Despite these criticisms, behaviorism has made significant contributions to psychology. These include insights into learning, language development, and moral and gender development, which have all been explained in terms of conditioning. Physiology : how the nervous system and hormones work, how the brain functions, how changes in structure and/or function can affect behavior. For example, we could ask how prescribed drugs to treat depression affect behavior through their interaction with the nervous system.

Humanistic psychology: a more recent development in the history of psychology, humanistic psychology grew out of the need for a more positive view of human beings than was offered by psychoanalysis or behaviorism. The biological approach uses very scientific methods such as scans and biochemistry. Animals are often used in this approach as the approach assumes that humans are physiologically similar to animals. Investigation of InheritanceMemory is one of the main areas of cognitive psychology. Investigations through the cognitive approach lead to essential discoveries on Memory and the role of schema. Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Free will is the idea that people can make choices in how they act and are self-determining. A possible reason for the limited impact on academic psychology perhaps lies with the fact that humanism deliberately adopts a non-scientific approach to studying humans. The main focus was measuring personality/mental abilities – those clusters were consistently larger than behaviorist ones.

One assumption of the learning approach is that all behaviors are learned from the environment. They can be learned through classical conditioning, learning by association, or through operant conditioning, learning by consequences.

The bell had become the conditioned stimulus and salivation had become the conditioned response. Examples of classical conditioning applied to real life include: 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. Even more sophisticated is the PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography) which uses a radioactive marker as a way of studying the brain at work. Studying a person’s subjective experience is the biggest problem for scientific psychology, which stresses the need for its subject matter to be publicly observable and verifiable. Subjective experience, by definition, resists such processes.