The Five Perspectives Of Psychology

Modern psychology is based on five basic perspectives, behavioral, psychoanalytic, humanistic, cognitive, and developmental. With each perspective comes a different view of human behaviors and how humans function on a day to day basis; however, each theory is correct in its own way. Throughout each of these five perspectives, psychologists are able to elaborately study the human mind, feelings, and behaviors.
Behavioral perspective deals with peoples’ mannerisms and visible habits that form as a result of the environment. These certain actions become habitual through learning, incentives, and consequences. For example, as a child I would continuously bite my nails as a nervous habit. To put an end to my practice my parents purchased Bitrex,
If I bit my nails while this adhesive was applied, it would leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Eventually, I trained myself to stop biting my nails while they had Bitrex on them and moved onto teaching myself to completely stop my nervous habit. Looking back at this event, I think it is strange that by having a consequence for biting my nails forced me to stop this habit. Burrhus Frederic Skinner would’ve looked for the particular cause and consequence of the habit; he called this “operant conditioning”. In this situation, B.F. Skinner would come to the conclusion that the cause of the nail biting habit was stress and anxiety while the consequence would be the fact that the adhesive would leave bitter taste in my mouth, making me not want to bite my nails anymore. Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychologist, would follow the theory
The theory developed by psychologist Sigmund Freud states that personalities develop as a result of unconscious internal forces which are formed by childhood events. For example, when I was a child, I had an enormous dog jump on me and knock me from my feet. Since that day, I have had an irrational fear of large dogs due to the fact that at that moment I felt vulnerable and helpless. As the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud would notice that this fear began as a result of an event that occurred during what he called the psychosexual stages. During the time of the accident, I was in the latent stage which has an age range from six to eleven. Due to the fact that this incident occurred so early on in my life, Freud believes that it had a significant affect in shaping my personality. Freud believes that the mind is split in the conscious and unconscious. Any memory that is painful or traumatic is classified as unconscious by Freud’s theory since people want to mask the unpleasant time; therefore, he would see my memory of the attack as an unconscious memory that causes a fear that I am aware of, which is classified as the conscious