Psychology Perspectives

Psychology Perspectives

  • Submitted By: ljje2007
  • Date Submitted: 12/08/2009 11:23 AM
  • Category: Psychology
  • Words: 1492
  • Page: 6
  • Views: 1230

In this paper I will explain how current perspectives on mental processes and behavior are viewed, how I understand or relate to them, and provide examples of research questions that I believe could be asked of them.
Psychology’s current perspectives are neuroscience, evolutionary, behavior genetics, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and social cultural (Myers, p.9).
The neuroscience perspective focuses on the brain and the body and how the body influences behavior and vice versa. Having two children, I can relate to the way I reacted or behaved in response to the surging hormones running through my body during and after pregnancy. I cried at commercials that had babies in them, had emotional responses to situations that normally did not bother me and after my second child, experienced post-partum depression, in which I feared that anything myself or others did could harm my newborn. For this I was treated with therapy and anti-anxiety medications. A psychologist studying my case from a neuroscience perspective might ask why does an increase in hormones cause increased emotions during pregnancy or what differentiated between her pregnancies that caused her to experience post-partum with her second child? In researching these questions, the patient would be a primary source, where the patient’s doctor or husband may be used as a secondary source.
The evolutionary perspective looks at how we adapt to survive and how that affects the way we behave. I researched this perspective a lot as I could not relate to it as easily as some of the other perspectives. I came across an article in ESC’s library, The Great Struggles of Life: Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Psychology, by David M. Buss, that lit the light bulb above my head: competition among females (Buss, p.5). Buss explains “The key point is that sexual selection theory predicts that when males exert mate preferences, the competition among females for access to desirable males...

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