Approaches In Psychology Flashcards
Outline psychology’s early philosophical roots
Rene Descartes (1596-1650):
- suggested that the mind and body are independent from each other
- this is a philosophical stance that came to be known as ‘cartesian dualism’
- this view suggested that the mind could be an object of study in its own right
John Locke (1632-1704):
- proposed empiricism -> the idea that all knowledge is derived through sensory experience, and that humans inherit neither knowledge nor instincts
- this view would later form the behaviourist approach that the world can be understood by investigating external events that are observed and measured
Charles Darwin (1809-1882):
- his evolutionary theory proposed that all human and animal behaviour has changed over successive generations, so that individuals with stronger, more adaptive genes survive and reproduce, and the individuals with weaker genes do not survive and reproduce
- thus, weaker genes are ‘weeded out’ (survival of the fittest)
- the assumption that many human behaviours, such as social behaviour, have evolved due to their adaptive value is deeply rooted in many areas of psychology, especially the biological approach
Outline Wilhelm Wundt and his significance in psychology
- opened the first lab dedicated to psychology in Germany in 1879
- known as the ‘father of psychology’
- his work marked the beginning of scientific psychology, separating it from its psychological roots
- he took a reductionist approach, where he simplified everything down to cause and effect
- his aim was to analyse the nature of human consciousness, and thus represented the first systematic attempt to study the mind under controlled conditions
- his pioneering method is introspection
- introspection is a psychological method to analyse someone’s thoughts and feelings internally
- it is a process by which a person gains knowledge about themselves by recanting conscious thoughts and feelings
Standardised procedures:
- one of his main objectives was to try and develop theories about mental processes, such as language and perception
- he and his co-workers recorded their experiences of various stimuli they were presented with, such as different objects or sounds
- their observations were divided into 3 categories; thoughts, images, and sensations
- for example, participants might be given a ticking metronome and they would report their thoughts, images, and sensations
- all introspections were recorded under strictly controlled conditions using the same stimulus each time, such as a metronome
- the same standardised instructions were issued to all participants, allowing replication
- isolating the structure of consciousness in this way is called structuralism
Evaluate the origins of psychology
A limitation is a scientific approach is not always appropriate. Not all psychologists share the view that all human behaviour can, or should, be explored by the use of scientific methods. If human behaviour is not subject to the laws and regularities implied by scientific methods, then predictions become impossible, and these methods are inappropriate. Likewise, much of the subject matter of psychology is in observable, and therefore cannot be measured with any degree of accuracy. A consequence of this is that much of psychological knowledge is inferential i.e. there is a gap between the actual data obtained in research investigations and the theories put forward to explain the status.
A limitation is that introspection is not particularly accurate. Nisbett and Wilson claim that we have very little knowledge of the causes of and processes underlying our behaviour and attitudes. Nisbett and Wilson found this problem was particularly acute in the study of implicit attitudes, i.e. attitudes or stereotypes that are unknown to us. For example, a person may be implicitly racist, which influence is the way they react to members of a different ethnic group. Because such attitudes exist outside of conscious awareness, self-reports through introspection would not uncover them. This challenges the value of introspective reports in exploring the roots of our behaviour.
What is science?
The systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment
What factors need to be looked at when deciding whether psychology is a science?
Objectivity
Control
Predictability
Hypothesis testing
Replication
What are the behaviourism assumptions?
- Should focus on observable behaviour
- Born as a blank slate
- Basic processes that cause learning are the same in all species
- Very nurture
- Scientific method
- Try to maintain more control and objectivity within their research and rely on lab experiments to achieve this
Outline the behaviourist approach
- The behaviourist approach is only concerned with studying behaviour that can be observed and measured
- It is not concerned with mental processes of the mind
- Introspection was rejected by behaviourists, as it’s concepts were vague and difficult to measure
- Behaviourists tried to maintain more control and objectivity within that research and relied on lab studies to achieve this
- They also suggest that the processes that govern learning are the same in all species, so animals like rats, cats, dogs, and pigeons can replace humans as experimental subjects
Outline how Pavlov investigated classical conditioning
- Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell
- Every time Pavlov fed his dogs, he would ring a bell
- Eventually, the dogs learned that a bell equals food, and salivated just at the sound of the bell
- The bell was the neutral stimulus, food was the unconditioned stimulus, and salivation was the unconditioned response
- The dogs were conditioned into associating the bell with food, so the bell is now the conditioned stimulus with salvation as the conditioned response
Outline how Skinner investigated operant conditioning and reinforcement
- Skinner studied how animals can learn from consequences of their own actions
- Consequences involve positive reinforcement, where something desirable is obtained, negative reinforcement, where something undesirable is removed, positive punishment, where something undesirable is given, or negative punishment, where something desirable is taken away
- Skinner used skinners box where he placed a rat inside. Each box had a variety of different stimuli, including a speaker, lights, and a food dispenser connected to a lever. The time taken for the rats to learn that pressing the lever give food was recorded. He found out that they would initially run around the cage until accidentally pressing the lever and then they were rewarded with the food. The more the rat was put in the box, the quicker they got at learning about the lever. The rats learnt that when they pressed the lever there was a reward in return.
Evaluate the behaviourist approach
A strength of the behaviourist approach is that it is based on well-controlled research. Behaviourists focused on the measurement of observable behaviour within highly controlled lab settings. By breaking down behaviour into basic stimulus-response units, all other possible extraneous variables were removed, allowing cause and effect relationships to be established. For example, Skinner was able to clearly demonstrate how reinforcement influenced an animal’s behaviour. This suggests that behaviourist experiments have scientific credibility. However, the problem with this is that behaviourists may have oversimplified the learning process. Behaviourism portrays a mechanistic view of human behaviour, and by reducing behaviour to such simple components, behaviourists may have ignored the influence of emotion on behaviour. Other approaches, such as social learning and the cognitive approach, have drawn attention to the mental processes involved in learning. This suggests that learning is more complex than observable behaviour alone, and that private mental processes are also essential.
A strength of behaviourism is that it gave psychology scientific credibility. The approach focused on the careful measurement of observable behaviour within controlled lab settings. Behaviourists emphasised the importance of scientific processes, such as objectivity and replication. This brought the language and methods of the natural sciences into psychology, giving the subject greater credibility and status.
A strength of behaviourism is it has real life application. Classical conditioning has been applied in the development of treatments for the reduction of anxiety associated with various phobias. Systematic desensitisation is a therapy based on classical conditioning. It works by eliminating the learned anxious response that is associated with a feared object or situation. It is then possible to eliminate one learned response by replacing it with another so the patient is no longer anxious in the presence of the feared object or situation. This classical conditioning based approach has been found to be effective for a range of phobias, such as a fear of spiders and fear of flying.
A limitation of behaviorism it it’s environmentally deterministic. The behaviourist approach sees all behaviour as conditioned by past conditioning experiences. Skinner suggested that everything we do is the sum total of our reinforcement history. We may think we make decisions, but our conditioning history determines our behaviour. This ignores any possible influence that free will may have on behaviour. This is an extreme position that ignores the influence of conscious decision-making processes on behaviour.
A limitation of behaviourism is it’s over reliance on nonhuman animals in research. Skinner’s research has received some criticism because his experiments involved the study of nonhuman animals rather than humans. Critics claim that his reliance on rats and pigeons means that Skinner’s studies can tell us little about human behaviour. They claim that unlike nonhuman animals, human beings have free will rather than having their behaviour determined by positive and negative reinforcement. However, Skinner argued that free will is merely an illusion and what we believe our behaviour has chosen through free will are actually the product of external influences that guide our behaviour on a daily basis.
Outline Bandura’s social learning theory
- Social learning theory is about learning through observation and imitation. An observer learns new behaviour by watching and imitating another person (role model). This process of watching an imitation it’s called modelling.
Key assumptions:
- Like the behaviourist approach, social learning theory assumes all behaviour is learnt from experience and the environment. However, this approach highlights the importance of indirect learning which occurs as a result of watching others.
- Places emphasis on seeing others being rewarded or punished for certain behaviours, rather than experiencing them for ourselves
- Mediational cognitive processes, which lie between stimulus and response, influence our behaviour
SLT is often described as the ‘bridge’ between the behaviourist approach and the cognitive approach because it focuses on how mental factors are involved in learning. These mental factors mediate in the learning process to determine whether a new response in acquired.
Outline models in relation to the social learning theory
- Models are more likely to be imitated if the person identifies with them
- Identification and then modelling is more likely to occur if the model a similar, such as the same age or gender
- Models are often influential or powerful people such as celebrities
- We will not simply observe and imitate everybody we come into contact with, we must identify with them 
What is vicarious reinforcement?
Vicarious reinforcement is where you learn about different actions through the positive or negative consequences of the same action by models
What are the mediational processes?
Attention
Retention (capacity to remember)
Reproduction (capability to reproduce)
Motivation
Outline Bandura’s study
Bandura had a large sample of toddlers with half female and half male
It was a lab experiment
Condition 1:
Children watched -
An adult behaving aggressively towards a bobo doll
An adult behaving non-aggressively towards a bobo doll
When given their own doll to play with the children who had seen aggressive behaviour were much more aggressive towards the doll
Condition 2:
Children saw an adult who was -
Punished
Rewarded
No consequence
When given their own doll to play with the children who had seen aggressive behaviour rewarded were more aggressive towards the doll
This suggests that children are likely to imitate acts of violence observed in an adult role model
Modelling aggressive behaviour is more likely if the behaviour is rewarded (vicarious reinforcement)
Evaluate the social learning approach
One strength of the social learning theory approach is that it recognises the importance of cognitive factors in learning. Neither classical nor operant conditioning can offer an adequate account of learning on their own. Humans and animals store information about the behaviour of others and use this to make judgements about when it is appropriate to perform certain actions. This suggests that SLT provides a more comprehensive explanation of human learning by recognising the role of mediational processes. Despite this, SLT has been criticised for making too little reference to the influence of biological factors on social learning. Although Bandura claimed natural biological differences influenced our learning potential, the thought that learning itself was determined by the environment. However, recent research suggests that observational learning may be the result of mirror neurons in the brain, which allow us to empathise with and imitate other people. This suggests that biological influences on social learning were under-emphasised in SLT.
One strength of the social learning theory is that it has useful real-world applications. Akers, for example, suggests that the probability of someone engaging in criminal behaviour increases when they are exposed to models who commit criminal behaviour, when when they identify with these models, and when they develop the expectation of positive consequences for their own criminal behaviour. This is supported by Ulrich, who found that the strongest cause of violent behaviour in adolescence was association with delinquent peer groups, where violence was both modelled and rewarded.
Unlike the behaviourist approach, Bandura emphasised reciprocal determinism, which is the idea that we are influenced by our environment, but we also exert an influence upon it through the behaviours we choose to perform. This element of choice suggests there is some free will in the way we behave, and is consistent with the fact that Bandura recognises the influence of cognitive variables on social learning. In this sense, we are able to store a particular behaviour we have seen and choose the most appropriate time to reproduce it. In behaviourism, the learning and performance of behaviour come together, but there is no element of choice. This is a more realistic and flexible position than is suggested by the behaviourist approach as it recognises the role we play in shaping our own environment.
A limitation of the social learning theory is there is a problem of complexity. In focusing exclusively on the processes of social learning advocates of this approach disregard other potential influences on behaviour. For example, in explaining the development of gender role behaviour, social learning theorists would emphasise the importance of gender specific modelling. In real life, however, a child is exposed to many different influences all of them interacting in complex ways. These include genetic predisposition media, portrayals, locus of control and more. This presents a serious problem for social learning researchers. If virtually anything can have an influence on a specific behaviour , it becomes very difficult to show that one particular thing is the main causal influence.
One limitation of SLT is that the evidence on which it is based was gathered through lab studies. Many of Bandura’s ideas were developed through observation of young children’s behaviour in the lab. Lab studies are often criticised for their artificial nature where participants may respond to demand characteristics. It has been suggested, in relation to the Bobo doll research that, because the main purpose of the doll is to strike it, the children were simply behaving in a way that they thought was expected. This suggests that the research may tell us little about how children actually learn aggression in everyday life.
What are the basic assumptions and aims of the cognitive approach?
- The cognitive approach looks at how we interpret the world by looking at the internal workings of the mind
- Cognitive psychologists try to explain behaviour by looking at our perception, language, attention, and memory
- They use scientific methods to construct experiments
Basic assumptions:
- It is the events within a person that must be studied if behaviour is to be fully understood
- It is possible to study internal mental processes in an objective way, and that insight into mental processes may be inferred from behaviour
What are internal mental processes?
Private operations of the mind that mediate between stimulus and response.
What is inference?
The cognitive approach investigates areas of human behaviour including memory, perception, and thinking. These processes are ‘private’ and cannot be observed, so cognitive psychologists study them indirectly by making inferences about what is going on inside people’s minds on the basis of their behaviour.
What are theoretical and computer models?
Theoretical models:
- Theoretical models are often pictures represented by boxes an hours that indicate cause and effect or the stages of a particular mental process
- The information processing approach suggests that information flows through a sequence of stages that include input, storage, and retrieval
- The MSM is an example of a theoretical model
Computer models:
- The information processing approach is based on the way that computers function, but a computer model would involve actually programming a computer to see if such instructions produce a similar output to humans
- If they do then we can suggest that similar processes are going on in the human mind
- Such computational models of the mind have proved useful in the development of ‘thinking machines’ or artificial intelligence
What is a schema?
- cognitive processing can often be affected by a person’s beliefs or expectations, often referred to as a schema
- a schema is like a metaphorical packet in your brain that allows you to make faster assumptions based on previous experience
- they act as a mental framework for the interpretation of incoming information received by the cognitive system
- babies are born with simple motor schemas for innate behaviours such as sucking and grasping
- as we get older, our schema become more detailed and sophisticated
- schema enable us to process lots of information quickly and this is useful as a sort of mental shortcut that prevents us from being overwhelmed by environmental stimuli
however, schema may also distort our interpretations of sensory information, leading to perceptual arrors
Outline cognitive neuroscience
- the scientific study of biological structures than underpin mental processes
- advances in brain imaging techniques in the last 20-30 years have allowed scientists to be able to systematically observe and describe the neurological basis of mental processes
- brain imaging techniques include fMRI and PET scans
Examples of the application of cognitive neuroscience:
- research showing how different types of LTM may be located in different areas of the brain
- localisation of function
- link between OCD and the parahippocampal gyrus
The focus of cognitive neuroscience has expanded recently to include the use of computer-generated models that are designed to ‘read’ the brain. This has led to the development of mind mapping techniques known as ‘brain fingerprinting’. A possible application of this could be to analyse the brain wave patterns of eyewitnesses to determine whether they are lying in court.
Evaluation:
- Lots of application in psychology (localisation of function, memory etc)
- All correlational data, doesn’t show cause and effect
- Weak evidence as it is mostly brain damaged patients.
Evaluate the cognitive approach
A limitation of the cognitive approach is it is machine reductionist. Although there are similarities between the human mind and the operations of a computer (inputs and outputs, storage systems, the use of a central processor), the computer analogy has been criticised by many. Such machine reductionism ignores the influence of human emotion and motivation on the cognitive system, and how this may affect our ability to process information. For instance, research has found that human memory may be affected by emotional factors, such as the influence of anxiety on eyewitnesses. This is not surprising given that approaches that focus on the motivational processes in behaviour largely ignore the cognitive processes involved in behaviour. The lack of focus on motivational states may be explained by the overdependence on information processing analogies, as motivation is clearly irrelevant to a computer, but not a human being.
A strength of the cognitive approach is it has many applications. The cognitive approach has been applied to many other areas of psychology, such as psychopathology, where it has been able to explain dysfunctional behaviour in terms of faulty thinking processes. This has led to the development of treatments for illnesses such as depression with cognitive-based therapies. These treatments, which aim to change dysfunctional ways of thinking, have been shown to be successful in the treatment of many mental disorders, suggesting that the emphasis on mental processes for explaining mental disorders is valid.
A strength of the cognitive approach is that it uses objective, scientific methods. Cognitive psychologists employ highly controlled and rigorous methods of study so researchers are able to infer cognitive processes at work. This has involved the use of lab studies to produce reliable, objective data. In addition, the emergence of cognitive neuroscience has enabled the two fields of biology and cognitive psychology to come together to enhance the scientific basis of study. This means that the study of the mind has a credible scientific basis. However, as cognitive psychology relies on the inference of mental processes, rather than direct observation of behaviour, it can occasionally suffer from being too abstract and theoretical in nature. Similarly, research studies of mental processes are often carried out using artificial stimuli that may not represent everyday experience. Therefore, research on cognitive processes may lack external validity.
The cognitive approach is less determinist than other approaches, as it is founded on soft determinism; it recognises that our cognitive system can only operate within the limits of what we know, but that we are free to think before responding to a stimulus. This is a more reasonable ‘interactionist’ position than the hasr determinism suggested by some other approaches.
