approaches

• who is Wundt?

  • the father of modern psychology
  • developed introspection (recording own emotions)
  • used structuralism (breaking down of response to stimulus)
• the behaviourist approach says behaviour is learnt through reinforcement and punishment
• classical conditioning is the process of learning to associate a stimulus with a response
• operant conditioning is when a behaviour is reinforced by a consequence, and the behaviour is then repeated
• positive reinforcement is behaviour reinforced through reward
• negative reinforcement is when the reward for the behaviour is avoidance of something negative
• punishment is when someone gets a negative consequence for their behaviour in the hope it does not happen again
• skinner did an experiment on operant conditioning using mice and pigeons
• Pavlov did an experiment on classical conditioning with dogs
• advantages of behaviourist approach

  1. studies to back it up
  2. useful to real life
• disadvantages of behaviourist approach

  1. not all behaviour is learnt
  2. deterministic and reductionist
  3. testing has issues (ethical/ not generalisable)
• social learning theory says we learn through observing others and imitating their behaviour
• there are mediational processes

  1. attention
  2. retention
  3. motor reproduction
  4. motivation
• vicarious reinforcement is observing how another person gets rewarded or punished from a certain behaviour and learning from that
• banduras bobo doll experiment tested vicarious reinforcement by making children observing a doll being hit by adults and then being put into the same situation themselves
• in Bandura's experiment the kids who saw the aggressive behaviour were more likely to be aggressive themselves
• weaknesses of Bandura's experiment

  1. lacks ecological validity
  2. suffers from DC
• strengths of SLT

  1. less deterministic than behaviourist (pay attention)
  2. supported by evidence (Bandura)
  3. real life application
• a weaknesses of SLT is that it is reductionist and can't explain all behaviour
• the psychodynamic approach says behaviour is motivated by the unconscious mind and is influenced by childhood experiences
• the psychodynamic approach is not credible as it is not falsifiable
• Freud said there were 3 parts of the mind

  1. ID - pleasure principle
  2. superego - morality principle
  3. ego - reality principle (balance between both)
• 3 defense mechanism: denial, repression, and displacement