Unit 8- P1 and M1 Describe and Assess the Psychological Perspectives.

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Unit 8- P1 and M1: (Health and Social Care but relates to Psychology) The Behaviourist Approach: Behaviourism is an approach focuses primarily on behaviour in a sense of it’s ability to be observed through focusing on the way that we, as human beings, are able to learn and the impact this has on our behaviour as well as how we interact and form relationships with others. As well as the observation of behaviour, behaviourists believe certain facts to do with behaviour including the believe that all behaviour is a result of experiences and they behaviour is likely to be repeated in a reinforcement occurs. The behaviourist approach holds two main assumptions. These are the assumptions that behaviour can be explained in terms of classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning refers to the process of learning through association. This involves an animal or a human learning to associate something new with something that naturally causes a response eventually making the new thing cause the same response itself. A key example found within psychology for the process of classical conditioning would be that of Pavlov’s dog experiment. Pavlov was initially doing experiments on dogs and salivating and noticed that when the dogs heard his footsteps, they begin to salivate involuntarily. This is due to them learning to associate the sound of Pavlov’s footstep with food. Upon realising this, Pavlov decided to research this further by attempting to get the dogs to associate the sound of a bell with the food. This was done by him ringing the bell whenever the food was presented to them. Pavlov used a specific procedure by doing this which is taken from the process of classical conditioning. This was done by first noticing the unconditioned
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