Critically contrast the behaviourist approach to psychology with the Essay

Critically contrast the behaviourist approach to psychology with the cognitive approach. You should refer to primary sources w - Essay ExampleAlong with close to similarities, there are fundamental contrasts of the airal and the cognitive approaches to psychology. First of all, both psychological schools follow different points of view as for the subject of psychological science. Behaviorists cope persons behavior,reflected inthe availableobjectiveobservation ofphysical processes, asthe only subject ofpsychology. Mental processes, as f spielors influencing behavior, are not interpreted into consideration by the behavioral concept. Hempel (1949), for example, claims that all psychological statements are translatable into statements that do not involve psychological concepts, but only concepts for physical behavior (p. 18). The behavioral theory assumes that after birth all human beings are similar. Thus, the formation of personality is greatly related to the surrounding environmen t, which is to shape and bring up a future individual. Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and Ill guarantee to take either one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select. (John Watson, 1930, p. ... avior, cognitive psychology focuses on inborn considerations such as patterns of thoughts, obsessive preoccupations, or the manifest content of onesdreams. The cognitive approach views the processes of thinking and cognition as the determinant of human behavior. Cognition is the act or process of knowing. It refers to the mental processes of an individual and includes attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imaging, thinking, and speech. Cognitive psychology states that human behavior is not merely the product of interaction with outward reality. It explicitly acknowledges the cosmos of internal mental states (such asbelief,desireandmotivation), Not stimuli and responses, not overtly obse rvable behavior, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaningby adding a bittiementalismto it. It focused on the symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and making sense not only of the world, but of themselves. (Jerome Bruner, 1990, p.2) The cognitiveapproach spread excessivelytothe studyof emotional and motivationalareas ofpersonality. In fact, the behavioral approach is based on the mechanistic materialism, considering human consciousness as an artificial analogue of ghostly notion of soul or spirit, and it is absolutely rejected by behaviorists. Mental processes also seem mostly as some concomitant informal factors, which are not included in the causal relationships between an individual and actuality. Only in the world of physical phenomena there are causal links, through and through which one of the events serves as a reason for another one, being its consequence.From this point of view, the relationship of stimulus and response (S - R) is accepted as the basic mechanism of the