Psychology For Dummies

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For Rogers, the focus of psychology is not behavior (Skinner), the unconscious ( Freud), thinking (Piaget), or the human brain but how individuals perceive and interpret events. Rogers is therefore important because he redirected psychology toward the study of the self. Remember Don’t forget it. When you see this icon I am reminding you of the highlights from that section. It flags the if you learn just one thing from this chapter type of stuff, so pay attention. A first principle of my mad-scientist vision of psychology is that building a human requires you to know what the person’s function is. After all, engineers don’t build things without knowing what they’re supposed to do. Only with a purpose in mind can you know what to materials are necessary and how they work together. Whenever someone tells you to look at the bright side, they’re coming from a cognitive perspective. When something bad happens, most people feel better if the problem gets solved or the issue is resolved. But how should you feel if nothing changes? If circumstances don’t change, do you have to feel bad forever? Of course not; in most cases, people can change the way they think about a situation. You can choose to look on the bright side — or at least not look solely at the downside. That’s the gist of cognitive therapy. Humanistic and existential

Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes. In case you were wondering (and worried), I am not engaged in an actual build a human project. But I’d have a very solid foundation and a good blueprint to get started if I ever decided to try. Each of a person’s parts, processes, and sources of help represents a chapter or section of Psychology For Dummies, 2nd Edition. Like all other carbon-based living organisms on planet Earth, human beings are staying alive machines. (Admit it; you instantly thought of the Bee Gees, didn’t you, or John Travolta in that white bell-bottom suit?) I’m not saying there is no meaning to life. Quite the contrary; I’m saying that the function of life is to be alive, to stay alive, and to perpetuate life. What’s the meaning of it all? Wrong book; try Philosophy For Dummies or Religion For Dummies. Client-centered therapy aims to increase clients’ self-worth and decrease the incongruence between the self-concept and the ideal self. This is the person who we would like to be. It consists of our goals and ambitions in life, and is dynamic – i.e., forever changing. Whenever someone tells you to look at the bright side, they’re coming from a cognitive perspective. When something bad happens, most people feel better if the problem gets solved or the issue is resolved. But how should you feel if nothing changes? If circumstances don’t change, do you have to feel bad forever? Of course not; in most cases, people can change the way they think about a situation. You can choose to look on the bright side — or at least not look solely at the downside. That’s the gist of cognitive therapy. SocioculturalB.F. Skinner (1948) published Walden Two, in which he described a utopian society founded upon behaviorist principles. Basically, psychology is a branch of knowledge that focuses on people, either as individuals or in groups. As material beings, humans are made of flesh and bones. Any discussion of thoughts, feelings, and other psychological concepts that doesn’t factor in biological makeup and function, especially the brain and nervous system, ignores the fundamental facts of human existence. It focuses on the present rather than dwell on the past unlike psychoanalysis. This therapy is widely used e.g. health, education and industry. Yes, this is the kind of blueprint or overlay I use to understand what psychology is: What are the ingredients of a person — mind, thoughts, emotions, perceptions, dreams, fears, personality, and brain — and what is the purpose of each ingredient? I’m not alone. Many psychologists engage in reverse engineering of the mind and behavior by looking at all the parts and how they work together to create . . . well, you. Finding the function

A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if some of the totality of their experience is unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the self-image. So I guess my metaphor is Frankenstein's Monster. Maybe think about it as Frankenstein’s Machine or Dr. Cash’s Machine or maybe even a Monster Machine. Why? The psychoanalytic/psychodynamic metatheory emphasizes the importance of unconscious mental processes, early child development, personality, the self, attachment patterns, and relationships. This approach explores how these mental and developmental processes interact with the challenges of life and everyday demands to affect the person you are and how you behave. Carl Rogers (1946) publishes Significant aspects of client-centered therapy (also called person-centered therapy). But then it happens: change. That’s right, something unexpected happens, and my human begins floundering, struggling, and verging on failing to achieve its primary function. How could I have forgotten that the world is not a static place?So it’s safe to say that the culture in which an individual is raised as well as the cultures he experiences or adopts throughout life impact his behavior and mental processes. But then it happens — change. That’s right, something unexpected happens, and my human begins floundering, struggling, and verging on failing to achieve its primary function. How could I have forgotten that the world is not a static place? 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 Remember We’re all psychologists really. Some of us just happen to be professional psychologists. The difference between a professional psychologist and a non-professional psychologist is really a matter of degree (get it?), separated by focus, time spent, materials consumed, and methods used. Over the years, I have been asked (sometimes respectfully and nicely, sometimes not) these questions: What makes you better at this than me? What do you know that I don’t? Well, I believe it’s really a matter of degree, perspective, and the psychologist tools I use to see and do the psychologist thing. Professionals in any field seem to immerse themselves in it. Again, it's a matter of degree. We all occupy the space of a psychologist to one degree or another. Psychologists just spend more time engaged in conscious and deliberate effort to stay in that space and look at the world from that viewpoint. We spend our time and careers occupying that space and doing the psychologist thing, occasionally coming out of the trance to share what we have seen, think, and found to be objectively true, at least as far as science allows us. But ultimately, psychology is only one way of looking at people and the world they interact with.