Approaches - Not Finnished

Question 1

3 assumptions of the behaviourist approach

Answer 1

• To be validated like other sciences, psychology should only study obervable, quantifiable behaviour
• Humans are only animlas and should not be treated as any more complex
  
  • This also means that research on animal behaviour will be directly relevant to humans
• The subject matter of psychology should be the laws that predict how behaviour changes and can be controlled
  (classical and operant conditionings)

Question 2

3 assumptions of the social learning Theory

Answer 2

• There are mediational processes occuring between stimuli & responses (cognitive thoughts)
• Behaviour is learnt from the environment through the process of
  • observational learning,
  • identification,
  • imitation
  • and reinforcement

In vicarious reinforcement, the reproduction of behaviour can be motivated when learners observe role models receiving reinforcement.

Question 3

3 assumptions about the cognitive approach

Answer 3

• Behaviour is influenced by thoughts both conscious and unconscious = an internal mental process
  
  • These can invlove schemas
  • And be studied scientifically
  • And inferences can be made by external models and tests
• The working of a comuputer and the human mind are alike
  
  • They encode and store informations
  • And they have output
• Neural mechanisms can be combined with cognitive processes in cognitive neuroscience

Question 4

3 assumptions of the biological approach

Answer 4

• Humans are biological organisms
  
  • So everything psychological is at first biological.
  • So to fully understand human behaviour we must look at biological structures
• From a biological perspective, your mind lives in your brain
  
  • All thoughts and feeling and behaviours have a biological basis
• Genes will influence behaviour
  
  • So behaviour will evolve the same way as physical characteristics, through the processes of evolutionary adaptation
    (evolutionary perspective = a branch of the biological approach).

Question 5

2 assumptions of the Psychodynamic approach

Answer 5

• Assumes that childhood plays a key role ind etermining an individuals mental/emotional state and their outcomes in later life.
• Also asumes that there are parts of teh mind that are inaccessible to conscious awareness.
  • Freud adopted the use of psychic determinism
    Ø This is the idea that all behaviout is caused by unconscious internal conflicts, over which we have no control or acccess to