Evaluate The Assumptions And Contributions Of The Behaviourist, Psychodynamic and Humanistic Approaches

This essay will in turn look at the behaviourist, Psychodynamic and Humanistic approaches to Psychology. It will evaluate the assumptions and contributions for each approach.

Behaviourists emphasise the relationship between the environment surrounding a person and how it affects a person’s behaviour. They are primarily concerned with observable behaviour, as opposed to internal events like thinking and emotion. This is a criticism of the behaviourist approach; it is seen as mechanistic and oversimplified, because it ignores mental processes or reinterprets them as just types of behaviour. John Watson saw emotions as the secretion of glands and thinking as the movement of our vocal chords without actual speech. However studies have been carried out and it has been found that people can still think even when their vocal chords are paralysed.

Behaviourists make the assumption that in humans; virtually all behaviours are caused by learned relationships between a stimulus that excites the sense organs and a response which is the reaction to the stimulus.

John Watson was strongly influenced by the work of Pavlov on classical conditioning. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate whenever he rang a bell. An unconditioned Stimulus (the bell) leads to an unconditioned Response (salivation). When the unconditioned stimulus is paired with another Stimulus (food), this stimulus will eventually produce the response on its own and is then called the conditioned stimulus which produces a Conditioned response. Behaviourists propose that phobias come about in a similar way, for example, somebody who is spider-phobic, might have learned to be scared of spiders because a parent always screams when they see a spider. The parent’s reaction is the unconditioned stimulus that provokes the fear response, which eventually becomes the conditioned response to the spider alone.

Another influential behaviourist was Skinner. He investigated operant conditioning, the learning process where rewarding a response leads to learning. Skinner put animals in a controlled environment known as the “Skinner box”. He found that he was able to train rats to press a lever or pigeons to peck a certain spot if he rewarded them for doing so with food. The stimulus strengthened the response, making it more likely to happen again. Skinner also found that punishment such as electric shocks weakened the response.

A major contribution is “behaviour therapy”, a group of therapeutic techniques based on the idea that abnormal behaviour comes about through conditioning and can be removed in the same way. Desensitisation therapy is based on classical conditioning. It gradually reduces the bond between the conditioned stimulus and the response might be shown a picture of a spider, next they would be shown a small spider in a tank, then a larger spider and so on until able to relax. Behaviour modification uses operant conditioning, rewarding people for positive behaviour to encourage them to behave that way more often.

...

This is a preview of the whole essay

The behaviourist approach has been criticised for being over-reliant on animal research. It is unknown to what extent findings from Animal research apply to humans. For example, humans have language, so unlike a rat, they will stop pressing a lever if they are told that no more rewards will be given. Behaviourists argue that there is little difference between the learning that takes place in humans and that in other animals, therefore research can be carried out on animals as well as on humans. Skinner proposed that the way humans learn superstitious behaviour is much the like the way the rats learned to press the lever.

Skinners radical behaviourism took Psychology a lot further than the early behaviourism of Watson. Operant and classical conditioning together can account for a far wider range of Psychological phenomena than classical conditioning alone. Skinner maintained the pure science tradition started by Watson and he avoided some of the oversimplifications. Operant conditioning provides a good explanation of how we are influenced in everyday life by our environment.

From a Psychodynamic perspective, the behaviourist approach ignores the importance of relationships and the dynamics of families and groups within which learning takes place. Humanist Psychologists say that behaviourism is mechanistic and cannot explain human capacity for free will and achievement.

The Psychodynamic approach is deterministic; free will is not part of the theory. This approach believes that our behaviour and feelings as adults are rooted in childhood experiences. Freud believed that much of our behaviour is determined by unconscious thoughts, memories etc. He compared the mind to an iceberg, with the tip of the iceberg being the conscious mind and the larger part as being the unconscious mind.

Freud assumed that the mind is divided into three parts, consisting of 1.The ID, which contains innate sexual and aggressive instincts and follows the pleasure principle with the emphasis being on immediate satisfaction; it is located in the unconscious mind. 2. The Ego, the conscious rational mind, it develops during the first two years of life, it works on the reality principle, taking account of what is going on in the environment. 3. The Superego develops at about age five and embodies the Childs conscience and sense of right and wrong, it is formed when the child adopts many of the values of the same sex parent.

Freud also assumed that there were three levels of the mind. The conscious - thoughts that are currently the focus of attention. The preconscious – information and ideas that can easily be retrieved from memory and brought into consciousness. The unconscious – information that is almost impossible to bring into consciousness.

by slowly introducing the stimulus and getting the phobic to relax, for example a spider phobic Freud’s theory suggested that there are frequent conflicts between the id, ego and superego, which cause the individual to experience anxiety, this leads the ego to devote a lot of time to trying to resolve the conflicts. The ego protects itself by using defence mechanisms, such as repression, displacement, projection and denial.

An assumption of the Psychodynamic approach is that the adult personality depends on childhood experiences. Freud assumed that all children go through five stages, the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the latency stage and the genital stage. This is known as psychosexual development.

Freud’s theory has had some experimental support in certain areas including repression and fixation. Freud believed that his theories were scientific because he believed in determinism and detailed collection of data, however behaviourists believe that approaches used by the Psychodynamics are incapable of being proved wrong and so that makes them unscientific. Although the Psychodynamic approach seems to have an explanation for everything, it seems to predict very little and so is viewed as being unscientific.

One of the major contributions of the Psychodynamic approach to Psychology is the recognition of the unconscious mind. The behaviourist and humanistic approaches have not effectively dealt with unconscious influences on our feelings and behaviour. Unconscious influences are important, especially when it comes to irrational behaviour.

Whilst there is sufficient evidence for the Psychodynamic principles such as unconscious influences and the importance of early experience, ideas like the Oedipus/Electra complex are almost impossible to research. Another limitation is that the theories are derived from case studies; Grunbaaum (1993) argued that the idea of basing Psychological theories on a small number of case studies is not scientifically valid. This is very important, especially when most of the case studies on which psychodynamic theory is based were carried out on people in distress, which means that the cases are not typical of the population as a whole. This could have made psychodynamic theorists overemphasise the irrational nature of human behaviour.

The humanistic approach seems simplistic in contrast to the complex Psychodynamic approach and the scientific behaviourist approach.

The Humanist assumptions that people are motivated by the wish to grow and fulfil their potential and can choose what they want to be and what is best for them has the benefit of being a very positive approach. They emphasise on free will and in contrast to behavioural and psychodynamic approaches which place more emphasis on what makes us behave as we do.

Humanists believe that we are influenced by how we feel about ourselves which in turn results from how we are treated by others, so if a person tells somebody that long hair doesn’t suit them, the persons self perception will change and it is likely that they will no longer wish to have long hair.

The humanist approach aims to help people to choose what they want and help them to fulfil their potential. This means that humanistic practice is always centred on creating conditions where people can make up their own minds and follow their own goals.

Carl Rogers believed that humans have one basic motive, which is the tendency to actualise. While this belief makes sense, there are constraints such as the conditions that surround a person. People will only flourish and reach their potential if their environment is good enough.

Like psychodynamic therapists, humanistic counsellors encourage clients to focus on and explore feelings, but they are different in that they are completely non-directive, they do not ask clients to focus on or explain things that they have said. A humanist would not offer interpretations but instead would encourage the client to keep on talking, in the belief that they would eventually find their own answers. Humanistic Psychologists reject interpretation because they believe that although symptoms can arise from past experiences, it is more useful for the client to focus on the present and the future rather than on the past.

Humanistic theory of personality proposed that people were innately good and unique with a basic need to be respected by others. People only become destructive when a poor self concept or external constraints override the valuing process. Rogers proposed that the most important aspect of self concept is self esteem. In our minds we have an image of ourselves as we are and an image of our ideal self. If the images match well, we will have good psychological health and self esteem, if they do not match then we will have psychological problems.

Rogers client centred therapy is the most significant contribution of the humanistic approach. The emphasis on the personal qualities of the therapist contributed to the development of the counselling profession. Rogers developed techniques for measuring the progress of therapy, suggesting that it should be subjected to research scrutiny. This was a vital contribution because therapists need to know whether the methods they use are actually effective.

Humanistic Psychology reminds us that individual human experience is Important and that there are important aspects of human experience such as self, peak experience and spirituality that are neglected in other approaches to Psychology.

This essay has evaluated the assumptions and contributions of the behaviourist, psychodynamic and humanistic approaches to psychology. The behaviourist approach focuses on the behaviour of people and seeks to explain behaviour as being learnt. The psychodynamic and humanist approaches are more concerned with the emotional aspects of people’s lives rather than their behaviour. The psychodynamic approach places importance on childhood experience. The humanist approach places more emphasis on the importance of our self image.

Bibliography

Basic Psychology by Henry Gleitman (First Edition)

Psychology, third edition by Cardwell, Clark and Meldrum

Psychology – A New Introduction by Richard Gross, Rob McIlveen, Hugh Coolicun, Alan Clamp and Julia Russell (Twelfth Edition)

Class lectures and handouts