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3. John Dewey, an American philosopher, founded the school of functionalism,
which led to many advances in education.
4. The Legacy of Structuralism and Functionalism: Both live on. Today
psychologists employ a variety of methods to study both the structure and the
function of mental life and behavior.
E. Current Psychological Perspectives
1. Contemporary psychology is dominated by seven perspectives or conceptual
approaches: Biological, Psychodynamic, Behavioristic, Humanistic, Cognitive,
Evolutionary, and Cultural. Each of these approaches espouses points of view
and sets of assumptions that influence both what will be studied and how it
will be investigated. Most psychologists blend and borrow from several of
these perspectives. At the end of the description of each perspectives is an
analysis of that approach to understanding the causes of aggression.
2. Biological Perspective: The biological perspective attempts to explain behavior
in terms of the influence of genes, the brain, the nervous system, and the
endocrine system by examining underlying physical structures and processes
a) From the biological perspective, even the most complex behavior can
be understood by decomposing the behavior into smaller units, such
as the firing of neurons in the brain
b) A unifying theme for biological researchers is that, although the
environment and experience can modify behavior by altering
underlying biological structures and processes, behavior originates
from biological forces
c) How biological psychologists study aggression: By examining the
genetic and biochemical bases of aggressive behavior in both normal
individuals and abnormal individuals prone to aggression
3. Psychodynamic Perspective: The psychodynamic perspective holds that
behavior is determined by powerful inner forces, such as instincts and
biological drives, and by attempts to resolve conflicts between personal needs
and society’s demands. The purpose of behavior, according to this view, is to
reduce tension.
a) Psychodynamic principles of motivation originated with Sigmund
Freud, a Viennese physician, and his work with mentally disturbed
patients. Freud’s ideas have had a greater influence on more areas of
psychology than any other person has.
b) Freud emphasized the primacy of early childhood in mental
development, but more recent psychodynamic psychologists have
broadened Freud’s theory to include social influences and interactions
that occur over the individual’s lifetime
c) How psychodynamic psychologists study aggression: By examining
the unconscious drives and conflicts that are expressed in aggressive
behavior and attempting to understand how aggression reduces
psychological tension
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PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE
4. Behaviorist Perspective: Behaviorists seek to understand how environmental
contingencies and stimuli control behavior in terms of three essential aspects:
Antecedent, behavioral response, and consequence
a) Antecedent environmental conditions refer to the state of the
environment before a behavior is performed
b) Behavioral response, the main object of study, refers to the action to be
understood, predicted, and controlled
c) Consequence refers to what results from the behavioral response
d) Behaviorists are interested in observable behavior and often use
nonhuman animals so that they can control the conditions of
experimentation more completely than they can with human
participants
e) Behaviorists argue that principles derived from research with
nonhuman animals apply to humans as well
f) Behaviorist principles have yielded more humane approaches to the
education of children and to the treatment of behavior disorders
g) How behaviorists study aggression: By examining the stimulus
causes and consequences of aggressive behavior. Specifically, they ask
how the behavior has been reinforced in the past.
5. Humanistic Perspective: Humanistic psychology, a more optimistic
alternative to the psychodynamic and behaviorist models, suggests that
humans are innately good and that the main task of humans is to strive for
growth and development of their potential.
a) Humanists are phenomenologists in that they study the individual
actor’s personal view of events, focusing on the subjective world
experienced by the person, not an objective reality
b) Unlike behaviorism, humanistic psychology examines the human as a
whole (holistic approach) and does not attempt to reduce mental life to
elemental parts
c) How humanists study aggression: By examining maladaptive values,
social conditions, and goals that hinder growth and self-actualization
6. Cognitive Perspective: In contrast to behaviorism, which focused primarily on
observable behavior, cognitive psychologists are most interested in human
thought and all the processes of knowing, such as attending, thinking,
remembering, and understanding
a) Cognitive psychologists view behavior as partly determined by past
experiences but also influenced by an individual’s inner world of
thought and imagination about the ways that the world could be. To
cognitive psychologists, an individual’s subjective reality is more
important than the objective reality that behaviorists strive to capture.
b) Cognitive psychologists often use the computer as a metaphor for the
human mind and study higher mental processes such as perception,
memory, language use, problem solving, and decision making
c) How cognitive psychologists study aggression: By examining
thoughts associated with aggressive behavior and the influence of
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CHAPTER 1: THE SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUR LIFE
viewing violence on television and video on attitudes toward
aggression
7. Evolutionary Perspective: The evolutionary perspective extends the idea of
natural selection to explain how mental abilities evolved over millions of
years, just as physical abilities did
a) Evolutionary psychologists identify adaptive problems that early
humans may have encountered such as avoiding predators, finding
food, reproducing, and raising children, and then generate inferences
about the mental processes that might have evolved in response to
these problems
b) Evolutionary psychology is different from other perspectives in that it
has a much longer temporal focus (millions of years) than other
perspectives
c) How evolutionary psychologists study aggression: By examining the
possible evolutionary advantage that could have been derived from
aggressive behavior in the past
8. Cultural Perspective: Cultural psychologists investigate cross-cultural
differences in the causes and consequences of behavior. Partly in response to
American psychology’s reliance on white, middle-class college students as the
subject matter of psychology, cultural psychologists cross national boundaries
in an attempt to understand how cultural groups differ on standard measures
of mental processes and to understand what new measures and concepts
might more accurately capture and describe the mental life of various cultural
groups.
a) Important concepts investigated by cultural psychologists include
perceptions, human development, emotions, social norms, and the
notion of “the self”.
b) Cultural psychologists point out that psychological principles derived
from one cultural group cannot be automatically applied to other
cultural groups. A famous example of this is the application of
psychodynamic principles, based on the traditional western roles of
mothers and fathers, to the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea, for
whom parenting roles are much different and the mother is the main
authority figure.
c) How cultural psychologists study aggression: By examining how
aggression differs across cultures. Questions cultural psychologists
might ask include: Are the same types of aggressive behaviors
performed with the same frequency in each culture?