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Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing innate (inborn) elements.The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a corresponding clearly defined stimulus.
He wrote a number of influential textbooks, and was important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world. McDougall was an opponent of behaviourism and stands somewhat outside the mainstream of the development of Anglo-American psychological thought in the first half of the 20th century ...
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. [1] [2] Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social ...
In psychology, a drive theory, theory of drives or drive doctrine [1] is a theory that attempts to analyze, classify or define the psychological drives. A drive is an instinctual need that has the power of driving the behavior of an individual; [2] an "excitatory state produced by a homeostatic disturbance".
The standard edition of Freud's works in English confuses two terms that are different in German, Instinkt (instinct) and Trieb (drive), often translating both as instinct; for example, "the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state". [10] "
Proponents of instinct argue that we eat because of hunger, drink because of thirst, and so forth. Some have even argued for the existence of God based on this criterion, arguing that the object of every instinct has a referent in reality. The counterpoint of hunger is food; for thirst it is liquid; for the sex drive it is a mate.
He proposed that psychoanalytic theory—as expressed through the principles of ego psychology—was a biologically based general psychology that could explain the entire range of human behavior. [9] For Rapaport, this endeavor was fully consistent with Freud's attempts to do the same (e.g., Freud's studies of dreams, jokes, and the ...
Categorization is a type of cognition involving conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience, such as objects, events, or ideas.It involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience by sorting and distinguishing between groupings, through classification or typification [1] [2] on the basis of traits, features, similarities or other criteria that ...