Psychologists can analyze various human behaviors from different psychological perspectives. Some of the psychological perspectives include psychoanalytic perspective, humanistic perspective, behaviorism, cognitive perspective, behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, and cultural perspective (Berne, 2007). People will be able to understand human behaviors, such as depression, love, anger, aggression, empathy, and others, through psychological perspectives. This paper will consider the analysis of depression by use of psychological perspectives.
Based on psychoanalytic perspective, depression refers to a psychological problem characterized by imagined or real loss (Washburn, 1994). Depressed individuals develop shame, self-hatred, or guiltiness and blame themselves ultimately. Humanistic psychologists view the cause of depression as the loss of power, status, money, or social rank (Rait%u0323er, 2008). A person experiences a reduced self-esteem due to the loss. People experience depression when the real and the ideal differ so significantly that they fail to tolerate. From the behavioral perspective, depression results from a reduced reinforcement, which happens when a person loses acquaintances and friends (Berne, 2007). The level of depression increases significantly among those individuals suffering from depression when acquaintances and friends avoid them. Cognitive theorists consider depression as a psychological problem that occurs when individuals possess faulty thinking about themselves, their present life situation, as well as the future life situations (Berne, 2007). Depressed people have thoughts that center on the unpleasant aspects of the past happenings and plan a negative expectation on the future happenings. From the perspective of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, depression is a psychiatric disorder that results from mental disturbances, which leads to a change in behavior. For instance, behavioral and cognitive neuroscience can explain post-natal depression (Nicolson, 1998). Finally, from a cultural perspective, people may suffer from depression because of the presence of individuals, who belong to different cultural backgrounds. For example, African Americans may experience depression because the Caucasians ignore them and their ideas (Tseng, 2001).
In conclusion, psychological perspectives can help psychologists explain depression and other human behaviors. It has been evident that the overall meaning of depression is the psychological problem characterized by mental disturbance. Negative interpersonal relations are the primary causes of depression (Berne, 2007).