Contemporary Developments in Psychology and Counseling Essay

Every human behavior includes in an events and activities that a human being show in his lifetime. Human’s intelligence and creativeness produced great inventions that prolong human lives and make living on this earth convenient. But at the same time human intelligence have produced life threatening inventions that can take away lives at the press of a button. In other words, men nurtures and protect his fellow human and at the same time destroys them. And so with these, we became curious. â€Å"Why do people behave the way they do?† with these problem we can now enter the world of Psychology. Psychology nowadays is universally defined as the science of scientific study of behavior and mental processes. And under this field of Psychology there are major areas which are the biopsychology, experimental psychology, developmental and personality psychology, health clinical and counseling psychology and social-industrial-organizational consumer and cross cultural psychology. And under this field we have the cognitive learning which assumes that learning results from thinking and other mental processes. Cognitive learning grew from a combination of Gestalt psychology and Behavioral Psychology. Cognitive Perspective focuses on how a person knows, understands and thinks about his or her environment. The Development of Cognitive Learning was according to the theory of Jean Piaget a Swiss Psychologist. He states that mental development undergoes different stages from birth until adolescence when a person acquired most of the cognitive functions. Some scientist also made their studies about the so-called Cognitive learning. Like Edward Tolman and Wolfgang Kohler. According to Tolman all organisms are capable of thinking. He believes that organisms takes in the information and use it to adapt to its environment. While Kohler experiment on insight of learning. He suggested that cognitive processes play an important role in learning. Insights are formed suddenly and transferred immediately to other similar problems. There are two steps in the process of cognitive interpretation in emotions. The interpretation of stimuli from the environment The interpretation of stimuli from the body to autonomic arousal As the first method says it means that individuals are not affected by the events but by the interpretation of the individuals on these situations. While the second method means the interpretation of within the body stimuli resulting to autonomic arousal. Another thing, Psychologists categorizes the diverse fields of Psychology under different models, approaches and perspectives. And these are seven perspectives; these are the evolutionary perspective, psychodynamic perspective, behavioral perspective, cognitive perspective, humanistic perspective, biological perspective or neurobiological perspective and neuropsychological perspective. These perspectives help Psychologists to organize their scientific findings to connect them to theories as they seek for further research. References Gines, Adelaida C. General Psychology. Philippines: REX Bookstore, Inc.,2003