Posted: July 28th, 2016

Pick a psychologist. Someone sort of famous.

Pick a psychologist. Someone sort of famous.

2. Find something written by this person. Be sure you limit your search to scholarly and full text.

A few notes:

*Steps 1 and 2 can be switched around. In other words, you don’t have to pick the psychologist first; you can pick the article instead, based on topic or title, and then just identify the author. It really won’t matter which way you do this.

*If you’re looking for a shortcut… check out this website: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/author.htm. The assignment is designed in such a way to give you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the library, which you will need to use in future weeks, but this website lists a number of notable psychologists and links you directly to one or more of their works, which are suitable.

3. Summarize. This is the final part of the prompt, which indicates a number of things you can consider for this portion of the post.
Summarize the contributions of the influential figure you selected to the field of psychology. In your discussion, include the following:
Describe your selected psychologist and his or her main contributions to the field.
Next, summarize the scholarly article you read. Your summary should provide an overview of the theoretical perspective and describe any empirical work (i.e., research study) that is presented in the article. For additional assistance on how to summarize an article click here.
Examine how this theory/research provides insight into differences in psychological functioning.
In layman’s terms, what does the theoretical perspective, that you explain, tell us about the differences between people and how they behave, think, and feel? How might it explain why they do what they do?
Illustrate with an example from your own observation or experience.
What personal experiences or observations of these types of behaviors might be able to be explained by this perspective?
Example: If I experienced a trauma, how might this trauma affect how I behave in certain situations?