Know psychology and its perspective

The origin of psychology can be traced to the Greek Philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who were asking question on mental life. They were wondering about consciousness, and wanted to know whether people are rational or irrational by birth. They are the important elements of cognitive aspects of psychology.

Another important person is Hippocrates who is the father of medicine. He studied functions of living organism and found how brain controls various organs of the body. This where the basis of biological perspective of psychology. Till World war II behaviorism was dominating in the society. After the war, interest in psychology increased. With the invention of sophisticated instruments and electronic equipment’s, wider range of problems were examined. The interest in psychology and in its perspectives increased due to the invention and researches on psychology.

During 1950’s, the development of computers offered psychologist a powerful tool for theorizing about psychological processes. Simulation of psychological phenomena with a computer, psychological issues were recast in forms of information processing models which says that human beings as processors of information and gave a more dynamic approach to psychology.

During 1950 Noam Chomsky stimulated the first significant psychological analysis of language which paved the way for emergence of psycholinguistics. During the same period advances where made in neuropsychology. Relationship between neurological events and mental processes were found. Advances in biomedical technology lead to the links between specific regions of the brain and particular thought and behavioral processes. This was done by Roger Sperry in 1981 leading to the award of Nobel prize. A psychological perspective is an approach that is, a way of looking at topics within psychology.

Psychologists try to relate human behavior to the functions of the body, particularly nervous and glandular systems. All psychological phenomena of human can be related to the nervous and glandular systems.

The behavioral perspective focuses on overt behavior. It is concerned with how the environment and the experience affect one’s activities. It focuses on rewards and punishers, which maintain or prevents a behavior.

Cognition refers to perception of the world around us including learning memory, thinking and comprehension of our social environment. It also refers to the processing of information. It is concerned with the mental processes, remembering, perceiving reasoning, and problem solving.

The psychoanalytic perspective is part of the broader perspective called psychodynamic. It focuses on the role of feelings and impulses which are thought to be unconscious. According to this perspective behavior starts from unconscious processes meaning beliefs, fears and desires that the person is not aware of, but they influence behavior.

According to Freud, many of the impulses that are forbidden or punished by parents and others are due to innate instincts; forbidden behaviors are forced into unconscious and manifest themselves as emotional problems and symptoms of mental illness or as socially approved behavior. This perspective helps us to new ways of looking at these problems.

According to the subjectivist perspective, human behavior is a function of the perceived world and not the objective word. To understand human behavior especially in social situations, we must understand how the person define the situation. Understanding one’s situation varies from individual to individual, since it varies based on one’s culture, personal history and motivational state. To sum up subjectivist perspective is and orientation toward understanding behavior and mental processes in terms of the subjective realities people actively construct.

The all researches and conclusion have only been possible when the first step in scientific study in psychology started in the year 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt established to the psychological laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany. He conducted experiments primarily with the senses especially vision and with the coworkers studied attention, emotion and memory.