Evolutionary psychology is based on the discoveries of Charles Darwin (1809-82) and on his theory of evolution. It is based on three crucial principles: How the environment changes and makes new demands on us, How humans change through reproduction, Humans who possess most adaptive genes are more likely to survive and reproduce. Darwin believed that if we are well adapted to our environment we are more likely to reproduce and are “fit to survive”. Humans are born with certain social behavioural traits that are naturally selected to ensure our survival as babies.
We are born being able to communicate by crying to let our mother know we need to be fed, changed etc. We are also born looking ‘cute’. This is to help our mother get attached to us and make the bonding process easier. This again is to ensure we get our needs met in order to survive. Describe how a bio-psychological and/or evolutionary approach might account for a human’s desire to climb up a mountain. Evolutionists believe that humans are born with the desire to achieve goals.
They believe that humans have the need to “journey through nature” and to “conquer distant peaks” as this is again another survival tactic. They believe that the travel of humans encourages reproduction on a larger geographical scale. Bio-psychologists believe that humans become aroused by certain activities, mountaineering being one of them. Hans Eysenck believed that extroverts where “stimulus hungry” and so they need to take part in “more dangerous pastimes”. This is suggesting that the urge to climb a mountain would somewhat depend on your personality and whether you are an intro or extrovert.
Define the following terms: The unconscious mind: The unconscious mind is the study of our brain and behaviour while we are asleep. Id: It is the biological part of the personality which we are born with. It is the most basic part of a personality and its job is only to ensure its own survival. Ego: The term Ego is used to describe the more rational, reality-orientated and executive aspects of the personality, and once again is partly conscious and partly unconscious.
The Ego’s task, as seen by Freud, was to control the more primitive Id impulses and to adapt these to outer reality in accordance with the reality principle, as well as to mollify the requirements of the Superego: “the poor ego…serves three masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another…. It’s three tyrannical masters are the external world, the superego and the id” (Freud 1933) Superego: The superego develops from about 3 years old. It has two subparts.
The first is the conscience which tells us what we shouldn’t do. The second is the ego ideal which tells us what we should do. Some effects of the functioning of the superego are descriptively conscious whereas others are descriptively unconscious. For example some individuals may be quite clear that what they wish to do goes against accepted values or indeed against their own upbringing; in others there is an unconscious sense of guilt. Defence mechanisms: The ego makes use of various procedures to avoid danger and anxiety.
Describe how Sigmund Freud explains the development of the human personality. According to Freud the human mind comprises of three different parts called the tri-partile structure of personality. The Id, Ego and Superego. He believed that human beings are born very selfish and destined to a life of anxiousness and will never be happy. Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process designed by the concept of sublimation.
He argued that humans are born “polymorphously perverse”, meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage (exemplified by an infant’s pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler’s pleasure in emptying his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage.
Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The lesser known Electra complex refers to such a fixation upon the father. ) The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.