Part I: Origins of PsychologyThe seven major perspectives in modern psychology are psychoanalytic, behaviorist, humanist, cognitive, neuroscientific/biopsychological, evolutionary, and sociocultural.Psychoanalytic: The founder of the psychoanalytic school of thought is Sigmund Freud. He believed that many psychological problems result from the conflicts that occur between "acceptable" behavior and "unacceptable" unconscious sexual or aggressive motives. His theory was called Psychoanalysis. Freud relied more on deductive reasoning rather than on rigorous research methods, hence making his approach non-scientific. Also, he laid emphasis on the importance of unconscious processes ...view middle of the document...
Also, they emphasized on the notion of free will (voluntarily chosen behavior) and self-actualization (a state of self-fulfillment) (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2008).Cognitive: Cognitive psychologists are interested in investigating the thought processes that occur in the brain. Also, they examine how the information is gathered, encoded and stored. Some of the concepts that are studied under cognitive psychology are perception, memory, imagery, concept formation, problem solving, reasoning, decision making, and language. Not only that, cognitive psychologists explain that a human mind works like a computer that sequentially takes in information(gathers), processes it( encodes), and then produces a response, hence called the information-processing approach.Neuroscientific/Biopsychological: This school of thought emphasizes on the role of biological factors on behavior. Psychologists who follow this school of thought explain behavior through the use of genetics and biological processes that occur in the brain. These psychologists combine the biological and the psychological aspects to explain behavior.Evolutionary: This school of thought examines concepts such as natural selection, adaptation, and evolution of behavior and mental processes. Evolutionary psychologists claim that an organism's reproductive success is determined by the behavior that favors the process of natural selection (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2008).Sociocultural: This school of thought emphasizes on the role of social interactions and cultural factors that influence behavior. Some factors include ethnicity, religion, occupation, and socioeconomic class and so on.Part II: Research MethodsResearch MethodsMethodPurposeStrengthsWeaknessesProvide an exampleExperimentalIdentify cause and effectAllows precise control over variables and identifies cause and effectEthical concerns, practical limitations, artificiality of lab conditions, research and participant biases Manipulation and control of variablesDescriptiveObserve, collect and record data Minimizes artificiality, easier to collect data, allows description of behavior and mental processes as they occurLittle or no control over variables, cannot explain cause and effect, and researcher and participant biasesNaturalistic observation, survey, and case study.CorrelationalIdentify relationships and how well one variable predicts another. Helps clarify relationships between variables that cannot be examined by other methods and allows prediction.Researchers cannot identify cause and effectStatistical analysis of relationship between variables.Biological Identify causation as well as description and predictionShares many or all of the advantages of experimental, descriptive and correctional researchShares many or all of the disadvantages of experimental, descriptive and correctional researchStudies the brain and other parts of the nervous system.Compare and contrast: Experimental and Correlational methods.Experimental resea...
