The Foundations of Psychology

Psychology is one of the broadest fields to analyze. There are many different schools of thought throughout the entirety of it, with the most important ones being functionalism, behaviorism, structuralism, and cognitivism. The psychology of all these schools all have a biological base and are the foundations of what psychology is. Without psychology and biology, human beings would cease to exist, and so a deeper look into the two systems may be beneficial to better understand such a complicated system. The foundations for the biology of psychology are the nervous system and the endocrine system, which must be fully investigated to understand clinical psychology.

Structuralism could quite possibly be the most important aspect of psychology as it was the first idea about psychology founded. At this time though, psychology and biology were not yet linked together. Wilhelm Wundt was the founding father of structuralism. This type of behavior was a way of looking at how things are broken down in the brain, and to investigate how things work structurally inside of it to form a mental process. To learn more about structuralism, it called upon introspection as a tool to better understand it. Introspection is known as a process that asks a person to look inside themselves and examine how they’re feeling and why they are feeling that way. Although introspection can be used as a great tool for any type of psychology, some feel that it can hinder, rather than improve one’s self. As (Wilson et al, 1989) states, “this type of thought can cause people to change their minds about how they feel and lead to a disconnection between their attitudes and their behavior.” This may be a bit farfetched, however some psychologists agree, seeking use of the observational approach instead, which is observing something from the outside.

The observational approach is often used in experiments involving behaviorism, because behaviorism is supposed to be a psychology that is fully observable. John B. Watson founded behaviorism and it can be defined as the psychology of behavior that is observable from the outside, such as someone’s actions rather than what is going on mentally. Behaviorism, as is basically stated is a psychology based on the behavior of the person or animal being studied. It is considered to be learned as well as genetics playing a role in it too. There are two types of condition when a behavior is learned, one is classical conditioning while the other is operant conditioning. The first is a naturally occurring stimulus that is paired together with a response. Operant conditioning is behavior that is learned through reward and punishment.

Classical conditioning can be seen through the familiar Pavlov’s dog experiment. Pavlov’s dog is when the conditioned response becomes the learned response due to a stimulus. For the dog it was to see if every time the bell rang and the dog was presented food, that eventually once the bell rang, the dog would salivate even if there was no food present. This is a conditioned behavior because it is a learned behavior. An example of operant conditioning is when someone’s behavior is customized by the consequences that take place after something has happened. These, and all types of behaviorism, lead directly into cognitivism.

Cognitivism can be viewed as a more extensive look at what behaviorism looks at as well. These two categories are very similar in that they take a deep look into observational behavior and mental behavior. Although cognitivism takes a more scientific viewpoint form any other category. The reason why cognitivism takes such a strong stance is because there is scientific proof of the claims it makes. Cognitivism, though very scientific also works with methods and theoretical thinking. Methodology and thinking patterns can certainly be considered scientific as well. Thinking is the basic focus of cognitivism because it looks to understand how the thought process works; seeing how the thought process computes outside resources. It believes that the brain processes what is going on based on what the person sees around them and the signals they are receiving. They must take these signals and turn them into a thought process with a final thought following. This all seems to lead up to what is known as functionalism.

Functionalism seems to be more of a philosophy than a category in psychology. It is a tricky thing to define as it is more part of the world of philosophy. This is because there are two separate aspects to it, which are the behavioral factors and the physical functions. Functionalism is concerned more with how the brain is functioning and what is making it function in a certain way, it cares about the mechanics, rather than the actions that are taking place. This gives one the impression that there is more to the brain than just nerve endings sending signals to one another. This is a sort of branch from structuralism; because structuralism also focuses on the why, only it focuses solely on the feelings of the self rather than the actions and behavior of someone else. Functionalism is the more developed version of structuralism because it makes more sense. By having included in it that there are functions that also need to be considered when trying to figure out what is happening in the brain and why rather than just running off an assumption that the brain is running of impulse alone.

The biological aspects that are seen in psychology are everywhere. There would be no psychology without biology because the biology makes up what chemical reactions are taking place inside the brain. Many people are not aware of the importance of how much these two systems must interact and how they must balance each other out to be able to provide a healthy life for a body. There are two parts of the biological factors in psychology which are the nervous system and the endocrine system.

The nervous system is obviously nerve cells that transmit information back and forth to each other to create physical and emotional reactions inside the body. The nervous system has two parts, the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The CNS controls the brain and spinal cord while the PNS controls the internal organs of the subject. While the nervous system controls these parts of the body, the endocrine system controls the secretion of hormones that control how someone feels emotionally as well as developmentally. The endocrine system is an extremely important part of the body, as it is the regulator to many areas of the body. This system regulates sleep, metabolism, mood, etc. These two systems must work harmoniously together in order to create a functioning being. As Sturmhofel and Bartke (1998) better describe,

“For the body to function properly, its various parts and organs must communicate with each other to ensure that a constant internal environment (i.e., homeostasis) is maintained.” (P.153)

All these systems must complement one another to ensure that the body is working the way it should be. If they are not all functioning properly then it’s certainly plausible for either the mind or the body to become overwhelmed. Psychologically and biologically the two must find a perfect balance to ensure a healthy life. Unfortunately, this is not always true of either and thus the reason for medication is made available. Neurologically and physically the body is capable of just how much the mind believes it can achieve, proving that psychology and biology play huge roles in one other categories. Psychology and biology are the two most important aspects of human life because that is what they create together, life.

References

Hiller-Sturmhofel, S., & Bartke, A. (1998). An overview. The Endocrine System, 22(3), 153.

Wilson, T. D., Dunn, D. S., Kraft, D., & Lisle, D. J. (1989). Introspection, attitude change, and attitude-behavior consistency: The disruptive effects of explaining why we feel the way we do. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 287-343.