Foundations of Psychology - Essay Example

The scope of the school of thought includes people’s ability to remember things, people’s thinking capacity, conceptualization of information, and social cognition among others. The school of thought had its basis on research with respect to “memory, perception, and information processing” (Walker et al., 2007, p. 6). Assumptions in cognitive science were previously limited to the transfer of information to the brain and the subsequent storage of the transferred information. Improvement in technology has however diversified assumptions in the school of thought to mental functionality (Faculty, n.d.) Another psychological school of thought is behaviorism whose scope covers relationship between people’s behavior and their external environment.

Developed through observations, the school of thought notes impacts of the environment on behavior and people’s reactions to their external environment. Unlike the cognitive school of thought, behaviorism relies on observable elements. Its basic assumption is that “behavior change signifies that learning has taken place” (Walker et al., 2007, p.6). The assumption in the school of thought therefore relates learning to behavioral reactions (Walker et al., 2007). . The basic assumption of the school of thought is that some childhood encounters are psychologically torturing to recall and are as a result suppressed in a person.

People find it very difficult to express such experiences which are only communicated unconsciously in passive states such as dreams (Walker et al., 2007). Another school of thought, humanistic psychology, refers to the study experiences among people. Like psychodynamic and behavioral psychology, humanistic psychology covers the influence of a person’s past experiences on present status. The basic assumption in humanistic psychology is the concept of free will in every person. The free will is experienced in a person’s capacity in decision making and choosing a way of life.

Based on the free will assumption, the humanistic psychology induces hope that people have the potential to overcome challenges. Social psychology is also a major psychological school of thought. The scope of social psychology covers an individual’s reactions to the presence of other other people. The reactions include how individuals think, how they behave, as well as their emotions to real or imaginary presence of other people in the individual’s environment. The basic assumption of the school of thought is that people exhibit behavior while in a social set up and that the behavior of an individual person is a factor of both micro and macro social factors of the person’s society (Walker et al., 2007). Primary biological foundations of psychology linked with behavior Genetic characteristics of individuals are one of the biological foundations of psychology.

Genetic composition in an individual determines protein composition in the person that consequently shapes