A-Level Psychology (AQA)

Topic Summaries

Approaches in psychology

The cognitive approach

  • The cognitive approach is a response to the behaviourists’ lack of explanation for people’s mental processes.
  • Key concepts:
    • It focuses on how people perceive, store, interpret, and use information and how it affects behaviour, mainly based on information processing – information is taken in by the senses and then processed in the brain, then stored and retrieved when needed.
    • It proposed that humans use mental tools like schemas to make judgements.
    • It only uses experimental studies for research so it is considered to be scientific.
    • It often uses computer metaphors to explain mental processes and has been greatly enabled by technological advances.
  • Schemas: mental frameworks of beliefs and expectations that are used to help interpret information about the world efficiently.
    • They are developed from our experiences and what we have seen in the past.
    • They can help ‘fill in gaps’ when we lack information about something and if we receive information that contradicts our schemas, we often disregard it.
    • Advancements in computer programming have led to psychologists to focusing more on the way information is stored and retrieved.
      • Scientific credibility: they use highly controlled methods of study such as lab experiments to allow researched to make inferences about cognition. They use specific lab equipment such as brain scanners which produce reliable and strictly objective data.
      • Soft determinism: regarded as less strict than hard determinism. The cognitive approach recognised that our cognitive system can only function within its biological limits that are out of our control; however, we are free to react and think about stimuli.
      • Real world application: cognitive therapy is the main choice of therapy that the NHS provides to people in need of help with depression, OCD, and anxiety
      • Machine reductionism: the cognitive approach treats the human mind like a computer and ignores the influence of human emotion on the cognitive system.

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