Cognitive Approach in Psychology From the 1920s through the 1960s, behaviorism dominated psychology in the United States. Eventually, however, psychologists began to move away from strict behaviorism. Many became increasingly interested in cognition, a term used to describe all the mental processes involved in acquiring, storing, and using knowledge. Such processes include perception, memory, thinking, problem solving, imagining, and language. This shift in emphasis toward cognition had such a profound influence on psychology that it has often been called the cognitive revolution. The psychological study of cognition became known as cognitive psychology. Cognition means “the known knowledge or the process of knowing”
Cognitive approach emphasizes on:
• Thoughts
• Feelings
• Thinking
• Values
• Expectations etc; factors that determine the personality of the individual
• For a proper understanding of behavior, the cognitive approach emphasizes the role of mediating processes in human behavior i.e., the processes that lie between the Environmental stimuli and the behavioral response
• Focused on how we ‘remember’, how information processing takes place, how decision making appraisals are done
• Unlike the behaviorist humanistic approach, this theory gives same importance to both the internal state of the person as well as the environmental events
• Internal events are referred as “Mediators” or “Meditation Processes”
Cognitive approach mainly focuses on:
• Emotions
• Social behavior
• Behavior modification
Cognitive approach includes the elements of psychology, linguistics, computer science and physiology– thus called a ‘hybrid science’ Tolman talked about the ‘cognitive maps’ (relationship between stimulus) it is not necessary to have an association between stimulus and response, a person can learn without showing any apparent response Both Kohler and Tolman played a vital role in laying the foundation of cognitive approach
Schachter’s Theory of Emotions
Richard Lazarus (1984) maintains that emotional experience cannot be understood unless we understand how what goes on in the environment is be evaluated. Emotion leads to cognition and cognition in turn leads to emotional experience psychology.
