Biological approach

INTRODUCTION:
   The biological approach to psychology, as its name implies, views man as a biological organism.
The approach arose out of attempts to understand two major issue: the relation between mind and body, and the influence of heredity on behavior.Even in the 17th century, most people believed the body was controlled by an intangible soul.The human body, he felt, was constructed like that of an animal-both were basically machines.It also believed that people (unlike animals) had a soul, which interacted with the physical body through a small gland in the brain called PINEAL GLAND.
   Dualism-the view, that mind and body are distinct; Descartes believed the two could interact via the pineal gland in the brain.
   Materialism-the assumption that all behavior has a physiological basis.

THE NATURE OF THE PHYSIOLOGICAL SYSTEM:
   The biological approach emphasizes the physiological basis of behavior.In everyday life, we encounter situations where the body affects the mind, and also where the mind affects the body.
   Mind, Brain and the CNS current knowledge indicates that the brain is, indeed, involved in our experience of consciousness, but no one is currently certain just how, or whether consciousness involves only the brain.

THE SPLIT BRAIN and THE NORMAL BRAIN:
  The striking nature of the split-brain findings makes it tempting to extend the conclusions to normal individuals. For example, clinical cases show that damage to the left hemisphere, whether by diseases or trauma, can impair speech.
   In many languages and cultures, being left-handed is viewed negatively. This can be seen in the way we used words: a left-handed compliment is not really a compliment. To be right is to be correct. A suspicious person is sinister (Latin for left-handed), while a skillful person is dexterous (Latin for right-handed). Similarly, a "gauche" (French for left) remark is in bad taste.

EFFECTS OF MIND ON BODY:
   'Mind over matter.' The phrase has been used to describe many things, from accomplishing a difficult tasks to claims of levitation. The most common meaning is to describe how physical reactions are seemingly altered by mental processes. The view that this is paradoxical or impossible can be traced to the dualistic perception of mind and body proposed by Descartes, in which the mind has no physical basis.
   'Mind' and 'Brain' may represent different levels of description, but materialism assumes that they have a common physical foundation.
   This unified view can help us to understand what would be otherwise inexplicable phenomena. A common example is the reaction to painful stimuli: everyday observation demonstrates that people react differently to similar physical traumas.

THE NATURE OF STRESS:
   Like pain, stress is a common human experience. According to Hans Selye, the doctor who pioneered stress research, stress is the non specific response of the body to any demand on it.Biologically, stress reaction evolved as an emergency response intended to prepare an individual for 'fight or flight' -that is, either to depend oneself or try to run away from a threat .In psychological terms, stress is a response of the body what ever is perceived as an emergency situation.

BEHAVIORIST APPROACH:
  The behaviorist approach emphasizes the study of observable responses, and rejects attempts to study internal processes like thinking. Behaviorist focus on learning as the primary factor in explaining changes in behavior. Depending on the type of response, this involves either classical conditioning
which is concerned with how conditioned  stimuli come to elicit conditioned responses. It can be applied to a number of aspects of human behavior, including emotional responses like fears, and even activity of the immune system or operant conditioning which is concern with how the probability of a voluntary 'operant' response changes as a function of the environmental consequences (reinforcer) which follow the response.
This process of reinforcement can be analysed in terms of the type of  reinforcer,  the contingency of reinforcement and the schedule of reinforcement.

COGNITIVE APPROACH:
    KEY THINKER:Wolfgang Kohler-(1887-1986) was a founder of Gestalt Theory. Born in Tallinn, Estonia, also educated in Germany. In 1913, he went to Tenerife in the Canary  Islands as a director of a lab studying the apes residing on the island; in what became an act of serendipity.
                                Edward Chace Tolman-(1886-1959)was born in Newton, Massachusetts.While he considered himself a behaviorists, and his own research was done almost entirely with rats, Tolman's bears little resemblance to the radical behaviorists.Latent learning-term used by him to describe situations in which learning is distinct from the performance of behavior.


PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACH:
   Dreams-operate on two levels, the manifest content that is symbolic, having created out of the original forms by the dream censor. And latent content actually is that certain symbols where fairly universal.

Three Characteristics of Dreams:
   (1)Made up of succession of usually vivid and colorful visual images.
   (2)Often accompanied by emotions.
   (3)Dreams are products of our imaginations.

   Self-analysis-represents a potentially treacherous endeavor, both personally and as theoretical validation.
   EGO-Which provides the conscious direction of our lives. 

my assignment in gen-psy

In biological approach, i learn that abusing drugs is dangerous. It can affect our body and it also affect our family relation. It can also influence other people that are innocent in that kind of drugs.  I learn that drinking alcohol is good to our health but not too much, because alcohol it makes a toxic in our body.......