Psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and behaviour. All the approaches helps us to understand different ways that people behave by assessing what the person learns. They state that human behaviour is a result from what they experience. There are six psychological approaches to health practice which are behavioural approach, cognitive approach, biological approach, social learning theory, humanistic approach and psychodynamic approach

The behavioural approach teaches that all behaviour (normal and abnormal) is learnt and all behaviour can be unlearnt. The key idea of the behaviourist perspective is that we can understand any type of behaviour by looking at what the person has learned. This will include personality traits such as shyness, confidence, optimism or pessimism. Behaviourist psychologists explain all human behaviour as resulting from experience. For example if someone has a fear of cats, they have experienced a cat being aggressive towards them. Also the behavioural approach is developed by nurture because all behaviour are learnt from their environment. Two key thinkers associated with this perspective are Pavlov (classical conditioning) and Skinner (operant conditioning). These theories both explain that all type of behaviour are learnt- shyness to aggression, from happiness to depression. Classical conditioning is when you associate one thing with another. Pavlov did an experiment with dogs- every time the assistant entered the room with a bowl of food, the dog begun to salivate- Pavlov speculated that the dog was salivating because it has learnt to associate the laboratory assistant with food.