Journal Discussion 1 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): “Freud was the Founding father of the psychodynamic approach” (Laura A.
King, 2015). The most amazing contribution he made was to deeply discover one person’s unconscious level of their behavior or performance. It could analysis back to one’s childhood memories, dreams, feelings, and experiences. For me, the most attractive theory he made was that people’s performances could cause by sexual drives. Fred’s donate his life work to emphasize on explore the hidden structure and processes of personality (Saul McLeod, 2013), and the unconscious level is from the sexual drives. Some cases are interesting, for instance, when people dream about dancing, it reflects sexual activities; or dream about cylindrical or hole shape object, it could be a symbol of one’s reproductive organs.
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990): Skinner believes that the rewards, and the punishments determine our behaviors (Laura A. King, 2015). This behavior approach could also called operant conditioning, which Skinner introduced that the causes and the consequences of a behavior is the best way to learn behavior (Saul McLeod, 2015). A really excellent example of this theory is that a child could be rewarded by praises or gifts to encourage their well-behaved manner; while punished by criticism to avoid bad habit. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920): “Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in 1879 and create the academic discipline of physiology.
” (Laura A. King, 2015). He is also regarded as the father of psychology (Saul McLeod, 2008). The birth of concept – structuralism – is the contribution of Wundt and his collaborators (Laura A. King, 2015), which “discovering the basic elements or structures, of mental processes (Laura A. King, 2015)”. The technique used in this method is called introspection, which means looking inside the mind.
For example, “describe an object such as an apple in terms of the basic perceptions it invoked including cold, crisp and sweet.” (Psychology World, 1998). Through these experiments, Wundt summarize a large number of basic conscious elements, which could used to illustrate all human behaviors. William James (1842-1910): Functionalism is the main contribution of James. On the textbook, “Functionalism explored the functions and purposes of the mind and behavior in the individual’s adaptation to the environment.
” (Laura A. King, 2015). Examples in the article “the pursuit of happiness” mentioned, according to James theory, a happy life can classify four ingredients: Choice, Active risk-taking, “As-if” thinking, and comes after a crisis of meaning. Those exactly explain why the human behavior in the outside world to understand the purpose of feelings. John B. Watson (1878-1958): “Watson’s behaviorist theory focused not on the internal emotional and psychological conditions of people, but rather on their external and outward behaviors.” (John Watson, 2015). One of his notable experiments is studying the emotional learning in children called “Little Albert experiment”.
However, this experiment was highly controversial and considered not ethical today, the contribution on exploring classical conditioning is still indelible. His behaviorism theory still impact on modern psychology, which discover the close link between early experiences and personalities. Reference: Laura A. King. (2015) Experience Psychology, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education. Saul McLeod.
(2013). Sigmund Freud. https://www.
simplypsychology.org/Sigmund-Freud.html Saul McLeod. (2015).
Skinner – Operant Conditioning. https://www.simplypsychology.
org/operant-conditioning.html Saul McLeod. (2008). Wilhelm Wundt. https://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.
html Psychology World. (1998). Structuralism. https://web.mst.
edu/~psyworld/structuralism.htm The pursuit of happiness. (2016). http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.
org/history-of-happiness/william-james/ John Watson (1878-1958). (2015-07-13). https://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/john-watson.html