed from the experiment.
John Watson- an American psychologist that created the psychological school of behaviorism. He is known for his two most popular experiments, “Little Albert” and Kerplunk. “Little Albert” showed evidence of classic conditioning with babies and loud noises. Kerplunk used rats to show you can turn motor skills into conditioned responses. A lot of his research was on child rearing, advertising, and animal behavior. He made scientific theory in behaviorism very popular.
Lawrence Kohlberg- an American psychologist known for his theory and work on stages of moral development. He helped to extend Piaget’s child development work twenty five years after that work was stopped advancing. While he was working on Piaget’s findings, it took Kohlberg five years to finally publish something of his own. He created a new field in psychology known as moral psychology. He was very big in studying the topic of moral judgement.
Stanley Milgram- an American social psychologist known for his controversial experiment on obedience during the time he was at Yale during the 1960s. The Holocaust had a big impact on Milgram when developing his experiment. One of his smaller experiments was looked at once he passed, it contained six degrees of separation. Milgram developed a technique to develop hybrid social agents that were very interacted. He is one of the most important social psychologists in its history.
Nature vs Nurture
When it come to the two topics, Nature and Nurture, no one understands the differences between the two. Both of them are quite similar but there is a big difference. This debate is continuously brought up in the psychology world. Both of the topics have to do with aspects of a person’s behavior, whether the aspect is inherited or acquired. Both nature and nurture have to do with something contributing influence to a particular behavior.Nature is all about behaviors being influenced by biology or genetics. Some examples of nature is genetic diseases, eye color, hair color, and skin color. Some of the mental illnesses that people acquire, such as bipolar and depression, are all from nature. Some people think nature is the more important role to mental health because of the repeated history of mental illness in a family.
Another big part of nature is addiction. When a long line of family history has a repeated occurrence of an addiction is it very likely that it will keep happening to future offspring. Nurture is all about behaviors being influenced by an outside experience or anything the individual has learned. An example of nurture is a child’s education level can be based on how much education background their parents had, if they had good education they can have money to provide for their child and if they do not have much education, their child will not be able to get the education they need. Obtaining a mental illness by the nurture aspect is all about obtaining it from the environment. The illness can either have a high or low severity because of the environment the individual is apart of. If someone in the home of a certain individual is having a problem with addiction of any kind and they are the first to have it, the individual can be influenced by the addict if seeing them taking substances or always being around it. Seeing things like that is a norm to that individual and in their later years will think that is what they have to do. Any habits of any friends or family members can influence that individual whether it is good or bad.
8 Main Perspectives of Psychology
Neuroscience- Neuroscience is a science that works with math, chemistry, computer science, psychology and medicine. It all has to do with molecules, cells, functional aspects of the nervous system. Neuroscientists study how the brain works and how people’s behaviors impact it. They also research what happens to the nervous system when an individual has a neurological, psychiatric, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Research in this field can help improve understanding with the brain and how the body works, and what we can do to help with health issues.
Evolutionary- theoretical perspective of psychology that tries to explain mental and psychological traits. These traits can include memory, perception, language, or any adaptations that an individual can obtain. It is all about how evolution shaped modern psychology. Research in this perspective has to do with survival, mating, parenting, family, and culture. These areas of adaptive problems are all being studied to look more into evolution and the problems that were created throughout the years.
Behavioral-Genetic- the study of genetic and environmental influences that people have on their behavior. The studies that are happening are all having to do with examining how an environment impacts an individual’s behavior. The studied mainly taken place in this perspective is with twin studies and studies with adoption. Researchers use quantitative genetic methods to figure out how much of the environment causes an influence on a person’s behavior. Molecular genetics are also used to what specific genes are influencing specific individuals.
Psychodynamic- this perspective includes all the theories throughout the science of psychology to see the interaction of forces and interactions throughout a person. All past experiences will have some sort of impact of someone’s adult life. This is looked out when a person is unconscious and to break down their personality. Psychodynamic theory states that a people’s childhood memories and experiences will have a lot of influences on a person’s adult life. Researchers will look into how an experience can largely impact someone and how it can affect their lives in the meir future. There is therapy that helps people who have trouble forming relationships and have deep depression.
Behavioral- this approach studies observable behavior. It is all about how conditioning has a role in having some sort of influence in a person’s actions and thoughts. All of the studies and results are based on observations. This concept is all about proving the environment is the reason for people’s illnesses. Researchers are trying to find patterns in behavior and actions that cause people to act the way they do.
Cognitive- the perspective that focuses on the mental processes such as attention, such as use of language, memory, perception, creativity, problem solving, and thinking. With these different parts of cognitive psychology, each of these studies have their own studies. Researchers have specific tests and experiments that they use for each of these branches. They do similarity tests, long/short term memory tests,logic tests, grammar tests etc.
Social Cultural- this approach is all about understanding how people interact in social situations and how they are feeling in those situations. They also want to know how they feel about the world overall, the people and ongoing events. The study approaches that psychologists will take here are experimental, surgery and interview methods.
Humanistic- supports the belief of humans and how they are unique and should be treated well and doctors should always keep in mind to treat humans with all respect. When doing tests and observations on them to diagnosis patients, sometimes people forget that they are human and have feelings and need to have all the respect while giving up their time for studies and experiments.
Researchers will look into how the person fees and what it is they want out of being experimented. They always need to make sure the patient is comfortable and feels safe and nothing they will do will hurt anyone.
What is Psychology?
When people think of psychology, some might think that it is mainly studied to help with people with a mental illness or to help cure people. Even though this is partly true, there is more to it. Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Modern psychology is now mainly about the studies of the topics memory, free will, and attraction. Not only does psychology fall under health reasons, the field is also used in human development, sports, clinical, social behavior, and cognitive processes. Psychology is relatively new to the science field. The high tech advances that the field has acquired are all in the last 150 years. The beginning of this field however started back in the BC period. Psychologists are all about the cause of something happening to someone rather than think how and why is happens. Psychology is all about investigating causes of people’s behaviors systematic procedures. Using predictions, explanations, and theoretical interpretations are all very important when it comes to this specific field. Psychology is very important when it comes to diagnosing people and trying to help the human population. This newly popular field of science helps many other fields of medicine for all ages. It is not all about why someone might be acting a certain way but it is about helping that person and knowing how it all came to be. Psychology is all about helping an individual if they feel they have something mentally wrong and want to fix it. No matter if you are an athlete or a regular person walking down the street, psychology will help diagnose you and figure out what is going on. It is all about helping, not judging.
15 Important Figures in Psychology
Albert Bandura- a Canadian born American psychologist who was the originator of the social cognitive theory. He is best known for his study on aggression, which he had the “Bobo doll” experiment. Adults would abuse an inflatable clown toy in front of a child which led to the child repeating the action of the adult to the toy. This showed that children can learn some of their behaviors from observing adults. Bandura was invited to testify against the Federal Trade Commission when children sustained multiple injuries when mimicking the violent advertisements and news coverages on television, for example the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Abraham Maslow- an American psychologist and philosopher best known for his contributions to humanistic psychology and his self theory of psychology.Maslow believed that people focus too much on the psychology of the sick and not enough on the healthy.The theory that Maslow came up with was known as the development of hierarchy. This theory was made up of five needs, psychological, love, safety, esteem, and self actualization in a pyramid shape. The first level is the most important to the fifth level being least important. Self actualization is at the top then comes esteem, love, safety, and psychological. This pyramid is used to help hospices, urban planning, development, and management.
Carl Rogers- An American psychologist who originated the non direct “client centered” approach to psychotherapy. He wanted to form more of a relationship with the client and the therapist. Wrote a book called The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child. This is all about his experience working with troubled children. Rogers suggested that clients, establishing a relationship with their therapist, can resolve issues and gain ideas and ways to help their life in the future.
Howard Gardner- a developmental psychologist known for his theory of multiple intelligence. After working with normal and gifted children, he started to believe that people’s IQs do not show all of the intelligence that one person might have. His book Frames of Mind, described his theory which included his eight major types of intelligence: visual- spatial, linguistic- verbal, mathematical, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Gardner proposed adding a ninth type, existential. His theory helped the education field the most. Teachers and educators wanted to find new ways of teaching their students to aim at the different kinds of intelligences.
Erik Erikson- an American psychoanalyst who wrote a lot on social psychology, individual identity, what the interactions that psychology has on culture, politics and history which helped other professionals approach psychological problems. Erikson’s theory was solutions to problems and the types of problems are all different based on society. Erikson came up with eight stages of development. These stages each approached the individual with it’s own psychosocial demands. He used both of his interests in history and psychoanalysis theory to look into how Martin Luther was able to create a new way of looking at life.
Ivan Pavlov- a Russian physiologist who developed the concept of conditioned reflex. The laws that were created were all based on his observations of irregularities in animals. He trained a hungry dog drool at the sound of a bell, which helps him connect the human behavior to the nervous system. Pavlov used the salivary secretion to really make his observations more accurate and emphasize his findings. He received the Nobel Prize for psychology.
Sigmund Freud- an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, aims to help treat mental disorders by evaluating their patients when their conscious and unconscious. Freud is sometimes known as the most influential intellectual legislator of his age. His finding of psychoanalysis was once a theory of the human psyche. Even after his death, his findings and work still remains very important and influential in today’s studies in many fields other than psychology.
William James- an American psychologist and philosopher who was the leader of the philosophical Pragmatic movement and psychological movement functionalism. He was also the first teacher to give people an option to take a psychology class in the United States. James also created the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James wrote many books that would help both the philosophical and psychological fields. He is known as the most influential American philosopher and he also earned himself the nickname “Father of American psychology.”
B.F. Skinner- an American psychologist and influencer of the concept behaviourism, which views kinds of behavior based on different variables being stimulated and controlled. He was big on actions being repeated. He believed that good actions will continuously be repeated why bad actions are less likely to be repeated. It all has to do with consequences and what the person will get out of their actions. He developed behavior analysis and operant conditioning chamber that was a very successful and helpful experiment that he wrote a lot about in his books.
Jean Piaget- a Swiss psychologist that is known for his work in child development. His work that he is most known for is genetic epistemology. This piece of work is combined with a lot of Piaget’s theories put together. His theory is all about educators being the only ones to be able to keep society from collapsing. A lot of educators use his child development work into consideration when it comes to the children. In colleges, professors will teach his theories and his work in their education programs.
Wilhelm Wundt- a German psychologist that who was one of the founding fathers of psychology. He is the one who stated that psychology is a science rather than biology or a philosophy. He was the first person to call himself a psychologist. He founded the first lab for psychology which helped psychology be separated from other sciences and being its own thing. He was the founder of “experimental psychology”. Wundt also created the first academic journal for psychological research, “Philosophische Studien”. Philip Zimbardo- an American psychologist and professor at Stanford University. He is known for his Stanford prison experiment which is now in college textbooks along with a lot of his other work. His experiment contained randomly selected male students to either be a prisoner or guard in his mock prison. This experiment was all about see how the prisoner or guard feels being that particular part to see what it is like in real life. He wanted the guards to be dominant over the prisoners and be aggressive. After a day, one of the prisoners began to have depression and anxiety and needed to be removed from the experiment.
John Watson- an American psychologist that created the psychological school of behaviorism. He is known for his two most popular experiments, “Little Albert” and Kerplunk. “Little Albert” showed evidence of classic conditioning with babies and loud noises. Kerplunk used rats to show you can turn motor skills into conditioned responses. A lot of his research was on child rearing, advertising, and animal behavior. He made scientific theory in behaviorism very popular.
Lawrence Kohlberg- an American psychologist known for his theory and work on stages of moral development. He helped to extend Piaget’s child development work twenty five years after that work was stopped advancing. While he was working on Piaget’s findings, it took Kohlberg five years to finally publish something of his own. He created a new field in psychology known as moral psychology. He was very big in studying the topic of moral judgement.
Stanley Milgram- an American social psychologist known for his controversial experiment on obedience during the time he was at Yale during the 1960s. The Holocaust had a big impact on Milgram when developing his experiment. One of his smaller experiments was looked at once he passed, it contained six degrees of separation. Milgram developed a technique to develop hybrid social agents that were very interacted. He is one of the most important social psychologists in its history.
Nature vs Nurture
When it come to the two topics, Nature and Nurture, no one understands the differences between the two. Both of them are quite similar but there is a big difference. This debate is continuously brought up in the psychology world. Both of the topics have to do with aspects of a person’s behavior, whether the aspect is inherited or acquired. Both nature and nurture have to do with something contributing influence to a particular behavior.Nature is all about behaviors being influenced by biology or genetics. Some examples of nature is genetic diseases, eye color, hair color, and skin color. Some of the mental illnesses that people acquire, such as bipolar and depression, are all from nature. Some people think nature is the more important role to mental health because of the repeated history of mental illness in a family.
Another big part of nature is addiction. When a long line of family history has a repeated occurrence of an addiction is it very likely that it will keep happening to future offspring. Nurture is all about behaviors being influenced by an outside experience or anything the individual has learned. An example of nurture is a child’s education level can be based on how much education background their parents had, if they had good education they can have money to provide for their child and if they do not have much education, their child will not be able to get the education they need. Obtaining a mental illness by the nurture aspect is all about obtaining it from the environment. The illness can either have a high or low severity because of the environment the individual is apart of. If someone in the home of a certain individual is having a problem with addiction of any kind and they are the first to have it, the individual can be influenced by the addict if seeing them taking substances or always being around it. Seeing things like that is a norm to that individual and in their later years will think that is what they have to do. Any habits of any friends or family members can influence that individual whether it is good or bad.
8 Main Perspectives of Psychology
Neuroscience- Neuroscience is a science that works with math, chemistry, computer science, psychology and medicine. It all has to do with molecules, cells, functional aspects of the nervous system. Neuroscientists study how the brain works and how people’s behaviors impact it. They also research what happens to the nervous system when an individual has a neurological, psychiatric, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Research in this field can help improve understanding with the brain and how the body works, and what we can do to help with health issues.
Evolutionary- theoretical perspective of psychology that tries to explain mental and psychological traits. These traits can include memory, perception, language, or any adaptations that an individual can obtain. It is all about how evolution shaped modern psychology. Research in this perspective has to do with survival, mating, parenting, family, and culture. These areas of adaptive problems are all being studied to look more into evolution and the problems that were created throughout the years.
Behavioral-Genetic- the study of genetic and environmental influences that people have on their behavior. The studies that are happening are all having to do with examining how an environment impacts an individual’s behavior. The studied mainly taken place in this perspective is with twin studies and studies with adoption. Researchers use quantitative genetic methods to figure out how much of the environment causes an influence on a person’s behavior. Molecular genetics are also used to what specific genes are influencing specific individuals.
Psychodynamic- this perspective includes all the theories throughout the science of psychology to see the interaction of forces and interactions throughout a person. All past experiences will have some sort of impact of someone’s adult life. This is looked out when a person is unconscious and to break down their personality. Psychodynamic theory states that a people’s childhood memories and experiences will have a lot of influences on a person’s adult life. Researchers will look into how an experience can largely impact someone and how it can affect their lives in the meir future. There is therapy that helps people who have trouble forming relationships and have deep depression.
Behavioral- this approach studies observable behavior. It is all about how conditioning has a role in having some sort of influence in a person’s actions and thoughts. All of the studies and results are based on observations. This concept is all about proving the environment is the reason for people’s illnesses. Researchers are trying to find patterns in behavior and actions that cause people to act the way they do.
Cognitive- the perspective that focuses on the mental processes such as attention, such as use of language, memory, perception, creativity, problem solving, and thinking. With these different parts of cognitive psychology, each of these studies have their own studies. Researchers have specific tests and experiments that they use for each of these branches. They do similarity tests, long/short term memory tests,logic tests, grammar tests etc.
Social Cultural- this approach is all about understanding how people interact in social situations and how they are feeling in those situations. They also want to know how they feel about the world overall, the people and ongoing events. The study approaches that psychologists will take here are experimental, surgery and interview methods.
Humanistic- supports the belief of humans and how they are unique and should be treated well and doctors should always keep in mind to treat humans with all respect. When doing tests and observations on them to diagnosis patients, sometimes people forget that they are human and have feelings and need to have all the respect while giving up their time for studies and experiments.
Researchers will look into how the person fees and what it is they want out of being experimented. They always need to make sure the patient is comfortable and feels safe and nothing they will do will hurt anyone.
