Social learning theory emerged from studies by Albert Bandura in the 1960s. His work focused on how people learn by observing others, and he proposed a series of experiments to test possible causes of aggressive behavior. One of the most famous was his Bobo doll...
Psychology
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Learning from the media
Bandura’s social learning theory and the bobo doll experiment had a special meaning for their time and sparked a debate that continues to the current day. Television and other forms of mass communication were becoming omnipresent. The extent to which adults were...
Gender development
Study of gender development and ideas of sexual and gendered identity has been largely overlooked by psychologists until recently. Until the rise of second-wave feminism in the later half of the twentieth century, psychology was largely silent about issues concerning...
The Baby X experiments
The influence of sexual stereotypes on gender development is somewhat cyclical. Adults learn about gender roles from children, and children imitate those roles based on their own biological sex. While adults treat boys and girls differently, children tend to follow...
Adolescence
One of the earliest pioneers of developmental psychology was G. Stanley Hall, who was the first psychologist to receive a doctorate in America. Hall was strongly influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution and thought that psychological development is a kind of...
Taking responsibility
For many psychologists, developing means moving from one stage to another during one’s life. The idea of developmental psychology began with the work of Erik Erickson. He thought that people go through stages of development throughout their whole life. These stages...
Middle age
We continue to face changes and challenges that affect our psychological makeup throughout our adult lives. While change and development may not be as noticeable as during our younger years, they are no less important. From the age of 25 onwards, our lives take shape...
Old age
In older age, we face new psychological challenges. These can be seen as affecting our lifelong psychological growth. This period of life can also be associated with negative stereotypes about physical and intellectual decline. However, much like any other...
The ‘Ages of me’
According to developmental psychology, it is impossible to pinpoint definite ages when certain changes take place. We are all different and grow at varying speeds. So what is meant by “age”? We have a chronological age but we also have several types of ages based on...
Psychology of difference
To an extent, psychology is the study of individual differences among people. Individuals are not identical to one another; they differ in their thoughts, feelings, motivations, personalities, likes, dislikes, preferences, habits, and behaviors. Psychology seeks to...
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Illusions and paradoxes
Our minds can often deceive us into thinking that what we see is reality. When we try to understand something, our mind interprets visual cues to determine if those things are where they should be. We know that two objects placed next to each other in space will not...
Decision making
Humans' ability to reason and make logical decisions is commonly regarded as one of the most important of human mental abilities. Yet it was not given much attention by psychologists until the 1970s when they began studying how memory and perception sometimes lead...
Psychoanalysis and psychodynamics
At the end of the last century, a different approach to psychological therapy emerged from the medical treatment of psychiatric disorders. At the forefront were the Vienna neurologists Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. They discovered that a person could get better if...
The talking cure
Freud used hypnosis to treat patients in his private neurological practice in Vienna, and he observed that the process of verbalization could lead to an improvement in the patient’s symptoms. A similar approach, known as ‘free association’, was taken by another of his...
The unconscious
Freud developed a comprehensive theory about how the human mind works. He realized that what we think we're thinking is just one part of what's really happening in our heads. Beneath the surface level of the conscious mind lies the preconscious, containing thoughts...
Free Course in Semiology
A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
