Posts tagged ‘Theories’
Theories of cognitive development: Jean Piaget.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was actually not a psychologist at first; he dedicated his time to mollusc research. In fact, by the time he was 21 he’d already published twenty scientific papers on them! He soon moved to Paris, and got a job interviewing mental patients. Before long, he was working for Alfred Binet, and refining Burt’s reasoning test. During his time working at Binet’s lab, he studied the way that children reasoned. After two years of working with children, Piaget finally realised what he wanted to investigate – children’s development! He noticed that children of a younger aged answered questions qualitatively different than those of an older age. This suggested to him that younger children were not less knowledgeable, but gave different answers because they thought differently.
Dreams part 2: More theories.
So we’ve explored, debatably, the most ‘out there’ theory regarding dreams. The main problem with Freud’s theory is that there is little evidence to support his ideas. It is very difficult to study dreams because there is no way to measure them; a researcher cannot watch a person’s dream and then compare it to their unconscious desires. Why? Well the mind is merely a concept, and therefore cannot be ‘accessed’ as such. Therefore, as mentioned, there is little support for his theory. On the bright side, at least for Freud, this means his theory cannot be discounted, as there is no proof against the theory either.
So what other theories are there? I am going to describe four more theories: the re-organisational theory, the activation synthesis model and theories put forward by Carl Jung, Fredrick Perls and Alfred Adler. So let’s take a look at the theories.
