Personality Essays (1356 words) - Behaviorism, Behaviour Therapy

Personality Psychology covers a vast field, and one interesting aspect of it is personality. Personality by itself involves various issues. Some of which basic aspects are Psychoanalytic, Ego, Biological, Behaviorist, Cognitive, Trait, Humanistic and Interactionist. Though personality as a subject fascinates me a lot, what interests me the most in this subject is behaviorism. For me different types of behaviors are amazing to learn about, mainly the behavior therapy, collective behavior, crime and punishment, and Social behavior and peer acceptance in children. I chose Behaviorism over the other aspects because I believe Behavior determines human personality and is very interesting. You can tell what one is by his behavior, and one behaves according to what place he has in society. By doing this paper on Behavior, I hope to get a better understanding of, if behavior develops a personality or if personality guides behavior. I also see behaviorism helping me in the future with my personal and professional career by understanding human personality and behaviour better than I do. No matter what your major is, if you can determine one`s personality by his behavior you can really get your work done from that person and understand the better than you would otherwise. This person could be your employee or your employer. Behavior Therapy Behavior therapy is the application of experimentally derived principles of learning to the treatment of psychological disorders. The concept derives primarily from work of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. Behavior-therapy techniques differ from psychiatric methods, particularly psychoanalysis, in that they are predominately symptom (behaviour) oriented and show little or no concern for unconscious processes, achieving new insight, or effecting fundamental personality change. Behavior therapy was popularized by the U.S. psychologist B.F. Skinner, who worked with mental patients in a Massachusetts state hospital. From his work in animal learning, Skinner found that the establishment and extinction of responses can be determined by the way reinforcers, or rewards, are given. The pattern of reward giving, both in time and frequency, is known as a schedule of reinforcement. The gradual change in behavior in approximation of the desired result is known as shaping. More recent developments in behavior therapy emphasize the adaptive nature of cognitive processes. Behaviour-therapy techniques have been applied with some success to such disturbances as enuresis (bed-wetting), tics, phobias, stuttering, obsessive-compulsive behavior, drug addiction, neurotic behaviours of normal persons, and some psychotic conditions. It has also been used in training the mentally retarded. Collective Behavior Much of collective behaviour is dramatic, unpredictable and frightening, so the early theories and many contemporary popular views are more evaluative than analytic. The French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon identified the crowd and revolutionary movements with the excesses of the French Revolution; the U.S. psychologist Boris Sidis was impressed with the resemblance of crowd behavior to mental disorder. Many of these early theories depicted collective behaviour returned to an earlier stage of development. Freud retained this emphasis in viewing crowd behaviour and many other forms of collective behaviour as regressions to an earlier stage of childhood development; he explained, for example, the slavish identification that followers have for leaders on the basis of such regression. More sophisticated recent efforts to treat collective behavior as a pathological manifestation employ social disorganization as an explanatory approach. From this point of view collective behavior erupts as an unpleasant symptom of frustration and malaise stemming from cultural conflict, organizational failure, and other social malfunctions. The distinctive feature of this approach is a reluctance to take seriously the manifest contest of collective behaviour. Neither the search for enjoyment in recreational fad, the search for spiritual meaning on a religious sect, nor the demand for equal opportunity in an interest-group movement is accepted to face value. An opposite evaluation of many forms of collective behaviour has become part of the analytic perspective in revolutionary approaches to society. From the revolutionists point of view a much collective behavior is a release of creative impulses from the repressive effects of establish social orders. Revolutionary theorists such as Frantz Fanon depict traditional social arrangements as destructive of human spontaneity, and various forms of crowd and revolutionary movements as mans creative self-assertion bursting its social shackles. (MSN behaviorism Search/types of behaviors.) Crime and Punishment Psychologists have approached the task of explaining delinquent behavior by examining in particular the processes by which behaviour and restraints on behaviour are learned. (MSN behaviorism Search/crime and punishment) Criminality is seen to result from the failure of the superego, as a consequence either of its incompletes development or of unusually strong instinctual drives. The empirical basis for such a theory is necessarily thin. Behaviour theory views all behaviour