Explain the Principles of Psychological Perspectives

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1.Explain the principal psychological perspectives There are many principles within psychology and within this essay the following will be discussed, behaviourism including classical and instrumental conditioning. Humanistic theories is in contradiction to behaviourist theories whereby theorists look at the whole person rather than specific elements of behaviour. Social Learning theory will then address behaviourism as a much broader term as well as cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and personality. Psychodynamic theory will then be focused upon paying particular attention towards Freud and Erikson and the importance of the unconscious mind. There will also be more organic or biological processes looked at such as cognitive processes. Behaviourism is a strands of theory generally derived by two people Pavlov and his earlier writings on conditioned reflexes and Skinner who’s work consisted of operant conditioning (Hogg, A. Vaughan, C:2005 p21). One of Pavlov’s most famous theories is the experiment dogs involving their saliva production around the time of feeding, this is conditioning at it’s most basic level, as it involves dogs not humans results can have their limitations. However, he found that the dogs started to produce saliva at feeding time, which he called an unconditioned response. But, he also noticed that when the person who usually fed them was present they started to produce saliva. He called this a conditioned response (Chang, R. 2004 p1-23). This experiment has also been repeated on humans in an experiment known as fear conditioning where a neutral stimulus i.e. a sound will follow something unpleasant like an electric shock, and experimenters found that even after one attempt it would cause a response (Maron, S:2001 p897-931). Operant conditioning which is was developed by Skinner, there are four contexts of this. Positive
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