Irza Fidah's Key Ideas from Theoretical Approaches in Psychology
by Matt Jarvis

• Some paradigms are most popular in the field of counselling, and psychodynamic approaches tend to be favoured by psychiatrists and social workers rather than by psychologists.
• Some psychologists are eclectic and borrow freely from different approaches whilst others work purely with one approach.

• Psychology should be seen as a science, to be studied in a scientific manner.
• Behaviourism is primarily concerned with observable behaviour, as opposed to internal events like thinking and emotion.

• The major influence on human behaviour is learning from our environment.
• There is a 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.

• Albert Bandura → In order to learn by vicarious experience, we must process the information about the consequences of people’s actions and come to logical conclusions about whether we should copy the behaviour.
• Psychologists can use classical conditioning techniques to reduce or remove the symptoms of phobias; or to helps to remove unwanted behaviours, such as pedophilia.

• Operant conditioning techniques can be used to help rehabilitate people such as long-term psychiatric patients who have been out of contact with “normal” society for a while.
• Behavioural approach places great emphasis on testable concepts and rigorous experimental research.

• Our behaviour and feelings as adults (including psychological problems) are rooted in our childhood experiences.
• Relationships (especially parenting) are of primary importance in determining how we feel and behave.

• Our behaviour and feelings are powerfully affected by the meaning of events to the unconscious mind, and by unconscious motives.
• Looks for information in dreams, symptoms, irrational behaviour, and what patients say in therapy.
• Freud believed that the most important of the defence mechanisms was repression.

The process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called dream-work. The purpose of dream-work is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continue sleeping.

• People are motivated by the wish to grow and fulfill their potential.
• People can choose what they want to be, and know what is best for them.
• We are influences by how we feel about ourselves, which in turn results from how we are treated by others.

• The aim of humanistic psychology is to help people choose what they want and help them fulfil their potential.
• One major difference between humanistic counsellors and other therapists is that they refer to those in therapy as “clients”, not “patients”.

Maslow distinguished between D-needs (deficiency needs) which result from requirements for food, rest, safety, etc. and B-needs (being needs) which derive from our wish to fulfil our potential. We cannot strive towards our B-needs until our D-needs have been met.

• Like behaviourists, cognitive psychologists see psychology as a pure science.
• Whereas behaviourists are interested primarily in behaviour, and psychodynamic and humanistic psychologists are interested primarily in emotion, cognitive psychologists are primarily interested in thinking and related mental processes such as memory.

• The major influence on human behaviour is how the mind operates.
• Like a computer we are influenced by the ways in which our brains are “hard-wired” and by ways in which we have been “programmed” by experience.

Here we shall consider two reasons why we might forget from long-term memory.

• Cue-dependency is a generally accepted phenomenon and probably the most common season for forgetting things.
• Repression, by contrast, is much more controversial and probably occurs rather less frequently.

• The technical term to describe how well a study can be applied to real-life is ecological validity.
• Some psychologists who adopt a purely cognitive approach can ignore other important psychological factors other than the ways we process information. This is called cognitive reductionism.

• The cognitive-developmental approach is primarily concerned with thinking and reasoning, as opposed to behaviour or feelings.
• Thinking and reasoning do not merely become more sophisticated with increasing experience, but the type of logic the child is capable of differs entirely according to its age.
• A major influence on human behaviour, feelings and thinking is the type of reasoning the person is capable of.

• Social psychology is interested in all the ways in which people impact on one another.
• The major influence on people’s behaviour is the social situation they are in.
• Social approaches are not tied to a particular research method.

The three-stage process in social identity theory:

1. In the first stage, social categorisation, we identify ourselves and other people as members of social categories.
2. In the second stage, social identification, we adopt the identity of the group we have categorised ourselves as belonging to.
3. The final stage is social comparison. Once we have categorised ourselves as part of or group and identified with that group we then tend to compare that group with other groups.

• Like behavioral and cognitive psychology, behavioural genetics and evolutionary psychology are seen as pure-science approaches.
• Genes affect physical characteristics, and the interaction of these characteristics with the environment can influence psychological characteristics.

• Whereas all the approaches we have looked at so far emphasise the role of the environment on determining the differences between people, behavioural genetics emphasises the role of genetic as well as environmental influences.
• Evolutionary psychology also emphasises the importance of genetic influences, but on human similarity rather than difference.

• Like other biological approaches to psychology, neurophysiology is a science.
• Neurophysiology emphasises the importance of physiological processes in affecting behaviour, thinking, and feelings.

Whereas behavioural psychology is most concerned with observable behaviour, psychodynamic psychology with emotion and cognitive psychology with thinking, neurophysiology is concerned primarily with physiological activity.