Different Viewing Behaviors from Different Perspectives.
Psychologists look at different phenomenons of psychological interest in different prospectives. Perspectives are different approaches or views of psychology. Different psychologists make different assumptions about which aspects of a person worth studying. There are five major perspectives in psychology, but I'm going to introduce four of them only, the behavioral, cognitive, psychoanalytic and humanistic perspectives.
In behavioral perspective, psychologists focus on observable behavior, but not on thoughts and feelings. They emphasis the importance of the learning experience in what makes people behave the way they do.Most human behaviors are seen as being learned and conditioned. We can study the first case through a behavioral perspective called stimulus-response psychology. It suggests that a behavior called conditional response is caused by a conditional stimulus. In that case, the conditional stimulus, a test, would not normally produce a particular response such as anxiety. However, when the students failed a test, they would be seriously punished by their parents. If this happened repeatedly, they will learn that punishment will be given when they fail a test. Thus the test would pair with a unconditional stimulus, the punishment. Eventually the students would experience anxiety with the test alone.
In cognitive perspective, psychologists focus on studying the role of metal processes such as feeling,thinking, guessing and so on play in determining emotions and behavior. Since mental processes are not observable, cognitive psychologists draw inferences about what is going on with mental processes based on the study of observable behavior. In the second case, a large number of people are so fearful of snakes may be because they think that snakes bite and kill humans. Therefore, whenever they saw a snake, they would immediately run away or even faint.
