The biological perspective of personality
The biological perspective of personality articulates that all our feelings, thoughts, and behavior are related to a biological cause. The perspective believes that most of our behavior is inherited with evolutionary function. It is mainly concerned with how or why personality traits show up through biology. The biological factors might include things such as the nervous system and physical condition.
The biological perspective has two main processes that people use to learn from the environment. The method includes classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning entails learning through association, while operant condition involves learning from behavioral consequences. Hans Eysenck and Ivan Pavlov highly contributed to the study of the biological perspective of personality. Hans Eysenck was a psychologist who believed that genetics is the primary determinant of our personality, but conditioning is a great contributor, which is the source of individual differences. He used the heritability study, which shows how much trait variation in a population can be related to the gene to prove a biological cause for the behavior. Classical conditioning was conducted by Pavlov, who surveyed his dogs. He rang the bell anytime he used to give the dog food. After doing that for a while, he rang a bell without providing food for the dogs, and their saliva increased. He realized that the food he was giving to the dog was the stimulus, and it triggered the release of saliva, which is an unconditioned response. Therefore, the dogs related the lab assistance with the food and thus developed an erudite conditioned response.
In conclusion, this perspective believes that genes play a key role in defining how we behave, feel, and think. It proposes classical conditioning and operant conditioning as the forms for learning in the environment. Eysenck showed that hormone level, together with environmental factors, influences someone’s personality. Pavlov showed how neutral stimuli could result in natural reflex.
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