The cognitive perspective is concerned with “mental” functions such as memory, perception, attention, etc. It views people as being similar to computers in the way we process information (e.g., input-process-output). For example, both human brains and computers process information, store data and have input an output procedure.

The biological perspective states that all thoughts, feeling & behavior ultimately have a biological cause. It is one of the major perspectives in psychology and involves such things as studying the brain, genetics, hormones, and the immune and nervous systems. While scientific research has yet to determine the actual effectiveness of subliminal messages, companies and other organizations still use them. [8] Identification with the aggressor is a version of introjection that focuses on the adoption, not of general or positive traits, but of negative or feared traits. If you are afraid of someone, you can partially conquer that fear by becoming more like them. According to the constructionist approach (Hampson, 1995), personality is constructed, in the course of social interaction, from three elements:

According to the name-letter effect, people are more likely to be attracted to someone who shares their initials. For example, a man named Robert will tend to be attracted someone named Rachel or Roberta. [15] The mind is therefore equipped with ‘instincts’ that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce. Psychology approaches refer to theoretical perspectives or frameworks used to understand, explain, and predict human behavior, such as behaviorism, cognitive, or psychoanalytic approaches.

The five major psychological perspectives are biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic, and provide different lenses through which phenomena are explained and analyzed. Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, explained the human mind as like an iceberg, with only a small amount of it being visible, that is our observable behavior, but it is the unconscious, submerged mind that has the most, underlying influence on our behavior. The behaviorist perspective is concerned with how environmental factors (called stimuli) affect observable behavior (called the response). With this definition, it is necessary to be clear about how rare a trait or behavior needs to be before we class it as abnormal. For instance, one may say that an individual who has an IQ below or above the average level of IQ in society is abnormal. One limitation of this definition is that apparently abnormal behavior may actually be helpful, functional, and adaptive for the individual.

Turning against the self is a very special form of displacement, where the person becomes their own substitute target.