Psychology For Dummies

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Client-centered therapy aims to increase clients’ self-worth and decrease the incongruence between the self-concept and the ideal self. Human conduct is guided by codes of behavior known as ethics. Simply put, ethics refers to the prescribing of right behavior and the proscribing of wrong behavior. In addition to psychologists being guided by the principles of science, they are also guided by their own code of ethics, their own understanding of right and wrong behavior.

Behavior is not constrained by either past experience of the individual or current circumstances (determinism).

Behaviorism emphasizes the role and influence of a person’s environment and previous learning experiences to understanding behavior. Behaviorists don’t traditionally focus on mental processes per se because they believe that mental processes are too difficult to observe and measure objectively. In the framework of behaviorism, the why of behavior can be explained by looking at the circumstances in which it occurs and the consequences surrounding someone’s actions. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning are ways of understanding behavior and they lead to behavior modification, a specific approach to modifying behavior, and helping people change that comes from the metatheory of behaviorism (see Chapter 8 for details on some behavior-modification techniques that are based on classical and operant conditioning). Cognitive Second, they must be conscious experiences of the here and now. No efforts should be made to retrieve unconscious experiences from the past. Psychologists strive to maintain their expertise and knowledge through the use of three forms of knowledge acquisition or ways of knowing: The point is, if they can cause it to happen, then they can un-cause it to happen, too. And that means they understand why and how it’s happening. This is a type of reverse psychological engineering for figuring out the why, what, and how questions of human behavior. (It’s also a good example of an empirical approach in as much as the process is observable and testable.)

I envision psychology reaching a pinnacle when it can list all the ingredients of the human mind and all the determinants of behavior. Maybe the field can figure it all out through that reverse engineering process mentioned earlier. Or, at the very least, maybe psychology will figure out people, and all the information that experts gather can be stored or formulated into an algorithm for making people that, one day, a super-intelligent robotic life form can utilize to re-create the human species thousands of years after it becomes extinct. I did say mad scientist, right?

Independent variables

The self is the humanistic term for who we really are as a person. The self is our inner personality, and can be likened to the soul, or Freud’s psyche. The self is influenced by the experiences a person has in their life, and out interpretations of those experiences. Two primary sources that influence our self-concept are childhood experiences and evaluation by others. Furthermore, the approach’s focus on meeting our needs and fulfilling our growth potential reflects an individualistic, self-obsessed outlook that is part of the problem faced by our society rather than a solution. References Self-actualization is only possible if there is congruence between the way an individual sees themselves and their ideal self (the way they want to be or think they should be). If there is a large gap between these two concepts, negative feelings of self-worth will arise that will make it impossible for self-actualization to take place. The environment a person is exposed to and interacts with can either frustrate or assist this natural destiny. If it is oppressive, it will frustrate; if it is favorable, it will assist. Behavior must be understood in terms of the subjective conscious experience of the individual (phenomenology): Humanistic psychologists rejected a rigorous scientific approach to psychology because they saw it as dehumanizing and unable to capture the richness of conscious experience.