Perspectives in Psychology

Paradigms vs. Perspectives in Psychology

• The lecture will cover five influential perspectives in psychology, from psychodynamic theory to evolutionary psychology.
• Some use "paradigm" instead of "perspective" for different branches of psychology.
• We'll define "paradigm" and why "perspective" is more suitable for psychology.
• The lecture will provide a snapshot of major perspectives with key people and names for further investigation.
• This will lead to a discussion of how we might integrate our growing understanding of psychology.

What is a Paradigm?

• A paradigm is a broad blueprint or structure.
• The contemporary understanding of the concept is attributed to Thomas Kuhn.
• Kuhn argued that the concept of truth in scientific fields undergoes radical change with new information.
• In 1962, Kuhn wrote that scientific works provide an open-ended resource—a framework of concepts, results, and procedures within which subsequent work is structured. Normal science then proceeds within such a framework or paradigm.
• Paradigms represent a broad system of assumptions, metaphors, and methods that structure how scientists operate:
  • Assumptions: The way the world works and what we know about it.
  • Metaphors: The role that science plays in connecting scientific language and concepts with things out in the world.
  • Methods: The procedures by which scientists obtain information about the world and the appropriate techniques for testing theories.
• Sciences like chemistry and physics have meaningful paradigms with agreed-upon fundamental principles, applications, and methods.
• Psychology lacks an accepted body of facts and assumptions underpinning it because it deals with human experience, which is variable and can be interpreted in many ways.
• Psychology has cohesive schools of thought like behaviorism and humanism, with scientists and practitioners holding consistent assumptions, models, and methods.
• There isn't an overarching framework that ties all of psychology together to provide a coherent paradigm for the field as a whole.
• Therefore, we use the term "perspectives" rather than "paradigm" in psychology.

Psychodynamic Perspective

• The psychodynamic perspective is widely known, mainly due to Sigmund Freud.
• Freud (1856-1939) was a neurologist who believed that our mental processes had underlying neurological mechanisms accessible as thoughts, feelings, and desires.
• The connection of these processes in our minds, largely due to formative experiences in infancy and childhood, drives our behaviors.
• A key assumption is that we usually have access to only a small portion of our mental processes, with the majority being unconscious.
• The iceberg metaphor illustrates this, where we're aware of some motivations and have normal streams of consciousness, but hidden motivations and suppressed fears and desires lie below the surface.
• Freud proposed that conflicts between conscious and unconscious processes may give rise to mental disorders or neuroses.
• While many mental processes are acknowledged to be beneath the surface of awareness, the significance of these processes and the extent to which therapeutic approaches should engage with them is debated.
• Methods of psychodynamic psychology involve techniques that infer underlying motives from conscious thoughts and behaviors, such as dream analysis or fantasy journaling.
• The Rorschach test, dissociation, and free recall are other examples where therapists identify recurring patterns or themes in mind to explore unconscious processes.
• Freud is credited with founding psychoanalysis, and several foundational concepts have stood the test of time:
  • Enduring aspects of personality emerge in childhood.
  • Childhood experiences play a role in personality development, shaping later social relationships.
  • Mental representations of oneself, others, and relationships guide people's interactions and play a part in psychopathology.
  • Mental processes operate simultaneously and in parallel.
  • Personality development involves regulating sexual and aggressive feelings and wishes, and moving from an immature dependent state to a more mature, independent one.
  • Much of mental life is unconscious.
• Criticism of psychodynamic theory is that it is essentially untestable and difficult to falsify, amounting more to a narrative of human behavior and experience.
• There is research that shows the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy, but there's a lot of debate still going on.
• Major figures in the area include Karen Horney, Erik Erikson, and Alfred Adler.

Behaviorism

• Behaviorism was established as a reaction against mental life and fantasy ideas.
• Behaviorists asserted that our behavior can be fully explained as the result of learning through the association between environmental or behavioral events and our responses.
• Ivan Pavlov demonstrated how learning can arise in response to environmental stimuli by training dogs to salivate in response to the sound of a bell paired with feeding time.
• Pavlov called this process conditioning, known as classical conditioning.
• Classical conditioning involves pairing a neutral stimulus with something that naturally elicits an unconditioned stimulus.
• With consistent pairing, the neutral stimulus can eventually elicit the same response as the unconditioned stimulus, becoming a conditioned response.
• In Pavlov's experiment:
  • Neutral stimulus: Sound of a bell.
  • Unconditioned stimulus: Food (produces automatic salivation response).
  • Conditioned stimulus: Sound of a bell (after pairing with food, it generates the salivation response on its own).
• The principles have been widely employed in therapy for understanding and treating things like phobias and addiction.
• John Watson argued that the mind is inherently unobservable and outside the scope of scientific methods.
• B.F. Skinner stated that there is no place in scientific analysis of behavior for a mind or self, suggesting that psychodynamic theory is basically voodoo because it lacks any kind of scientific grounding.
• The human being in behaviorism is viewed as a biological machine: inputs are received from the environment, resulting in various outputs in the form of behavior.
• Mental processes were referred to as a black box; there is no way to objectively observe and measure what is going on inside.
• Behaviorists focused on what can be objectively observed and manipulated.
• The Little Albert experiments, where John Watson and his student Rosalie Rayner produced a fear response in a toddler referred to as Little Albert, which showed how the environment shapes behavior by selectively and consistently rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others.
• While the experimental and objective approach of behaviorism had an impressive influence in the field of psychology, the way that they dealt with the mind as unnecessary was one of the most contentious aspects of the perspective.
• Behavior theories have continued to find broad applications in psychological therapy, from helping people quit smoking to improving performance and learning.

Cognitive Perspective

• The cognitive perspective places mental processes at the very center of the perspective.
• The black box is replaced by schematics representing the ways in which information is processed in the mind and brain.
• Cognitive psychologists were very interested in the ways that people perceive, process, and retrieve information.
• The mind is described as being like a computer where:
  • The brain and other physiological structures represent the computer hardware.
  • Patterns of thought and other mental processes are conceptualized as the software.
• Cognitive psychology was considered revolutionary during the 1950s and 60s and has since become a central tenet of contemporary psychology.
• It fulfills one of the goals of identifying the underlying structures of mental processes using experimental methods.
• Researchers contributed to develop the cognitive perspective including:
  • Jean Piaget is famous for his work on child cognitive development.
  • Noam Chomsky developed influential theories of language acquisition and development.
  • Donald Broadbent is known for his contributions to the understanding of attention, perception, and memory.
• Ulric Neisser wrote the first book on cognitive psychology in 1967.
• Neisser's work established the idea of mental schemas that serve to guide behavioral responses to environmental stimuli.
• He championed naturalistic experimental methods, observing human behavior in its natural ecological setting rather than purely in the laboratory.

Humanistic Perspective

• The humanistic perspective emerged as a reaction to the dominance of behaviorism and psychodynamic approaches.
• Humanistic psychologists such as Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers emphasized the uniqueness of the individual and the importance of their subjective experiences and personal growth.
• A guiding tenet of humanistic psychology is the concept of self-actualization.
• Self-actualization refers to the process of realizing and fulfilling one's potential, leading to personal growth, fulfillment, and the realization of one's capabilities.
• Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs, often depicted as a pyramid ranking needs from the most vital to survival through to needs that arise when we're able to thrive in a healthy environment, with self-actualization placed right at the pinnacle.
• According to Maslow, individuals must first satisfy their basic physiological and safety needs before progressing on to higher levels of psychological need, such as belongingness and love, esteem, and ultimately self-actualization.
• Self-actualization involves several key characteristics:
  • Autonomy: Self-actualized individuals are autonomous and independent, able to make decisions and pursue goals based on their own values and interests.
  • Authenticity: They have a strong sense of authenticity and are true to themselves, living in accordance with their own beliefs and values, rather than conforming to societal expectations.
  • Creativity: Self-actualized individuals often demonstrate a high degree of creativity, expressing themselves through artistic, intellectual, or problem-solving endeavors.
  • Peak experiences: They may experience peak or transcendental moments characterized by feelings of deep fulfillment, connection, and meaning.
  • Continued growth: Self-actualization is an ongoing process marked by continuous personal growth and development.
• Self-actualization is a subjective and individualized concept and might manifest differently in different cultures and different times.
• Humanistic psychology assumes the inherent goodness of the individual and holds that, given the right environmental conditions and social supports, a person will naturally begin to flourish.
• Humanistic psychology is also largely a therapeutic perspective, with clinicians offering a person-centered approach that's oriented to the individual's sense of meaning and relation with the world.
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the concept of self-actualization and self have been critiqued for their cultural and individual biases, as well as their oversimplified portrayal of human motivation and development.
• Nonetheless, the idea of self-actualization remains a compelling and influential concept throughout psychology and personal development.

Evolutionary Psychology

• Evolutionary psychologists propose that as humans evolved over time, we developed and refined various traits that served various kinds of adaptive functions.
• They confer advantages that improve individual and group capacity to survive in various environments.
• These traits include physical characteristics such as greater or lesser levels of melanin, or greater or lesser levels of body hair, along with cognitive or emotional characteristics such as social cognition, decision-making, and even higher reasoning.
• Whatever features conferred enough of a survival advantage in the context of the individual's environment were more likely to be passed down to future generations and be repeated.
• These notions are based on principles of natural selection, which stems from the pioneering work of natural scientists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
• Cosmides and Tooby were instrumental in founding the field of evolutionary psychology as a cohesive perspective.
• They're particularly well known for their work on the concept of a modular mind.
• They propose that the human mind consists of domain-specific cognitive mechanisms that are shaped by natural selection to solve specific adaptive problems faced by our ancestors.
• For example, we can view the decisive actions and decision-making that's associated with stress, which we commonly call the fight or flight response, as a modular mechanism.
• Critics of the modularity hypothesis have raised some concerns about its oversimplification of the mind and its potential to overlook the interactive and dynamic nature of cognitive processes.
• There is also ongoing debate about the extent to which different aspects of cognition are modular versus non-modular, or which may interact and be distributed across the brain.
• Nevertheless, the perspective still captures wide attention and offers a compelling approach to understanding the origins of behavior as well as insights into the functions that they serve.