Behavior therapy/models human Behavior

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Psychology: Six Perspectives

Psychology in Perspective

By: Dodge Fernald

Book Title: Psychology: Six Perspectives

Chapter Title: "Psychology in Perspective"

Pub. Date: 2008

Access Date: November 3, 2022

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412938679

Online ISBN: 9781452224862

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n10

Print pages: 332-356

© 2008 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online

version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

Psychology in Perspective

Psychology in perspective

• Multiple Bases of Behavior ◦ The Search for Causes ◦ Convergent Evidence

• The Perspectives Revisited ◦ Orientations in Research ◦ Eclecticism in Practice

• Psychology in the Making ◦ Unfinished Business ◦ Pathways and Prospects

The various perspectives approach psychology differently, each with special assets and limitations. From one standpoint, they reflect a hybrid vigor, bringing a healthy diversity into a field still in adolescence, not yet with a clear identity. From the opposite standpoint, they highlight the fragmentation in the field already exacerbated by psychology's enormous breadth, ranging from biological to cultural studies, including a full spectrum of intervening topics.

This closing chapter considers the six perspectives together, rather than separately, providing comparisons among them. It addresses them first with regard to the multiple bases of aggressive behavior. Then it turns to the commonalities and differences among the perspectives in research and practice. Finally, it presents each perspective's view of human nature and closes with comments on the future of psychology as a science.

Loosely considered, human nature and science share certain features, for science is a human endeavor. Contrary to much thought, it is not a completely impersonal, omnipotent force, functioning apart from the human condition. Science includes checks and balances not regularly encountered in everyday life, but of course it is not impervious to internal, personal influences. Scientists are human beings, possessing wisdom and biases, creativity and failings. In a general way, they show human qualities not so different from those of Bertha and Breuer and all others. Our brain is a thinking brain and also an emotional brain.

Then, too, the people who manage the funds for scientific research are also human beings, each with personal preferences, fears, rivalries, and so forth, favoring some research programs, necessarily ignoring or rejecting others. Human hopes and foibles exist in all spheres of human life, including the management of human institutions.

In managing The Home for many years, Bertha showed obvious human skills and frailties, including sometimes painful discrimination, favoring some children and not others—until she grew too old and tired for this full-time work. Then in her mid-seventies, she confronted the uncertain prospects of old age, including her increasing ailments. “Who can make long plans with a bad gallbladder?” she complained. But she made them anyway.

She decided to return to Vienna one last time. There she visited old friends and familiar places and divested herself of her cherished laces, donating them to the Capital Museum for Arts and Crafts. She browsed among the book stalls and rummage stores of her childhood and then met with Wilhelm, prepared for a confrontation.

Bertha typically did not think about her own verbal aggression. Yet she regularly inflicted wounds on others. At The Home, she fired staff members callously, calling them unfit to care for themselves—their own bodies, minds, and homes. At board meetings, she openly rebuked members not only for their ideas but even for their personal grooming. Whenever a donor to The Home presented a gift of doubtful value, she “thanked” the contributor with a rather stern note (Edinger, 1968; Freeman, 1972).

This verbal aggression yielded gains for Bertha on many fronts—but it gained her no friendships. Apparently unaware of its consequences, she often wondered why she was so lonely. According to relatives and

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colleagues, she never showed any concern about her scathing remarks, though deeply troubled by aggression in others (Edinger, 1968).

“I've often thought that if there's nothing to love,” she said on another occasion, “to hate something is a good substitute” (Edinger, 1968).

Verbal or physical, expressed individually or in a group, aggression remains a serious problem for humanity. Most perspectives investigate this issue, and their diverse approaches focus on a number of contributing factors within and outside the individual.

Multiple Bases of Behavior

At the outset, some definitions are in order. In brief terms, aggression is behavior directed toward another individual for the purpose of causing harm. The aggressor believes that the behavior will cause harm and that the potential victim would be or is motivated to avoid it. A high level of aggression, called violence, is aimed at causing extreme harm.

At any level, aggression can be hostile or instrumental. Thus, hostile aggression involves impulsive behavior, driven by unplanned anger and the goal of harming a victim. Also called reactive aggression, it occurs as a response to some perceived transgression. In contrast, instrumental aggression involves pursuit of some other goal, apart from harming another individual, who becomes a victim as a byproduct of the action. This aggression serves as a means or an instrument for attaining that goal. In other words, both types involve an intention to harm, but they differ in the ultimate purpose, serving primarily to induce harm or to gain some profit (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). These definitions can apply to physical aggression, involving bodily injury, and verbal aggression, occurring through hostile words, both of which can produce mental, emotional, and other psychological harm.

The Search for Causes

When it comes to physical aggression, the chief hypotheses in biological psychology concern testosterone, a sex hormone produced primarily in males but found in both sexes. This chemical substance influences motivation and emotion by acting on various brain areas, including the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus, in turn, influences the endocrine system and therefore the secretion of testosterone. Studies of diverse species have shown that male animals injected with testosterone attack others they would normally ignore or even avoid, and females injected with testosterone become increasingly aggressive. Aggression in boys rises with the onset of testosterone secretion at puberty, and violent men have elevated levels of testosterone (Archer, 1996; Mazur & Booth, 1999). Throughout experimental and clinical studies with animals and people, testosterone emerges as an influential factor in aggression.

The implication of testosterone makes it tempting to say, “There is the cause—the reason for aggression, especially in men.” But viewing testosterone as the only factor grossly oversimplifies the issue. It prompts a reminder. The fallacy of the single cause wrongly attributes a certain condition or outcome to one and only one factor. Every scientific hypothesis has limits. The testosterone explanation alone becomes overzealous, attributing complex personal and social behavior to a single physiological mechanism, a specific hormone. Low levels of serotonin, for example, also increase aggression. Testosterone appears to be an important contributing factor, but it fluctuates with variations in several factors, including competition and dominance. In fact, testosterone may serve primarily to increase aggression once the behavior has commenced (Virgin & Sapolsky, 1997). And testosterone provides little explanation for the sometimes severe aggression on the part of women against members of their family.

Traditional psychoanalysis hypothesizes that human aggression is an inborn impulse or instinct, automatically driving us toward destructive acts. An element of the id, it functions as a counterpart to the impulse for life and love. But modern psychoanalysis takes a more moderate view, regarding aggression as an innate tendency, its expression dependent on external factors (Marmor & Gorney, 1999). It can become markedly augmented by childhood conflict and other difficult early experiences, such as parental favoritism, family tragedy, and

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cultural patterns. Through repression, the aggressive impulses become hidden, but they do not disappear. They emerge in disguised forms, called unconscious motivation.

In one common disguise, called displaced aggression, the hostility is directed toward some object or individual, not the true, original source of the problem. The individual behaves aggressively instead toward other people and events—criticizing his bosses, gossiping about colleagues, attacking the government, scapegoating minorities, and the like. The hostile feelings become expressed in these diverse ways, but their earlier, underlying causes may remain hidden.

Freud also stressed the harm in verbal aggression. Words, he said, are powerful instruments, the means by which people communicate their feelings and influence one another. They can promote unspeakable good, and they can inflict terrible wounds (Freud, 1927).

For behaviorists, the environment contains the keys to aggression. The basic concept is the reinforcement principle. Behaviors followed by positive consequences tend to be repeated; those that result in no consequence or negative consequences tend to be discarded. On this basis, people become aggressive because they gain certain outcomes (Catania, 1998). Aggressive political campaigns yield advances in the public domain; combative business practices increase profits; doubtful lawsuits produce preposterous fortunes. On the playing field, in the classroom, at work, and even in religious endeavors, the aggressive pursuit of self-interests often results in personal gain, although it can yield socially beneficial outcomes too.

In observational learning, a viewpoint that includes elements of behaviorism and cognitive psychology, children become aggressive partly through modeling the aggressive behavior of parents, other elders, public figures, and television characters. Especially when parents aggressively punish aggression or seem to gain some favorable outcome for their aggression, the child is likely to imitate the parent later (Bandura, 1986).

With its positive outlook, the humanistic approach devotes comparatively greater attention to the origins of aggression than to its mode of expression, concentrating on two potential sources. First, it points to environmental factors, blocking opportunities for self-actualization. This disruption begins with conditions of worth in childhood, leaving the individual likely to engage in antisocial behavior. The second source operates in the other direction, suppressing aggression, and it arises with another central concept in humanistic psychology: empathy. People who understand the distress of someone treated aggressively are less likely to engage in aggression themselves because of their empathetic response to the victim's pain. Research has also shown that low maternal empathy is linked to child abuse (Eisenberg, 2000).

In its traditional form, cognitive psychology focuses not so much on everyday social issues but instead on specific mental activities: visual perception, working memory, inductive and deductive thinking, and so forth. The basic concern lies with how human beings process information, not how they acquire meanings. Nevertheless, research in this perspective includes cognitive studies of the aggressive personality and the role of disciplinary measures in child rearing. The basic rationale states that people develop their own rules about how the social world works and how to respond, and these interpretations guide their behavior (Anderson, 2000). From the viewpoint of social cognition, investigators have also examined the inferences people make about others' aggressiveness (Eron, 2000).

From the evolutionary perspective, aggressive behavior evolved through natural selection, owing to its obvious advantages in survival and reproduction. As noted already, both of these adaptive tasks require aggressive responses: hunting for food, protecting territorial rights, obtaining access to mates, and building shelter (Buss, 1999; Darwin, 1859). In one form or another, aggression occurs in all human societies, and, unlike many animal species, human beings have no innate inhibiting mechanism, such as the submissive response in certain animals, which brings the attack to an end. Men are more physically violent than women, and breeding experiments with animals have shown clear genetic bases for aggression (Maxon, 1998; McGuffin & Thapar, 1998; Rowe, Almeida, & Jacobson, 1999).

Among early Native Americans, their mode of dress characterized different orientations toward aggression. The Zuni wore long, flowing robes, appropriate for their pastoral existence. Warlike instead, Comanches dressed for battle, even in everyday life (Linton, 1949). These differences in dress and behavior in earlier,

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more isolated societies suggest that culture can mold human beings in peaceful or aggressive ways, perhaps even apart from their biological needs.

No perspective or investigation can examine all sides of a question with all sorts of participants and all available methods. Each contributes in its own, restricted way, or it does not address the topic at all (Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 Multiple Bases of Behavior. Diverse causes underlie most human behavior, including eating disorders. Severe eating disorders often appear in adolescence, although signs of potential problems may become evident years earlier, especially low self-esteem, concerns about body image, and unsuccessful dieting (Agras, 2000)

This circumstance raises a vital question. How can several different perspectives contribute useful findings to the same question? The answer lies with the complexity of human behavior. Each perspective considers a different aspect of the behavior. Collectively, they prompt a reminder about the fallacy of the single cause. Psychologists today speak instead about multiple causality, meaning that any complex human reaction is influenced by several factors within and outside the individual. Their number and relationships presumably are finite and orderly. Thus, they are potentially discoverable, but the task remains challenging indeed.

This concept, multiple causality, remains implicit throughout psychology. One justification for presenting psychology in six perspectives lies with the multiple basis of behavior. Along with empiricism and rationalism, multiple causality represents a recurrent theme in the field today.

Convergent Evidence

When answering any research question, a degree of uncertainty always remains. Even the various perspectives together fail to give a full and complete answer. For this reason, psychologists look for convergent evidence, which shows the predominant outcome in a large number of investigations. Individually, each research finding may count for little, but in convergent evidence many different investigations, each somewhat flawed, point to the same general conclusion. In other words, convergent evidence shows the consensus among many studies.

Today's conclusions about the hazards of smoking required a half-century of diverse investigations. Early

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naturalistic observations and surveys suggested a relationship between smoking and cancer. But rebuttals claimed that people who smoked were susceptible to disease. Or they were in ill health anyway and perhaps already had cancer. Then, in clinical settings, case studies showed a higher-than-normal rate of lung cancer among smokers. But the tobacco industry rejected these findings as isolated instances. The clinical evidence was sporadic, not sufficiently scientific and systematic. Then experiments with animals demonstrated a causal outcome; rats given access to a device for “smoking” developed higher rates of cancer than those without this experience. But even these results were not conclusive. They simply showed that rats should not smoke cigarettes. And so it went, on and on, including quasi-experimental studies with human beings, each study adding to the accumulation of findings. Eventually, convergent evidence demonstrated that smoking constitutes a health risk (Viscusi, 1992).

Any judgment about the weight of the evidence of course can still be subjective. For this reason, psychologists often perform a meta-analysis, which literally means an analysis of the analyses—that is, a study of the existing studies. This technique does not involve collecting new data. Instead a metaanalysis reveals the thrust of the overall evidence by examining investigations already completed, using statistical techniques for assessing their significance with respect to sample size, method, results, and so forth. In short, a meta- analysis offers a reasonably objective approach for reaching an overall conclusion about the evidence from numerous investigations.

Since the 1970s, psychologists have studied the influences of aggression in the media. Although no one study by itself makes a convincing case, the overall evidence is convergent, as shown in meta-analyses. Media violence is associated with aggression in the viewers (Murray, 2000). In one extensive experimental study, for example, participants were assigned randomly to view violent programs or programs with other content, and the results showed that aggression in the media significantly increased aggressive behavior in the members of the audience (Wood, Wong, & Cachere, 1991). Evidence of this sort, persuasive for psychologists, has not yet created among the public any momentous demand for diminished aggression in the media.

One reason is that all such findings reflect probabilities. They are not categorical proof of something. In fact, psychologists rarely use the word prove. They speak instead about findings that offer support or some support or no support for one hypothesis or another. Or they speak about findings that confirm or fail to confirm a particular hypothesis.

Investigations show that aggression is associated with poverty. But most poor persons are not aggressive, and some people from affluent circumstances, like Bertha, show aggressive behavior. In other words, psychological research yields probabilistic findings, indicating the likelihood that one factor is associated with another or causes another. Physical abuse often causes aggression in children; delinquency is commonly associated with sexual abuse; and antisocial behavior may be increased by exposure to community violence (Margolin & Gordis, 2000). These outcomes are likely. In the philosophical view known as probabilism, certainty is impossible. Always, there is some doubt, but the probability may be sufficient for making practical decisions. A scientific finding reveals a trend or tendency.

Experiments have shown that after receiving injections of testosterone, animals rise in the dominance hierarchy of their colonies. And after the disappearance of the dominant member, the animals remaining near the top of the hierarchy experience an increase in testosterone. In these animals, biological and environmental factors combine to contribute to aggression. There is a reciprocity between them (Cacioppo, Bernstein, & Crites, 1996).

The same conditions hold for human beings. A person's inherited potential may be fostered in one environment and suppressed in another. Or it may lie fallow. In a rough sense, heredity sets a variable limit on an individual's potential as a warrior, writer, or welfare worker, and environment shapes that potential in various ways.

Several perspectives point out that potential aggression can be molded into socially acceptable or even admired ways, depending on the environment. Freud speculated extensively about aggression in the context of defense mechanisms, a concept that has received support (Cramer, 1997). In one mechanism, called sublimation, aggressive impulses are not openly directed toward adversaries or even innocent people but

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instead toward social conditions that make life difficult for others. In this struggle, the individual gains social approval, or at least tolerance, and at the same time finds at least a partial release for aggressive energy. Bertha's major crusades in life can be viewed in this way.

Freud also speculated about humor, especially in jokes, describing how they can serve as an outlet for latent aggressive tendencies. Near the end of her life, Bertha used humor in this way, writing five witty obituaries for herself, each pretending to take the viewpoint of some group she had opposed: white-slave merchants, anti- feminists, persons opposing aid to prostitutes, well-paid social workers, and Zionist members of her religion. Calling herself “an old and active enemy” of all these people, she concluded each piece with a sarcastic refrain: “What a pity!” (Edinger, 1968; Hirschmüller, 1989). With these fictitious death notices, she pushed back at the opposition.

Shortly thereafter, her gallbladder became infected, and she placed herself in the hands of a surgeon. “I was in such pain in Ischl,” she wrote to The Home, “that I submitted to the claws of Aesculapius” (Edinger, 1968). She received rough treatment from the Greek god of medicine and healing. Then she incurred further illness.

Not long after that trip to Ischl, her condition became critical, left her bedridden, and then proved fatal. At her request, no one delivered a eulogy at the funeral. But Martin Buber, the Austrian philosopher, commemorated her life and career later in a memorial service, noting her vigorous and independent dedication to serving humanity.

Like his contemporaries at that service, he held a very different view of Bertha than the one we have today. Knowing her early illness and family history, and her later tendencies toward verbally aggressive leadership, we view her here in more complex terms, specifically through the different perspectives. They add to our understanding of her textured life, just as that life and work provide a human setting for discussion of these perspectives.

The Perspectives Revisited

These diverse perspectives create a vitality in modern psychology. As the prior discussions show, each makes its own contribution toward our understanding of a particular topic, such as human aggression. Here the focus changes, turning instead to direct comparisons among them and examining their similarities and differences in research and practice.

Orientations in Research

The perspectives are alike in a few basic ways: All of them pursue the study of behavior. All have assets, and all have deficits. And none can investigate the full spectrum of human behavior. Moreover, all run the risk of investigator effects, and all face the challenge of generalizing their findings to various contexts.

Beyond these fairly superficial similarities, what more can be said? Here we come full circle, returning to the research goals, methods, and data analyses described at the outset of this book. Now, with a background in all six perspectives, each can be viewed as inclined toward one or another research orientation, despite their differences in central concepts and theoretical viewpoints.

A moment's reflection shows that most research psychologists pursue nomothetic goals, aiming to establish universal principles of human behavior, which are applicable to people in general or to certain categories of people. To identify these principles, especially cause-and-effect relationships, they study groups of people and employ experimental methods, the most rigorous among all approaches to scientific inquiry. For group findings, they also use the survey. And to interpret the findings, they use statistical analyses, essential for creating precise measurements and understanding relationships among variables. This nomothetic- experimental-statistical orientation to research reflects the longstanding model of the natural sciences, evident in biology, physics, and related fields.

Biological psychology and cognitive psychology, with its computer metaphor, have this research orientation.

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They tend to investigate groups of people, often in controlled experimental settings, and focus on some narrowly defined component of a basic psychological process. Although they do so from different starting points—the body and the mind—they give the highest priority to precision, achieved through experimental methods and statistical analyses. In all phases of research, reliability of measurement remains a fundamental concern. Data analyses typically include descriptive and inferential statistics.

But these perspectives reflect differences as well. Biological psychology sometimes advances through research in exceptional case studies, such as H. M.'s inability to create new memories owing to destruction of the hippocampal areas and Phineas Gage's loss of emotional control following damage to the frontal brain regions. And cognitive psychology, as a complement to its experimental studies, commonly employs methods of naturalistic observation. These studies, focusing on perception, memory, and thinking in everyday environments, are often more relevant but less controlled than the usual laboratory studies.

Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology also reflect a nomothetic-experimental-statistical orientation—but in less traditional ways. Behaviorism seeks universal principles, employs experimental methods, and uses some statistical analyses. But rather than investigating groups of people, it also employs a single-participant experimental design, studying one individual at a time. These experimental studies focus on a narrow range of behaviors in highly controlled environments, making possible individual comparisons and generalizations among them, analyzed largely through descriptive statistics. In these ways, behaviorism has revealed a number of widely recognized universal laws of behavior, ranging from the fundamental principle of reinforcement to many related principles.

Less experimental than the other perspectives, evolutionary psychology fits less clearly in this cluster. Clearly nomothetic, it collects data from large numbers of people, employs inferential statistics, and uses experimental procedures. But in contrast to the other perspectives in this cluster, it places greater reliance on a descriptive method, the survey—using questionnaires, interviews, self-reports, and public records to seek findings consistent across groups and cultures. It also employs naturalistic observation throughout diverse societies, collecting data without the usual controls employed in laboratory settings. Nevertheless, its emphasis on nomothesis, group data, and statistical analyses makes evolutionary psychology a potential entry in this cluster.

But psychology is a complicated enterprise. One cluster cannot accommodate all perspectives. Especially in applied psychology, investigators pursue idiographic goals, aiming to understand a particular individual, event, institution, or other specific instance. To do so, they typically use descriptive research methods, often the traditional case study or naturalistic observation. And the data analyses are commonly thematic, ignoring extensive statistical interventions. This idiographic-descriptive-thematic orientation is guided by a research protocol, a flexible research plan permitting deviations based on unexpected events in the course of the research.

Traditional psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology reflect this orientation. Founded on case studies, psychoanalysis takes a special interest in the unique ways different individuals express and disguise their innermost concerns. With special interest in subjectivity and the self, humanistic psychology also relies heavily on the case study for flexibility in data collection and analyses, supplemented by observational methods and the survey as well. The complexity of any individual human being requires this broad, flexible approach, especially in the areas of personality and clinical psychology (Ozer, 2000).

Both perspectives sometimes forego opportunities for increased precision in favor of the greater breadth and improvisation essential in the study of particular instances. In this context, the traditional case study stands in marked contrast to the single-participant experiment. It takes place in a less controlled setting with less precise measurements, almost inevitably yielding a less rigorous conclusion. In these ways, traditional psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology may proceed beyond the borders of modern science and mainstream psychology. Contemporary research on psychoanalytic concepts is a different matter, employing carefully controlled experimental methods (Westen, 1998).

On these bases, the six perspectives fall into a pair of clusters. Those in the cluster of four—biological, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology, along with behaviorism—maintain a quantitative orientation, studying

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a large number of participants in a restricted, well-defined way, obtaining a narrow band of information about people in general. As basic research, they aim to discover precise relationships between two or a few well-defined variables. Often oriented toward the laboratory, they typically pursue nomothetic goals, use experimental or survey methods, and employ statistical analyses. In the fashion of the natural sciences, they search for universals.

Proceeding in almost the opposite direction, traditional psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology maintain a more qualitative orientation, investigating a particular instance—pointing to the distinguishing attributes of some person, event, small group, or institution. They aim to present the fullest description feasible of its essential nature. More often associated with questions outside the laboratory, they tend to pursue idiographic goals, use descriptive methods—especially participant observation and case studies—and employ thematic analyses, sometimes supported by basic statistics. In a flexible fashion, they become more involved with everyday life and holistic concerns.

In ordinary language, the quantitative orientation places a primary emphasis on precision; the qualitative orientation gives greater priority to fullness and relevance. Both orientations would like precision as well as fullness and relevance if they could have them, but all research requires such choices. This necessity marks a major issue and schism in the scientific study of behavior, dating back even to William James's pioneering efforts in psychology.

The quantitative orientation is primarily deductive, proceeding from a hypothesis to the collection of data; this research approach is widely used in modern psychology. Called hypothesis testing, the investigator aims to discover whether a certain theory or hypothesis will be supported by the data collected in a particular investigation. This research is often conceived in three steps: forming a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and verifying the results. But these idealized steps do not reflect the less orderly nature of much research.

The qualitative orientation is more flexible and often inductive, proceeding in the opposite direction—from data collection to the construction of hypotheses or theories. The aim is to develop concepts and theories from the data. Sometimes loosely known as exploratory research, especially in naturalistic observation, investigators may examine some behavior or event with no clear hypothesis in mind (Chiesa, 1994). And the investigation may include an intuitive, subjective dimension, along with more objective procedures.

In summary, the quantitative perspectives commonly address science-oriented questions with the highest possible precision in measurement and statistical analyses. The qualitative perspectives tend to focus on more human-oriented questions in the broader context of everyday experience. The data from both approaches require interpretations, though with greater structure in quantitative analyses and greater flexibility in qualitative analyses. In fact, throughout the research process—planning the project, collecting data, analyzing the data, and writing the report—the stages of quantitative inquiry are more fixed and specific, those in qualitative inquiry more variable.

No one research orientation always serves best. Ideally, as science advances, the objective, reductionistic, numerical procedures in the quantitative orientation can be complemented by the subjective, more holistic, interpretive procedures in qualitative research (Runyan, 1984). Together, they offer a range of research options.

Eclecticism in Practice

In its short history, psychology has evolved in numerous ways, readily evident in its different perspectives. Often emerging as protests against the status quo, these perspectives have also arisen as a way to establish their own workable boundaries within this vast discipline. Thereby, they have modified and advanced the field.

These perspectives are now less distinct from one another than they were decades ago—when they were known as systems of psychology. Improved research methods have increased psychological knowledge and stimulated them to become broader and more flexible. There are now many varieties of biological psychologists, psychoanalysts, behaviorists, and so forth, and many of them simply call themselves psychologists. Nevertheless, readers pondering these different schools of thought sometimes expect an

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assessment, some measure of their overall merit.

From the standpoint of dualistic thinking, all knowledge is either right or wrong, or it falls into two other categories: known or unknown. In any case, this incorrect notion of absolutes states that there is only one right answer, one best perspective (Perry, 1970). But most dualistic thinking eventually becomes eroded by the complexities of our environment.

Even superficial scrutiny shows that human knowledge is incomplete. Even the experts sometimes disagree. In multiplistic thinking, an element of doubt enters, producing three categories: right, wrong, and uncertain. Ultimate truths cannot be known; therefore, no perspective is better than any other. It makes no difference which is adopted.

But some answers are better than others, depending on the context. According to contextual thinking, all knowledge must be understood and evaluated with reference to a specific situation or circumstance. In an instance of aggression, the behaviorist considers reinforcement history. In the same or another instance, biological psychology examines brain activity. The observer decides on the usefulness of a particular perspective in a particular context (Perry, 1970).

The special comfort Bertha experienced with the dark Biedermeier cabinet seems best understood from the viewpoint of behaviorism. No other perspective offers an equally compelling explanation for her strongly favorable reaction to that piece of furniture, apparently attributable in a large measure to classical conditioning. Its aesthetic qualities and Bertha's knowledge of its history may have played a role too, as suggested in cognitive psychology. But the behavioristic perspective in particular points to Bertha's emotional reaction.

With regard to her avoidance of snakes, preference for sweets, language acquisition, and recognition of facial expressions of emotion, the evolutionary perspective offers a promising interpretation. Evolved psychological mechanisms may underlie all these behaviors. In lesser ways, other perspectives may be relevant too, as emphasized in the concept of multiple causality.

Contextual thinking is also called relativistic thinking, for a decision is reached in relation to a particular situation. Our world is one of contingent knowledge and divergent values (Perry, 1970). Each perspective contributes in its own way, broadly or narrowly, in one setting or another. No one perspective serves best in all circumstances.

Contextual thinking, together with the increasingly permeable boundaries among these perspectives, has promoted in applied psychology a tendency toward eclecticism, which means being selective. In eclecticism, a person selects whatever perspectives, or whatever features of one or another perspective, seem most useful in a given circumstance. A natural outgrowth of contextual thinking, eclecticism has become increasingly prominent in certain realms of applied psychology, notably psychotherapy. A flexible, pragmatic spirit pervades this approach, which is not bound to any single viewpoint.

In research, many psychologists continue to work within one or another perspective, maintaining a systematic emphasis on a particular set of concepts, such as modularity doctrine or the reinforcement principle. They become experts in that approach, conducting their investigations with the highly specialized knowledge essential in modern research. Alert to useful developments, they may use behavioristic models for research in biological psychology, for example, or employ evolutionary theory in studying cognitive concepts. But investigators typically remain within a given sphere.

In practice, many psychologists today become eclectic by design, offering an array of techniques in psychotherapy, thereby better meeting individual needs in a particular instance. They aim to transcend the limitations of one school of thought. Broadly based, multimodal therapy combines methods from the different perspectives, though without necessarily developing a fully integrated practice (Wachtel, 2000). Behavior therapy, psychoanalysis, and cognitive therapy may be used with different people experiencing different adjustment problems or, less likely, with one person at different stages of the therapeutic process. The goal is to take advantage of the different strengths of the various perspectives. But eclecticism, in turn, requires the

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sacrifice of greater expertise in a particular approach.

One notable combination of methods today occurs in cognitive behavior therapy, which includes a cognitive element focused on conscious thought and a behavioral element directed to less mindful habits. The assumption is that both conditions contribute to adjustment disorders and therefore both must be considered in therapy (Brewin, 1996). Cognitive behavior therapy aims in both directions: to diminish irrational thinking and to reinforce desirable ways of behaving. On this basis, it incorporates from behavior therapy the reinforcement principle and such techniques as contingency management, observational learning, and systematic desensitization. From cognitive therapy, it includes methods for reducing irrational or inappropriate thinking, such as the ABC technique, categories of maladaptive thought, and reframing. With this concern for changing behavior and thinking, cognitive behavior therapy has achieved widespread popularity. Also, it includes diverse forms of homework, such as keeping a journal of thoughts and behaviors; it focuses on ways of testing beliefs; and it identifies reinforcement contingencies (Kendall, Krain, & Henin, 2000).

Consulting psychology requires considerable eclecticism, for it encounters a variety of problems in many spheres of everyday life: education, medicine, law, business, and other contexts. To become most effective, consulting psychologists must employ an array of methods for reaching useful decisions about people and situations, thereby resolving a wide variety of psychological problems. Each problem must be examined in a flexible manner, each for its own complex content and unique characteristics.

This book depicts an eclectic outlook. Each perspective appears in a different phase of Bertha's life, one well suited to illustrate its particular concepts and merits: the biological perspective through her treatment for neurological problems in a Swiss hospital; psychoanalysis amid her relapses, fantasies, and growing interest in storytelling; behaviorism in her entry into the world of work at the orphanage; humanistic psychology through the fulfillment she experienced with The Home in Neu-Isenburg; the cognitive perspective in her dedication to the feminist cause; and evolutionary psychology amid the issues raised in her unsuccessful journey to the brothels.

But Bertha never knew that her last journey to Vienna also proved to be a failure. She returned one final time for something more than books and laces and a meeting with Wilhelm. She made extensive efforts to destroy all remaining evidence of her psychological disorder experienced 55 years earlier, cautioning members of her extended family against speaking about that part of her life.

It came to light anyway. Years later, on a trip to Vienna, one of Freud's biographers discovered Anna O.'s true identity—common knowledge among her relatives. Then he revealed it to the world as a footnote in his three- volume work on Freud, which was widely read at the time (Jones, 1953). He did so, he said, to honor Bertha's achievement. Through her self-styled therapy with Breuer, she became the real discoverer of the cathartic method of psychotherapy. Her name deserved commemoration.

Protesting vigorously, the Pappenheim family regarded the gain as irrelevant, the cost as momentous. A Homberger cousin tried to rescue Bertha, or at least to save the family reputation, writing an open letter of protest (Guttmann, 2001).

But Bertha only added to her modern reputation when she failed to cover the traces of her earlier illness. With our remarkably different attitudes today, she becomes all the more admirable for her impressive response to mental disorder.

Psychology in the Making

Since the dark days of Anna O., psychology has expanded enormously, including the emergence of its systematic perspectives. Its national associations in the United States, not even in existence when Bertha arrived in Frankfurt, have grown to include more than 100,000 members. These associations include more than 50 specializations, each adhering to its own concepts and goals, methods and assumptions, jargons and journals. Today many hundreds of psychology research journals publish new issues on a regular basis.

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Unfinished Business

Despite this vigorous growth, psychology's overall goals remain—to gain greater understanding of human behavior and experience and to improve the human condition. In fact, the permanence of these goals prompted William James to describe them as psychology's “unfinished business.” Further work always remains. New research findings extend, challenge, or supplant the old, as the cycle repeats itself again and again.

Research proceeds at an irregular pace, and discoveries vary widely in importance. This unpredictable progress readily appears in research on a popular topic: “human nature.” The difficulty in measuring this concept, and even defining it, contributes to this unfinished business.

Consider these examples. Someone parks a car illegally. Someone else assists an adult with a baby. Children want to dress like their friends. People loosely describe such acts as human nature. But they cannot be human nature, for they are not characteristic throughout our species. Not everyone engages in these behaviors.

Strictly speaking, nature refers only to the natural world, including the laws and principles guiding our universe. From this standpoint, human nature refers to the psychological and behavioral characteristics and tendencies in people that distinguish them from animals and that remain when the influences of nurture have been discounted. But that definition is so broad that the term has no firm usage in psychology. Implicitly, it means “without nurture,” excluding the endless behavioral tendencies acquired during our lifetimes.

But that condition is impossible because nurture begins even before birth. During any human pregnancy, nature is modified by the woman's ingestion of substances, exposure to emotional circumstances, regularity of exercise and sleep, and other events. But ignoring these influences—exceedingly difficult to measure—what are the natural tendencies of newborn human beings? An age-old question arises: Are human beings by nature basically good or basically evil? It has challenged philosophers and lay persons throughout human history.

Investigators in psychology's first laboratory studied biological and cognitive psychology without making extensive speculations about human nature. Each perspective today maintains its special interest in the human body or the human mind, respectively. Both biological and cognitive psychology point to characteristics deemed uniquely human. But in this process, neither has reached any fundamental, widely recognized philosophical position about the essential, innate tendencies of human beings.

The other perspectives have taken stronger, distinctly different positions. Psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, behaviorism, and evolutionary psychology leave little doubt about their views.

Traditional psychoanalysis describes human nature in pessimistic, negative terms. People are not gentle creatures waiting to be loved, Freud declared. They are endowed instead with a powerful element of aggressiveness, waiting to exploit a neighbor in the workplace, to take advantage of a person sexually, to gain someone else's possessions, even to humiliate another individual. After listening to his patients describe their lives, Freud challenged his readers to dispute this conclusion.

Socialization, he continued, restricts our satisfactions in life. It imposes such sacrifices on human aggression and sexuality that people cannot be happy. Unconscious motivation to emit these behaviors remains constantly at odds with the social order. Nothing is so contrary to human nature as the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself (Freud, 1930). The mutual hostility of human beings constantly threatens their civilization with disintegration.

Experiences in everyday life, and especially World War I, prompted Freud to hold this view. Since his day, with warfare around the globe, many people have adopted this troubled outlook. Broad and vaguely articulated, it may be part of the answer—but no final statement.

Humanistic psychology takes the opposite stance, viewing human nature as basically positive. Rogers'

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concept of the actualizing tendency underlies this optimistic outlook. This capacity for growth, inherent in all living creatures, promotes fulfillment of one's potential, providing it is not obstructed by external forces (Rogers, 1951).

During his career, Rogers envisioned people with this potential living successfully in a rapidly evolving culture, adapting to its changes, experiencing personal growth and the satisfying use of their abilities. He foresaw them as open to new experiences, both external and within themselves; desiring a wholeness in life, expressed in the integration of thoughts, feelings, and physical energy; acutely aware that life is always changing; and caring for others in a nonjudgmental way (Rogers, 1980). He also urged that we assist people in communicating more successfully with one another, especially in nonverbal ways (Rogers & Russell, 2002).

Human beings cherish the natural world, according to Rogers. They must form an alliance with it, rather than aim to conquer it, a view now shared by many in our global economy.

Needless to say, the traditional psychoanalyst and humanistic psychologist would not make promising dinner partners. They are poles apart in their views of human nature.

And it is not true, as sometimes alleged, that radical behaviorism takes no position on human nature. It too adopts a clear stance: There is no such thing as human nature—until the environment becomes influential. Resisting both prior perspectives, Skinner declares in Walden Two no faith at all in human nature. He has nothing to do with ideas of innate goodness and evil. His faith lies instead with our capacity to create and change human behavior (Skinner, 1948).

Applications of behaviorism have produced impressive techniques for behavior modification in everyday life, including remarkable assistance for people with presumably inborn, intractable personal problems. But these achievements do not demonstrate that human beings have no human nature—no substantial innate behavioral tendencies.

The psychoanalytic, humanistic, and behavioristic perspectives stand at odds with one another. In further juxtaposition, evolutionary psychology resists all of them, including behaviorism's blank slate. It states that human nature is not bad, not good, and not completely absent.

From the evolutionary perspective, we possess at birth an assembly of inborn, independent psychological predispositions, and they are components of our human nature. These evolved psychological mechanisms are activated by specific circumstances in everyday life and related to problems of survival and reproduction in ancestral eras. In modern society, some are negative, others positive. The so-called negative mechanisms arouse fear, anger, jealousy, and related emotions. In bygone millennia, they promoted successful responses to dangerous situations and engendered competition among human beings (Buss, 2000).

The more positive evolved mechanisms, including mate and food preferences, kinship patterns, and social exchange, contributed to happiness. Natural selection has designed in human beings certain landscape preferences, for example, favoring patterns of good weather and signs of the harvest, resisting dense forests and completely open plains. For living spaces, human beings consistently prefer savanna-like landscapes over other natural and even human-made environments (Buss, 1995a, 2000).

According to the evolutionary perspective, at least a portion of human nature appears in these highly evolved psychological mechanisms, positive and negative. Human nature includes the many ways in which natural selection, over the eons of human prehistory, designed us for survival and reproduction.

In summary, these four perspectives show successively different responses to the question of human nature, appearing almost completely independent of one another. And yet each may contain an element of truth. It is noteworthy too that the earlier, more philosophical perspectives—psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and behaviorism—all take firm categorical positions. Among the later, more topical perspectives, evolutionary psychology approaches human nature in pluralistic fashion, including a mixture of inborn “programs.” And modern biological and cognitive psychology, if forced to a position, would move toward evolutionary psychology, reflecting the interest in mind-brain systems and subsystems.

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The question of human nature puzzled the ancient Greek philosophers, stimulated interest through the Renaissance, rose again during the Enlightenment, and poses a substantial challenge in our own era of science. For example, one piece of this unfinished business concerns the ways in which the subsystems in our mind-brain apparatus are sufficiently malleable to result in learning completely novel adult tasks. At the same time, they must be sufficiently fixed to learn human language, understand facial expressions, comprehend physical space, and acquire at a very early age countless other dimensions of a human culture (Pinker, 2002). Continued inquiry into the nature of human nature appears essential for humankind. Knowledge and assumptions about our nature underlie all debate about human values, human society, and the optimal conditions for human development (Leahey, 2000).

Pathways and Prospects

This book began with observations about the breadth of modern psychology and the life of Anna O. Then it turned to the six perspectives, one by one, encountering in that process various stages in Bertha's career. Here, following a brief testimony to her work, it presents issues in contemporary psychology and conclusions about psychology's future directions.

Broad public acclaim came to Bertha decades after her death. In 1954, her adopted country issued a series of commemorative postage stamps called Helpers of Humanity. On one of them, the German government honored her life and work: Bertha Pappenheim, Pioneer Social Worker.

Modern psychology also remembers her in a special way—as the spirited but deeply troubled Anna O., who led Breuer to the “talking cure.” She thereby became a pioneer in psychotherapy too.

Looking backward on someone's life is one matter. Looking ahead, forecasting psychology's pathways and prospects, becomes more challenging, especially in a field with distinct growing pains, inevitable in any rapidly developing human enterprise. Psychology's growing pains have appeared in three major contexts: the gap between psychology's two cultures—research and practice, its overlapping borders with other disciplines, and its current trajectory of intermittent new perspectives. In these respects, youthful psychology faces an uncertain future, especially in comparison with the more established natural sciences.

Almost since its inception, psychology has experienced the challenge of maintaining two identities: a scientific stance in research and a professional posture in everyday life. In fact, only a few decades after the founding of its original national organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), the practicing membership also formed its own group, the American Association of Applied Psychology. After a brief period, the applied psychologists reverted to the original APA group, but 50 years later another split occurred, this time initiated by the research psychologists. Many of them joined the Association for Psychological Science (APS), as it is called today, devoted strictly to the advancement of psychological science at the national and international levels, encouraging cooperation among all scientists in fields of psychology (Hakel & Herring, 2000). Many psychologists today are members of both organizations. But these rifts, initiated by each group, testify to the ideological and practical differences between them.

The scientists view the field from a deterministic, generally reductionistic standpoint, emphasizing objectivity in the study of psychological phenomena. Practitioners, especially those in human services, often work in a more holistic, interpretive fashion, recognizing subjectivity as the fundamental human experience (Kimble, 1984). The competent practitioner employs scientific thinking and scientific instruments, but the analysis of data becomes a more judgmental, interpretive task. The practitioner can build a case for one conclusion or another but, without sufficient controls, cannot rule out alternative explanations.

This breach between scientific and practical goals is not confined to psychology. It appears throughout human inquiry. But it is unusual to find both goals so vigorously pursued in the same discipline. In coming decades, the term psychologist may continue to understate the differences between these spheres.

A separate but related challenge appears in psychology's overlapping borders with other disciplines. Spread in so many directions, the field may cease to remain a single endeavor and instead become gradually absorbed into those related fields. Biological psychology may merge into departments of neuro-science

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or medicine, cognitive psychology into computer or cognitive science. Psychoanalysis, with its massive conceptual framework for idiographic studies, may continue to flourish in departments of humanities (Scott, 1991). The trend toward interdisciplinary approaches may include humanistic psychology in philosophical studies and behaviorism in schools of education, business, nursing, and other professional enterprises, perhaps affiliated with a practice-oriented social psychology. And evolutionary psychology may develop a closer alliance with departments of organismic and evolutionary biology.

Many of psychology's major advancements have occurred at these boundaries. In the long view, it matters little whether they are credited to psychology or to interdisciplinary approaches (Hilgard, 1988).

But psychology's remarkable early growth suggests that it will not become dispersed into these related disciplines. Instead, absorption may take place in the opposite direction. Other disciplines in behavioral science may look to psychology for leadership and innovation, especially as it acquires increasingly sophisticated research methods and instruments. Some of these related disciplines may become part of an even broader field of psychology.

And, finally, apart from the two cultures and related disciplines, there is the question about psychology's overall pathway. Lacking a paradigm, will the field continue its past pattern, producing another new perspective in the next generation or so? For many psychologists, this trend is a healthy, expected condition in an emerging field. Systems of thought develop without a paradigm, and the behavioral sciences currently may be suited to this status.

Perhaps, instead, two or three perspectives may become increasingly allied, as suggested in the recent exchanges among biological, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology. Pushing research frontiers toward mind-brain-behavior relations, they have taken a stand against popular opinion and the older perspectives—psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanistic psychology. This trend suggests that modern psychology is moving away from systematic, philosophically based perspectives toward more open-ended, research-oriented subfields. The history of any science reveals such trends, reflecting the successive changes in questions the field has addressed (Kagan, 2006).

Implicitly or explicitly, the earlier perspectives regard the mind-brain mechanism as a general problem solver. Psychoanalysis views the mind largely in terms of levels of awareness, without any prominent attention to its specialized functions. Behaviorism, with no substantial interest in human mental life, approaches learning as an almost infinitely flexible process guiding the acquisition of behavior. And humanistic psychology, focusing on subjective experience, devotes almost no attention to the architecture of the human mind.

The newer approaches view mind-brain-behavior relations in terms of special systems or functions. A system is a set of relationships among parts concerned with the same larger function, forming a single whole. In systems analysis, scientists aim at understanding a system, a complex yet unitary function, in terms of the relations among its parts or subsystems. Of course the relevant parts in psychology are not pieces of hardware or software, as in systems analysis with computers. In a group of people, they are the individuals. In one individual, they are that person's organs, the larger parts including smaller parts as further components or subsystems. In the biological sphere, the cells are basic parts; aggregates of cells form tissues; tissue collections become organs; organs, in turn, form components or systems in the individual—digestive, skeletal, endocrine, and others. In the social realm, systems appear in families, commercial institutions, religious groups, and countless other organizations of individuals (Rapoport, 1968).

Modern biological psychologists, using the latest equipment, view the brain according to modularity doctrine. Our brain operates through the interaction of distinct units, systems, or modules, each functioning in an independent but coordinated fashion with other brain systems. In cognitive psychology, investigators speak of the mind as composed of domain-specific, or content-specific, problem-solvers, processing at the same time the different features of a particular scene—such as color, size, and shape—and doing so in distributed fashion, meaning in different brain regions. These parallel but separate systems produce integrated information, although it is not yet clear how they do so or how they are mapped onto specific brain modules. And in the evolutionary approach, evolved psychological mechanisms are viewed as innate dispositions to respond in specific ways to narrow bands of information related to survival and reproduction. According

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to these perspectives, the human mind is not one all-purpose, problem-solving device—an outlook also consistent with a systems approach.

From this standpoint, understanding how we experience integrated information becomes a substantial research challenge. Investigators today informally speak of this integrative communication as “cross talk,” meaning the inferred but as yet unknown ways in which the systems and subsystems send messages to one another.

These modern perspectives—biological, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology—share a more textured, pluralistic view of mind-brain mechanisms, partly because the necessary instrumentation has become available to reveal it. Loosely united through the concept of evolution, they may become more closely connected as a single, overarching model, integrating some of psychology's perspectives and linking the field with other life sciences (Buss, 1999).

If such an integration occurs, it may alter the protest-and-replace pattern evident among prior perspectives, perhaps marking instead movement toward a paradigm, accompanied by substantial challenges. Biologically based inquiry would need to be integrated with studies of individual and group behavior. Emerging from cognitive and biological psychology as well as evolutionary influences, cognitive neuroscience, for example, aims to discover how the brain creates the mind (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992). But its contribution to our knowledge of human behavior demands greater understanding of the complex relationships among findings from various levels of research, reductionistic and holistic, across the broad spectrum. According to some scholars, cognitive neuroscience is not part of psychology but instead is a reductionistic, interdisciplinary field, whereas the study of behavior remains at the center of mainstream psychology (Tagler, 2000).

Psychology instead may be suited to a pre-paradigmatic stage. Its focus on human behavior, and especially the human brain, greatly complicates scientific study, resulting in divergent views about the proper course of the field. In fact, communities of social scientists addressing behavioral questions show more and larger disagreements about legitimate scientific questions than do communities of natural scientists addressing the purely physical world (Kuhn, 1970). The fact that none of the behavioral or social sciences has achieved paradigmatic status suggests a fundamental difference from the natural sciences.

At this point, it is not clear whether psychology should even be viewed in the context of the so-called stages of science: pre-paradigmatic, paradigmatic, revolt, and then a new paradigm. Moreover, a basic tension exists within psychology, reflecting the contrasting worldviews of the natural and social sciences, the former more objective and rationalist, the latter more subjectivist and relativist. Both conditions reveal unsettled issues in contemporary psychology, characterized today by an emphasis on specialization, apparently at the cost of integration in inquiry (Driver-Linn, 2003; Kashdan & Steger, 2004).

If psychology does develop a paradigm, that model may not follow the pattern of the natural sciences, which implies that all causal forces operate upward from lower-level phenomena. It may give way to a model in which we study ourselves from a more reciprocal framework, stressing functional relations in both directions—upward from the more molecular components in human physiology and downward from the more molar elements in social life and culture. With this model, we would expect to obtain the most penetrating findings not from the smallest pieces of physical reality alone but together in their patterning with larger elements in our environment. This two-directional model, up and down, would offer a new way of comprehending ourselves and the nature of reality (Sperry, 1995). In more familiar terms, it would move away from the contemporary emphasis on reductionism to include more holistic concerns, concentrating on systems analysis and the patterning of factors at various levels of complexity.

In conclusion, these persistent issues—the scientist-practitioner split, relations with allied fields, and prospects for a paradigm—are major components of psychology's identity problems. They reflect psychology's growing pains—not a surprising condition in a young, vigorous, growing field—and they raise questions about forthcoming developments. But growing pains are rarely lethal, and they often become instructive (Rychlak & Struckman, 2000). In fact, they can be regarded as favorable signs.

In any case, psychology's emphasis on empiricism should continue; in fact, it is often cited as the field's

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1.

2.

3.

unifying characteristic. And productive empiricism requires rationalism, promoting psychology's theoretical achievements. These twin themes—empiricism and rationalism—appear throughout the field, along with the concept of multiple causality. In historical perspective, psychology reflects these three themes. Its most prominent schools of thought have emerged in this context, each with its particular leadership, times, and settings.

Summary

Multiple Bases of Behavior

The various perspectives address the complexity of human behavior in diverse ways, and their findings remain probabilistic, indicating the likelihood that one condition is associated with another or causes another. Hence, advancements in knowledge occur through convergent evidence, in which different investigations and perspectives point to the same conclusion. Multiple causality states that behavior is typically influenced by several factors both inside and outside an individual.

Key Terms: aggression, fallacy of the single cause, multiple causality, convergent evidence, meta-analysis, probabilistic findings

The Perspectives Revisited

Biological and cognitive psychology maintain a quantitative research orientation, evident in predominantly nomothetic goals, experimental methods, and statistical analyses. Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology do so with less emphasis on traditional experimental methods. Traditional psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology maintain a more qualitative research orientation, commonly with idiographic goals, descriptive methods, and thematic analyses. Many practitioners today use these perspectives in an eclectic fashion.

Key Terms: quantitative orientation, qualitative orientation, contextual thinking, eclecticism, multimodal therapy, cognitive behavior therapy

Psychology in the Making

Human nature is viewed as negative in psychoanalysis, positive in humanistic psychology, nonexistent in behaviorism, and multifaceted in evolutionary psychology, an outlook generally compatible with findings and theories in biological and cognitive psychology. Questions about psychology's future concern the breach between its scientific and applied dimensions, its eventual relationships with allied fields, and its progression toward further perspectives or perhaps a paradigm.

Key Terms: human nature, systems analysis

Critical Thinking

A man planning to purchase a car reads numerous consumer reports. Indicate how contextual thinking may underlie his eventual choice. Describe human sexual behavior from the viewpoint of multiple causality. Make reference to at least four psychological perspectives. Explain how the idea of systems analysis reflects approaches to the mind-brain mechanism proposed in biological, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology. Cite the central concept in each case.

• psychology • evolutionary psychology • cognitive psychology • aggression • biological psychology

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• human nature • behaviorism • orientation • applied psychology • systems analysis

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n10

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