11/21/2012 |

Submitted to: Mrs. Maria Hutchinson
Submitted by: Roger Polanco
Introduction to Counseling and Guidance
Research
On
Cognitive and Behavioral Approaches
Similarities and differences

In psychology many approaches have been discovered and some are still currently in use. There are two approaches, which I feel have much similarities but also differences. I will be explaining the cognitive and behavioral approach. Cognition literally means, “Knowing”. In other words, psychologists from this approach study cognition, which is A ‘the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired.’ They focus on the way human’s process information, looking at how we treat information that comes in to the person (stimuli) and how this treatment leads to responses. In other words, they are interested in the variables that mediate between stimulus/input and response/output. The main areas of study in cognitive psychology are: perception, attention, memory and language. The essence of the behavioral approach is the statement that all behavior is learned and that when we are born we are like a blank slate. Experience and interactions with the environment make us what we are. We become what we become as a result of forming stimulus-response units of behavior in reaction to the environment. This perspective has been called environmental determinism because it suggests that the environments in which we exist determine us. The second statement is that all behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning theory: stimulus and response (S-R) links that build up to produce more complex behaviors. In essence, conditioning refers to changing behavior in the absence of conscious thought, as in saying “I am conditioned to behave in that way”. The third main statement is that we need look no further than the behaviors we can observe in order to understand and explain how