Signigicant Event - Assignment Example

Behavioral and Cognitive Perspectives in Psychology Back during my junior school days, I spend an extra year in school since myself, in company of other friends had turned up late for the last paper of the national examinations. This occurrence made me bear the pain and shame of seeing my former classmates proceed to the next academic level as I had to repeat the last class in the junior school, and since then I learnt to be very sensitive about the time aspect of activities and respect the same.

Since I have developed the personality of a person with great regards for the timeliness of events, I would say that concerning the behavioral approach to psychology, the environment within which I studied and lived helped shape up this personality. The school system we were and are in requires that every activity is timed and that violation of this timing would lead to such grave consequences as the one I faced. Miller et al., (2010) put it, “… the formation on a personality is greatly related to the surrounding environment, which is to shape and bring up the future individual” (p.34). In essence, the external stimuli of the need to avoid the painful consequence enhanced my personality.

This is to imply that not conscience, but the sensitivity to the environment and severity of the impacts have influence in shaping the personality (Maultsby, Maxie & Wirga, 2008). In another way, cognition has also contributed to the development and moulding of time consciousness. Mental processes including perception, attention, reasoning, imaging and even judgment were highly involved in the process of my development of time consciousness. I had to reason out the need to do activities in time for the purpose of order without necessarily looking at the consequences of lateness.

Therefore, thinking and cognition processes contributed to the determination of my behavior.From this significant event in life, both the classical and operant learning occurred. Because of the event, I have always got to question the timing of any activity which I am to undertake. In fact, without a mention of time when an activity is being described, I feel that the description is not complete and would press further to know. In fact, given the consequence of the time specific exam that I had once faced, my perception of the time being part of every activity would make me worried even if I were to undertake and activity which is not time specific and requires no deadline.

This is essentially because of the classical conditioning of my mind.This is attributable to my uncomfortable feeling with any activity which is timed. I had developed some fear and dislike for such activities and proceeded to believe that any activity is thus timed and the failure to beat such deadline would lead to such grave consequences as the one I faced. Because of these reasons, any time an activity is presented to me to do, my mind travels back to missed examination paper. Upon remembering the event, I get to do things differently.

The memory of the event may be completely accurate because of a number of reasons. Major contributors to the accurate memory are the severity of the consequences of the event and the time lapse since the event occurred (Maultsby, Maxie & Wirga, 2008). The more severe as indeed the consequences were, the more accurate the memory. Similarly, relatively shorter time lapse implies more accuracy in memory. In conclusion, the two learning approaches of operant and classical and the two perspectives of behavioral and cognitive psychology have worked in unison.

ReferencesMaultsby, Maxie and Wirga. (2008) "Behavior Therapy". Journal of Mental Health. Howard University, College of Medicine: Academic Press. 46(4), 51-53Miller, Galanter, Eugene and Pribram. (2010) Plans and the structure of behavior. NY: Holt, Rinehard and Winston.