PYSCHOLOGY

Psychology & Human Behaviour



Psychology & Human Behaviour

Introduction

The paper aims to emphasize on the various perspectives of psychology and their relation with human behaviour. Social and cognitive approaches to psychology are critically analyzed in the paper. Furthermore, compare and contrast of the two main approaches of psychology is carried out in the paper as well. Moreover, examples are provided in order to reveal that how different approaches influence the particular human behaviours. An individual's personality is unique and it distinguishes him or her from other people. As a person personality develops and matures along with clear identity of individuality (Bandura & Walters, 2007).

Social perspective of psychology examines the people who live in places rich or poor has generally features more similar to each other. It is common to have news of people who have become rich quickly and started to act differently with their friends, relatives etc. Another example is that in situations of economic crisis some people may experience changes in behaviour due to indebtedness and unemployment. Cognitive psychology was negatively impacted by a number of restrictive assumptions defined as positivists. These assumptions specified that the object of study of psychology would only observable behaviour and the proper way to perform investigations on this subject would be by determining the stimulus-response relationship. Within this approach, the behaviour study was limited to the identification of correlations between variables depending on the experimental context and responses observable behaviours produced (Richards, 2010).

Background

Psychology is a relatively new branch of science grown from evolutionary paradigm. It is the basis for the theory of evolution. This is a new approach for both psychology and the theory. For psychology is a new approach because it takes into consideration the theory of evolution. At the forefront is a much adaptation and it is considered the reasonableness of our basic emotions, behaviours and ways of thinking (Barlow, 2008). The theory of evolution is also an innovation, because in the process of evolution takes into account human psychology. There are six basic principles of Psychology, after which each of the above-mentioned representatives of the signs. The first one says that the brain is a kind of computer created by natural selection in order to acquire and process information from the environment. Data obtained from the environment are used to initiate certain behaviours and regulation of physiological processes. In the second assumption, it is assumed that individual behaviour is generated by the brain in response to information extracted from the environment (Bandura & Walters, 2007).

For this to study and understand the specific behaviour we need to know both the external information that they initiate and mental architecture that produces them. Another assumption is that the human brain cognitive programs are adaptations. There are, as it allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce. Fourth assumption boils down to the claim that the human brain cognitive programs do not have to actually be adaptive. They did this for millions of years in our archaic ...