Behaviriourism

4. Behaviriourism

The literature of this school of psychology is still awaiting its bibliographer. Though this interpretation of human actions and reactions has been strongly criticized by other psychologists, the leading figures - B.F.Skinner, J.B.Watson and E.C.Tolman - have also been recognized and respected as great scholars. Skenner`s own summary About behaviorism, 1974, contained numerous bibliographic references to this important interpretation of man’s relationship to the world around him. Strange compilation of references designed to show the errors of this school of psychology was published by A.A.Roback in 1923 as part of his critical discussion entitled Behaviorism and Psychology; it is now only of historical interest.

We have already referred to Robert 1 Watson`s The history of psychology and behavioral sciences: a bibliographic guide, 1978. in our discussion of the general background guides to psychology. It suffices to note, here, that this work, though by one of the leading scholars of the behaviorist school, is not, and does not pretend to be, a bibliography of Behaviourism. In some respects the same can be said of C.Heidenreich`s Dictionary of personality: behavior and adjustment terms, which appeared in 1968. Both these books have been compiled by leading members of this behaviorist school and unquestionably representative of the views of that school. We have mentioned these works here for that reason, but stress that these are scholarly and unbiased reference works which do not include or misrepresent references to other interpretations of human behavior.

5. Gestalt psychology

Gestalt Psychology, school of psychology that deals mainly with the processes of perception. According to Gestalt psychology, images are perceived as a pattern or a whole rather than merely as a sum of distinct component parts. The context of an image plays a key role. For instance, in the context of a city silhouette the shape of a spire is perceived as a church steeple. Gestalt psychology tries to formulate the laws governing such perceptual processes.

Gestalt psychology began as a protest. At the beginning of the 20^th century, associationism dominated psychology. The associationist view that stimuli are perceived as parts and then built into images excluded as much as it sought to explain; for instance, it allowed little room for such human concepts as meaning and value. About 1910, German researchers Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka rejected the prevailing order of scientific analysis in psychology. They did not, however, reject science; rather they sought a scientific approach more nearly related to the subject matter of psychology. They adopted that of field theory, newly developed in physics. This model permitted them to look at perception in terms other than the mechanistic atomism of the associationists.

Gestalt psychologists found perception to be heavily influenced by the context or configuration of the perceived elements. The word Gestalt can be translated from the German approximately as “configuration.” The parts often derive their nature and purpose from the whole and cannot be understood apart from it. Moreover, a straightforward summation process of individual elements cannot account for the whole. Activities within the total field of the whole govern the perceptual processes.

The approach of Gestalt psychology has been extended to research in areas as diverse as thinking, memory, and the nature of aesthetics. Topics in social psychology have also been studied from the structuralist Gestalt viewpoint, as in Kurt Lewin’s work on group dynamics. It is in the area of perception, however, that Gestalt psychology has had its greatest influence.

In addition, several contemporary psychotherapies are termed Gestalt. These are constructed along lines similar to Gestalt psychology’s approach to perception. Human beings respond holistically to experience; according to Gestalt therapists, any separation of mind and body is artificial. Accurate perception of one’s own needs and of the world is vital in order to balance one’s experience and achieve “good Gestalten.” Movement away from awareness breaks the holistic response, or Gestalt. Gestalt therapists attempt to restore an individual’s natural, harmonic balance by heightening awareness. The emphasis is on present experience, rather than on recollections of infancy and early childhood as in psychoanalysis. Direct confrontation with one’s fears is encouraged.

6. Cognition psychology

Cognition, act or process of knowing. Cognition includes attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imagining, thinking, and speech. Attempts to explain the way in which cognition works are as old as philosophy itself; the term, in fact, comes from the writings of Plato and Aristotle. With the advent of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy, cognition has been investigated from several viewpoints.

An entire field—cognitive psychology—has arisen since the 1950s. It studies cognition mainly from the standpoint of information handling. Parallels are stressed between the functions of the human brain and the computer concepts such as the coding, storing, retrieving, and buffering of information. The actual physiology of cognition is of little interest to cognitive psychologists, but their theoretical models of cognition have deepened understanding of memory, psycholinguistics, and the development of intelligence.

Social psychologists since the mid-1960s have written extensively on the topic of cognitive consistency—that is, the tendency of a person’s beliefs and actions to be logically consistent with one another. When cognitive dissonance, or the lack of such consistency, arises, the person unconsciously seeks to restore consistency by changing his or her behavior, beliefs, or perceptions. The manner in which a particular individual classifies cognitions in order to impose order has been termed cognitive style.