• Join over 1.2 million students every month
  • Accelerate your learning by 29%
  • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month

Why cant one approach explain all human behaviour?

Extracts from this document...


﻿Why can?t one approach explain all human behaviour? Freud?s? theory of development based on the psychosexual stages proposes that adult behaviour is a direct consequence of how well individuals get through the stage sequence. The stages follow a child?s development when an erogenous zone becomes their focus in accordance with their age and these include the mouth (breast feeding), anus (potty training), genitalia (recognition of different sexes) and the phallic (genitalia) stage where the Oedipus/Electra complex results in a child identifying with the same sex parent. Freud theorised that in order to have a normal personality as an adult the stages must be satisfactorily passed without fixation by overindulgence or frustration as this would result in undesirable characteristics such as vanity. For example if a man appears too uptight and stingy this could be a result of anal retention because he gains pleasure from controlling as and when he goes to the toilet. Freud believed that the id, ego and super-ego are parts of our psyche that develop during the psychosexual stages and are an ever changing dynamic that interact to influence our behaviours. ...read more.


might take when stressed and anxious but we do not know which mechanism is being portrayed because it cannot be objectively tested. For example Ann might be in a supermarket having an argument with another customer who ?deliberately? took the last carton of milk, Freud would explain this as the id being in control as a result of oral aggression due to frustration and her display of anti-social behaviour indicates projection??.. Alternatively Ann?s behaviour could be explained better using a behaviourist approach. Behaviourism The behaviourism perspective of human behaviour focuses on a stimulus-to-response basis deducing that the environment directly determines behaviour. Its main features centre on behaviours adopted by operant conditioning, classical conditioning and social learning. Behaviourists use quantitative data from experiments and observation as research methods, because they believe that psychology should be scientific and behaviour must be measurable. Classical conditioning is a behavioural theory developed by Ivan Pavlov in the 1930?s theorising that we learn behaviour by association, he observed a natural response to a stimuli and then paired that existing response to a new stimuli. An example of classical conditioning is a case study by Watson and Rayner (1920) ...read more.


The mediating factors include the observer paying attention to the behaviour, how effectively they encode it, whether or not they are able to replicate it and how motivated they are to do so with the consideration of vicarious punishment and reinforcement by their ?model?. Behaviourism reduces human behaviour to a mechanical process and disregards individual thought process. The approach considers humans as products of their environment regardless of physiological differences. With the use of addiction as an example, behaviourism would explain it as a consequence of reinforcement. If for example vicarious learning initiated gambling because an individual frequently saw advertisements on TV showing casino winners, they could become addicted because of the positive reinforcement of winning and the irregular positive reinforcement strengthening the behaviour. Physiological The physiological approach to explaining behaviour has three main viewpoints and these include the functions of the different areas of the brain, the nervous system consisting of neurotransmitters sending messages to the brain and behaviours determined by hormones. The structure and function of the brain is used by physiological psychologist to explain behaviour by outlineing the connection between the function of cerebral hemispheres. ?Roger Sperry? discovered that separating the hemispheres connected communicating with each other by corpus collasum which are continuoly communicating with each other, case studies show that Neurotransmitters send messages http://faculty.stcc.edu/psyc400/psyc400/chapters/chapters4to6/lectures/lecture4a.htm ...read more.

The above preview is unformatted text


Found what you're looking for?

  • Start learning 29% faster today
  • 150,000+ documents available
  • Just £6.99 a month

Not the one? Search for your essay title...
  • Join over 1.2 million students every month
  • Accelerate your learning by 29%
  • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month

See related essaysSee related essays

Related AS and A Level The Psychology of Individual Differences essays

  1. Marked by a teacher

    Classical and Operant Conditioning

    3 star(s)

    Once one step is mastered they move to the next step, continuing up the hierarchy until they have mastered their feared situation. Research has found that Systematic Desensitisation is successful for a range of anxiety disorders e.g. about 75% of patients with phobias responded to this method of therapy (McGrath et al, 1990).

  2. Outline and explain the principles of one of the following: a) Maslow's Hierarchy of ...

    At this stage, the need is figure and everything else is ground. The second phase is "contact", where possibilities of meeting the need are evaluated. When out of these possibilities a means of restoring balance arises, it becomes figure and the individual assembles their resources to contact figure and overcome any obstacles that they may encounter.

  1. The Gestalt Approach to Psychology

    Gestalt psychology is based on isomorphism. The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (1995) defines isomorphism as "the hypothesis that there is such a structural similarity between excitatory fields in the cortex and conscious experience. Note that the correspondence here is not presumed to be between the physical stimulus and the brain but between the perception of the stimulus and the brain".

  2. Free essay

    Discuss the range of methods available to the psychologist.

    You could do a double blind procedure to make the result more accurate, so that the research does not have less influence on the evidence they take. Experiments are used to establish a causal relationship. A form of identifying the relationship is by using correlation.


    In some circumstances, the verbal description of the nature of the investigation would not be sufficient to eliminate all possibility of harmful after-effects. For example, an experiment in which negative mood was induced requires the induction of a happy mood state before the participant leaves the experimental setting.


    A good example of the social learning theory is that of eating disorders such anorexia and bulimia, which have risen as a result of media influence, which promotes beauty in women associated with looking slim. Teenage girls learn that to be accepted as attractive there is a need to be

  • Over 160,000 pieces
    of student written work
  • Annotated by
    experienced teachers
  • Ideas and feedback to
    improve your own work