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Unit VI (6) Essay

A paradigm in psychology is made up of the ways of thinking, basic assumptions, and methods of study that are generally acknowledged by the members of a discipline or group. The five major paradigms in psychology include psychodynamic, biological, cognitive, humanistic, and behavioral paradigms. In making a piece of psychological study, the researcher unconsciously or consciously selects a paradigm. This paradigm entails an idea of what the researcher considers is significant in human behavior. Science is likely to go through shifts; thus, psychology is not a science as it has no agreed paradigm. There are a number of conflicting methods, and the subject matter of psychology is so varied; as a result, investigators in dissimilar fields have little in common. In this paper, I located a scholarly article that discusses the emergence and impact of the cognitive psychological paradigm discussed in the textbook. I provide reasons on why this school of thought arose and also contrasted it with at least three other theories.

Psychological paradigm signifies a theory, pattern, or representative example, as of the interrelations and functions of behavior under study, process, or the like. According to the article, psychology was established as a science in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt, who created the first psychological laboratory. The cognitive perspective is centered on “mental” functions such as attention, perception, and memory (De Houwer et al., 2017). It perceives individuals as being the same as computers in the manner they process information. According to the article, it has numerous applications, including eyewitness testimony and cognitive therapy. Cognitive psychology assumes that a mediational process takes place between stimulus and response. The mediational, for example, a mental event, could be problem-solving, attention, perception, or memory.

This school of thought arose in order to try to explain human behavior by understanding the supposed process. One example is that psychotherapists use the ideologies of cognitive theory when they teach an individual how to recognize maladaptive thought patterns and change them into constructive ones and transform them into productive ones. This paradigm of psychology emphasizes psychological areas of behavior. Cognitive Psychology turns around the idea that if we desire to recognize what makes individuals tick, then the method to know is to discover what processes are in point of fact going on in their minds. In another way, psychologists come from this viewpoint to study reasoning, which is the psychological process or act by which knowledge is obtained.’ The cognitive viewpoint is concerned with mental functions (De Houwer et al., 2017). It views individuals just like computers in a way that both computers and human brains process data, store information, and have an input and output procedure. This had resulted in cognitive psychologists elucidating that memory consists of three stages: encoding (where info is obtained and worked on), storage (where the info is retained), and retrieval (where the information is remembered) (Kruglanski et al., 2018). It is an exceptionally scientific approach and commonly uses lab experiments to study human behavior. Through experiments, the antique laboratories explored areas such as sensory and memory opinion, both of which Wundt alleged to be closely linked to physiological processes in the brain. The entire movement had evolved from antique philosophers like Plato and Aristotle.

When contrasting it with the other three theories, Roger’s humanism agreed with the main assumptions of Abraham Maslow in a way that he believed that each person could attain their goals, desires, and wishes in life. This theory emphasizes growth, change, and the potential for human good. When compared with Jungian analysis, this analysis is the psychotherapeutic method of Analytical Psychology whereby the patient and the analyst work together to get unconscious components of the mind into a more stable connection to conscious awareness and experience. Lastly, Piaget’s theory contrasts with it in that he believed that individuals are continuously adjusting to the environs as they take in new information and learn new things.

Reference

De Houwer, J., Hughes, S., & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2017). Psychological engineering: A functional–cognitive perspective on applied psychology. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(1), 1-13.

Kruglanski, A. W., Jasko, K., Milyavsky, M., Chernikova, M., Webber, D., Pierro, A., & Di Santo, D. (2018). Cognitive consistency theory in social psychology: A paradigm reconsidered. Psychological Inquiry, 29(2), 45-59.