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

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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