Career Development and Aspirations Essay Example

public and private actions. Behaviorists acknowledge the importance of studying private events such as dreaming, but reject the concept of a separate internal entity that causes outward behavior. [8]The behavior may be overt (e.g., walking, talking) or covert (e.g., dreaming, imagining).

Behaviorists do not utilize terms like "mind" or "consciousness" as they do not describe real psychological occurrences such as imagining, but are instead explanatory entities that are hidden within the organism. In contrast, private events are treated as behavior by behaviorism and are analyzed in the same way as overt behavior, which is why the approach is named "behaviorism." Behavior pertains to both the tangible events of the organism, whether open or private. Additionally, regarding behavior-environment relations, the emphasis does not dismiss the importance of genetics or biology in relation to behavior. Instead, analyzing behavior-environment relations provides a robust tool to inspect the impacts of these and other factors.

Skinner believed that introspection could be useful in identifying the environmental factors that influence overt and covert behavior (Skinner, 1974), but he did not see mental phenomena as the focus of introspection. Instead, he saw it as a means of examining the physical body of the organism. Other behaviorists, such as Watson in his 1913 work "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," rejected introspection as a key method and viewed psychology as an objective natural science that did not differentiate between humans and animals. Skinner also eschewed hypothesis testing as a research technique, believing it led to speculative theories and overlooked unexpected findings. As a result, behaviorism dominated American psychology for much of the first half of the 20th century (10).

The cognitive revolution in psychology

was largely influenced by linguist Noam Chomsky. In his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky challenged the behaviorist approaches to studies of behavior and language that dominated the field at the time.

Chomsky critiques Skinner's adoption of 'stimulus', 'response', and 'reinforcement' concepts from animal experiments, arguing they only capture human language acquisition in a vague manner. Chomsky stresses the importance of the child's role in language acquisition and proposes that humans possess innate language acquisition abilities. Additionally, psychologist Albert Bandura's work on social learning theory highlights that children can learn aggression through observational learning without showing overt behavior changes, which must be explained by internal processes.

[12] Humanistic psychology arose in the 1950s as a reaction to the limitations of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. It was inspired by existential thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard, employing phenomenology, intersubjectivity, and first-person perspectives. The humanistic approach aims to comprehend the entirety of an individual rather than fragmented aspects of their personality or cognition.
[13] Essential concerns specific to humans such as self-identity, death, freedom, aloneness,and meaning are at the core of humanism. Unlike other psychological approaches that focus on pathology, humanistic psychology prioritizes subjective significance while rejecting determinism; its emphasis lies on positive growth.

Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Fritz Perls were instrumental in founding this school of thought, which is sometimes referred to as the "third force" in psychology alongside behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Maslow presented a hierarchy of human needs, while Rogers developed Client-centered therapy and Perls contributed to the creation and development of Gestalt therapy. Meanwhile, advancements in computer technology led to the idea of mental function as information processing and laid the groundwork

for the emergence of cognitivism. This psychological perspective differs from others in its acceptance of scientific methodology and rejection of introspection as a valid method of investigation, as opposed to the reliance on internal mental states seen in symbolic approaches like Freudian psychodynamics.

The acknowledgement of internal mental states, such as belief, desire, and motivation, is explicitly addressed in cognitive psychology but not in behaviorism. Progress in the field has been made through the study of brain and nervous system function, including research by Charles Sherrington, Donald Hebb, and cognitive neuropsychology studies of individuals with brain injury. The development of brain function measurement technologies has contributed to the growth of contemporary psychology, with neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience being particularly active areas. Cognitive psychology has been unified with related disciplines like philosophy of mind, computer science, and neuroscience under the comprehensive field of cognitive science.