Contrast and Compare Two Perspectives Within Psychology

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Contrast and Compare Two Perspectives Within Psychology

By Victoria Whatmough

Oldham Life Long Learning

The two perspectives that are going to be focused on in this assignment are the cognitive perspective and the biological perspective. Within the above perspectives, the key points are going to be the contrast of these perspectives and how they compare with reference to emotions.

There are several main areas of psychology, each area (or perspective) gives different kinds of information, which we can use in an attempt to understand people and their behaviour. Before we begin to analyse our chosen perspectives here is an insight of a few other areas within ? and it's history.

The emergence of psychology is dated at 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt attempted to investigate the mind through 'introspection' (the process of observing the operations of one's mind). In 1913 psychologists, especially John.B.Watson, an American psychologist, questioned introspection. He stated that no accurate results could be proved as everybody's thought processes were different. Only the individual can observe there own mental processes. Watson believed that behaviour should be studied, as it was measurable and can be observed by more than one person. This was known as behaviourism and dominated psychology for the next forty years. It was at this time that Psychology broke away from Philosophy.

In Austria and Germany 20 years later, Gestalt psychologist also reacted to the idea of structuralism and behaviourism, they studied on the basis that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'. Gestalt ?'s were mainly interested in people's perceptions and they believed perceptions could not be broken down in the way Wundt stated.

Earlier that century in around 1900, Freud, a neurologist published his psychodynamic theory of personality, he believed that the unconscious mind played a large role in understanding behaviour. Freud's theories also represented an alternative to behaviourism. According to Freud, "the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they be simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions, or the motives of an artist or scientists. (http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/freud.html2002).

One of the main areas within psychology is known as the cognitive perspective. This is to do with gathering and use of information, taking information in and making sense of it (perception). How we retain, attain and regain information. These mental processes are known as cognition, which is how cognitive ? got its name. Some accounts of the cognitive perspective date back to the early 1900's originating from two early schools of thought, Structuralism and Gestalt's (the focus being mental processes). The actual cognitive perspective didn't occur until the late 1950's as a major challenge to behaviourism. It was around this time that scientists started to compare the human brain to a computer. The computer provided the ideal analogy and a good basis for understanding human cognition. Therefore, cognitive ?'s seek to explain cognition in terms of an information processing system, the brain being the processor and the data being both the input and output from it.
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The year 1956 was a very important year within the cognitive perspective. At a meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Chomsky introduced his theory of language, Miller presented a paper on 'the magical number seven' in short term memory, and Newell and Simon presented a paper on the logical theory machine, with a further paper from Newell and Simon et al (1958).

As we are unable to observe our thought processes directly, we can still gain an insight in to them by ways of experiments and making inferences on a person's behaviour. These inferences have ...

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