This will be the second thread in the Psychology series that I am creating, what this one will be about is the continuation of the fifth school of thought, Multiple Perspectives.
Unlike in earlier time periods, today we have many different views on Psychology with no particular one standing out. Because each one is unique, we have to call the time period Multiple Perspectives as there isn’t one that actually gets decisively more support than the others. This leads to the term eclectic. Eclectic means drawing from multiple perspectives. This is actually how many psychologists are today. (A fun fact is that someone actually asked geeogree what eclectic meant in his ask anything thread a few weeks back, I commented on it, but it is a pretty cool thing to see). There are truly seven broad categories that are present today.
The humanist perspective was one that was inspired in the effects of the behavioralists. Because the behavioralists were so inclined to reduce everything in Psychology to just math and science, there were some who decided to talk about the mysteries of our consciousness. The two prominent humans are Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. What they believed was individual choice and free will. Deterministic behavioralists were those who believed that all actions were caused by previous conditioning, in effect we always do what our minds think is best based on our past experience. Maslow and Rogers were not in agreement with this, they said that our behaviors are determined by our needs. Hence we have Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. An excellent example that Barron’s review book gives of this is that the reason that someone is unsociable according to a humanists, is probably because they believe that their needs are better suited with a smaller group of people rather than a larger one. Because their needs only require a certain amount, they follow their needs, so their behavior is resulting directly from those needs.
The psychoanalytic perspective is still existent today, even though it is very controversial. What it talks about is the unconscious mind and how it controls many of our actions. Just to review it mainly deals with repression which is when your past experiences are pushed into your subconscious when you do not deal with them and hide them away. The psychoanalytic perspective uses dream analysis, word association, etc to examine this unconscious mind. Again the controversy is rooted in the fact that there is nearly nothing that can actually be scientifically tested within this theory, which means that most of it is speculation rather than actual experiments giving verifiable results. Continuing on with the example, the unsociable person would be so because of their repression of memories from their childhood when they used to be embarrassed at social gatherings at parties or school events.
Biopsychology perspective is most near the field that I personally am inclined to go into. This is really the same as neuroscience, where you look at neurotransmitters and hormones to see what effects they have on the decisions that we make in our daily lives. Often inheriting traits are looked into to see whether certain behaviors come into people through genetics, or a combination of that and of the way the person works with the parts of their brain. This branch of psychology if followed, would mean that the future of Psychology would really be a sub branch of biology since everything in psychology can be covered in some biological way.
The evolutionary perspective is the one that views actions as a result of the natural selection within society. What happens in this theory is that when people possess certain traits that are advantageous for survival they have more chance of reproductive success and thus are passed onto the next generation. The example from this would be that someone is sociable because it was a trait that was advantageous to his or her parents, whether it was for making allies or friends. This is similar to the Biological perspective as it is a branch of biology, but it is not actually the same as the biological perspective.
The next perspective is the behavioral perspective. What this is, is that human thought and behavior are seen in terms of conditioning (as we saw with Pavlov’s dogs). The behavioral perspective is that all of our actions are based on reward and punishment. Scientifically, certain stimuli create certain responses, so we learn based on that. For the sociability example, it would be dependent on whether the person was rewarded or punished for sociable behavior and that either of the two conditioned the person to either be sociable or non sociable. Therefore this view is pure science cause and effect.
The cognitive perspective is seeing behavior as the result of how we interpret, process, and remember environmental events. What this one really talks about is that our ability to interpret situations, and process it affect what we do. Under the sociability example what the cognitive perspective really is, is someone looking at the situation and wondering whether it would be beneficial to initiate conversation and how the person understands the situation. For this person being sociable would be the option that made the most sense (therefore the way that he or she understood it) and acted upon it.
The social-cultural perspective is one that see how our behaviors change based on the values of our culture being different from the values of other cultures. Things such as how conversation is usually initiated in the different cultures can be either a deterrent or a motive for one to engage in conversation and therefore affect the person’s actions. The values of the culture such as being individual or being part of a greater community may also have the effect on sociable behavior under this perspective.
Psychologists today use various perspectives based on the context of the patient at hand, these theories are always changing. In the future there are bound to be changes in the way the Psychologists study the human mind.
That wraps up the actual content portion of this part. Now for the different activities that you can use to learn more on the topics / get used to the multiple choice questions that are bound to appear on the AP exam if that is your primary motive:
1. http://wchs.woodfordschools.org/apreview/default.htm#histor-and-methods
What this website really does is give you good definitions and multiple choice questions, what I would do with this is really just make notecards or something of the sort and try to learn all of those definitions by heart and then doing the multiple choice questions. Multiple Choice and understanding why you missed the things you did really will help in your psychology learning as it gives you the questions that you are bound to expect on the exam.
2. http://teachers.greenville.k12.sc.us/sites/lfarmer/Shared%20Documents/Ch.%201%20AP%20notes.pdf
What this site has that is pretty neat, is an outline of this chapter one from an actual AP Psychology textbook. It has outlined it to the things that you really need to know, so that you are not wasting time studying a textbook when you can quickly just learn it from a few pages per chapter. I use this one quite a bit. I will be posting them by chapter as the site only has a few of the chapters done, but when I do post one of these, it’s a great study resource to go back and look over this. I just memorized nearly everything out of this by writing it all down again. Takes 2-3 hours, but it lets me memorize everything (after I have understood it of course).
3. http://staff.tuhsd.k12.az.us/kreeder/CHAPTER%20TOPIC%20SUMMARY.pdf
This not as good as #2 I feel, but it still is great in the fact that it is reliable in terms of covering all the chapters. If you want a quick summary of most of the things in the textbook just to refresh your memory then this is the one. Also if you find that your review book / sites do not cover a certain portion, then you can read up on it here. I feel that this does not contain all the necessary information to get a 5 on the multiple choice portion, but it should give you a good amount.
4. http://www.learner.org/discoveringpsychology/03/e03expand.html#
Just change the chapter to which ever section you are learning about (the link links to the third section, I would recommend starting from the first). This actually is a great series of videos that are about 30 to 45 minutes long each and give you great information on the things needed to know for the AP. I personally watch all of them because of the enjoyment out of watching them rather than reading notes of things that I already understand, but need to memorize. I just find that watching the videos relating to the things that I just learned (or even memorized) makes me unable to forget them, which is something I feel really good about for the AP exam.
5. http://www.deforest.k12.wi.us/mr.leclouxsworldofappsychology.html
This is a class site I found for AP Psychology. I really like the site as it has worksheets for the videos that were put in number 4 and have everything categorized by chapter as to make things a lot easier. At the bottom there are a lot of relevant links to help you succeed in AP psychology. I think that I have used this site more than the others so far in actually learning all the material, but I would suggest this to supplement the actual learning, but the first three are great mostly for the actual review of the course that you have already learned. It is pretty hard self studying AP psych, but I believe that it quite possibly can be done without too much trouble. You just have to know what you are doing.
Finally I would like to suggest that the readers get AP Psychology by Barron’s. it is actually a really good book as it has all the information in condensed format and is mostly easy to read. I format my threads on their standard, so I am providing you with essentially all the necessary information as them, but they also have an essay portion that I might not be able to get to. They also have a number of multiple choice tests that make me feel as if this is the best study resource of all the study resources that I have mentioned. It starts off with a diagnostic test for those of you who want to quickly review and be finished, but the best feature of all I feel is actually the fact that all of the questions in the book (the end of chapter questions and the 3-4 practice ap tests) actually have answers with full complete explanations.
This wraps up the first history and perspectives section. I hope you have enjoyed reading this post. Have a nice day!

That's some interesting stuff, I didn't really notice one can do that. Good job.