| Course | PSYCH 599 Foundations of Graduate Study in Psychology (PSYCH/599) |
|---|---|
| Week | 2 |
| Paper type | History and systems paper |
| Length | about 1,221 words, 4 double-spaced pages plus title page and references |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | University of Phoenix |
| Program | MS in Psychology |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for PSYCH 599 Week 2
Why Patients Skip Their Pills: One Everyday Behavior Seen Through Psychology's Schools of Thought
[Student Name]
University of Phoenix
PSYCH/599: Foundations of Graduate Study in Psychology
Week 2 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The pharmacy chain, patients and refill figures are composites written for a model paper; historical positions and research findings come from the sources listed.
Psychology did not arrive as a single science. It developed through schools of thought that disagreed about what psychology should study and how. Comparing those schools on one ordinary behavior shows their differences more clearly than a timeline can. This paper uses a behavior I see every week in my work: patients who do not take medications as prescribed.
The Behavior
In the eleven pharmacies I supervise in Albuquerque, about one in five new prescriptions for long-term conditions such as hypertension or high cholesterol is never picked up, and many patients who do start a medication refill it weeks late. Pharmacists call these patients, but the calls often reach voicemail. The problem is common across health care and costly for patients' health. The question for this paper is how each school of psychology would try to explain it.
Structuralism: What Is the Experience?
The earliest laboratory psychologists, working in Germany and later at Cornell under Edward Titchener, tried to break conscious experience into its elements through trained introspection. A structuralist would ask a patient to describe in careful detail the sensations, images and feelings present while holding a pill bottle and deciding not to open it. The approach treated the mind as something to be analyzed like a chemical compound.
Structuralism faded because introspective reports could not be checked by other observers and because it said little about why experiences matter. Yet its aim of describing inner experience precisely survives in modern qualitative interviews about what living with a chronic illness feels like.
Functionalism: What Does It Do?
Angell (1907) argued that psychology should study mental activity in terms of what it accomplishes for an organism trying to adjust to its surroundings, rather than in terms of its static contents. The functionalist question is practical: what does skipping a dose do for the patient? Perhaps it avoids side effects, saves money at the end of the month or protects an identity as someone who is not "sick." Functionalism, shaped by Darwin's ideas, opened psychology to applied questions in education, work and health, and that applied spirit is the ancestor of the health psychology research I hope to study.
Behaviorism: Cues and Consequences
Watson (1913) wanted the mind-talk thrown out: no more introspective reports, no more claims about consciousness, only what an outside observer could record, with predicting and steering behavior as the science's purpose. A behaviorist would ignore what patients think and look at observable conditions: cues that prompt pill taking, such as a pillbox beside the coffee maker, and consequences that follow it. Swallowing a blood pressure pill brings no immediate reward and sometimes an immediate side effect such as dizziness, while the benefit, a stroke that never happens, is invisible. From this angle, nonadherence is predictable.
Behavioral thinking still guides practical tools in my pharmacies, such as automatic refill programs, text reminders and blister packs that make a missed dose visible. Its weakness is that it cannot easily explain why two patients facing the same cues behave differently.
Psychoanalysis: Hidden Conflicts
Freud's psychoanalysis approached behavior through unconscious motives and conflicts formed early in life. A psychoanalytic reading might see a missed dose as a way to deny illness and mortality or as quiet rebellion against a parental figure, such as a physician. These ideas are hard to test, and psychoanalysis lost ground in research psychology for that reason. Still, the notion that patients may resist treatment for reasons they cannot easily state has stayed alive in clinical work and in research on denial and ambivalence.
Humanistic Psychology: The Person's Own Direction
Humanistic psychologists reacted against both behaviorism and psychoanalysis, which they saw as treating people as machines or as prisoners of the past. Maslow (1943) proposed that human motives are arranged so that more basic needs, such as safety and belonging, tend to dominate until they are met, after which growth needs come to the fore. For a patient choosing between rent and a copay, the missed refill reflects basic needs pressing ahead of long-term health. Humanistic thinking also emphasized dignity and self-direction, which echoes in today's shared decision making, where patients and clinicians decide on treatment together.
The same skipped pill can be a cue problem, a belief problem or a rent problem, depending on which school is asking.
Cognitive Psychology: Beliefs and Memory
By the 1950s, researchers in linguistics, computer science and psychology were studying memory, attention and language in ways behaviorism could not accommodate. Miller (2003), one of the participants, recalled how this cognitive revolution grew out of a meeting of disciplines that took internal mental processes seriously again, using rigorous experimental methods rather than introspection. Cognitive psychology asks what patients believe, remember and expect.
Current adherence research is largely cognitive. Horne and Weinman (1999) studied patients with asthma, kidney disease, heart disease and cancer and found that their beliefs about medicines predicted reported adherence: patients weighed how necessary they believed a medication was against how worried they were about its harms, and those whose concerns outweighed perceived necessity reported taking medicines less consistently. This finding shapes how my pharmacists now talk with patients, asking first what worries them about a medication.
Gestalt Psychology: The Whole Situation
A smaller school deserves mention because its central idea fits this problem surprisingly well. Gestalt psychologists, working in Germany in the early twentieth century, argued that people perceive organized wholes rather than collections of elements, and that the whole shapes how each part is understood. A patient does not experience a pill in isolation; she experiences it as part of a morning routine, a diagnosis she resents, a cost on a receipt and a conversation with a doctor who seemed rushed. Change one part of that whole, such as moving the pill bottle beside the toothbrush or replacing a rushed conversation with a patient one, and the meaning of the pill can shift. Gestalt ideas later fed into social psychology through Kurt Lewin's view that behavior depends on the person and the situation together. That interactionist idea runs through modern adherence work, which no longer looks only at the patient or only at the medication but at the fit between them.
Biological and Evolutionary Perspectives
Biological psychology looks at the brain, genes and bodily systems. For adherence, it points to cognitive decline in older patients, depression that saps motivation and side effects that make a medication unpleasant. Evolutionary thinking adds that humans tend to favor immediate rewards over distant ones, a bias that makes daily prevention difficult.
What the Comparison Shows
No single school explains why patients skip medications. Behaviorism explains why reminders help; cognitive psychology explains why some patients deliberately stop; humanistic psychology explains why cost and dignity matter; biology explains why depression and memory loss get in the way. Modern psychology has largely stopped asking which school is right and instead combines their questions. The history matters because each school still shapes what researchers measure and what interventions they try.
Conclusion
Tracing psychology's schools through one ordinary behavior shows that each answered a question its predecessors could not and left questions for its successors. As a graduate student, I want to read current research with this history in mind, asking which tradition a study belongs to and what that tradition might be missing.
References
Angell, J. R. (1907). The province of functional psychology. Psychological Review, 14(2), 61-91. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0070817
Horne, R., & Weinman, J. (1999). Patients' beliefs about prescribed medicines and their role in adherence to treatment in chronic physical illness. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 47(6), 555-567. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-3999(99)00057-4
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
Miller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 141-144. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00029-9
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20(2), 158-177. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0074428
What the PSYCH 599 Week 2 instructions ask
The second week usually asks students to explain the history of psychology and compare its schools of thought. Prompts commonly name structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology and biological or evolutionary perspectives, and ask you to describe each school's central question, methods and key figures, explain what led to its rise or decline and show how the schools still influence the field. Some versions ask you to apply the perspectives to a behavior or a case. Organize by idea rather than by date alone, use primary sources where you can, and show how each school would study the same problem differently. Cite your sources in APA style.
How this PSYCH 599 Week 2 example is built
This model paper lines up six perspectives against one behavior Leticia Ramos sees daily: roughly one in five new prescriptions in her pharmacies is never picked up, and many patients refill late. Structuralism would ask what a patient experiences at the moment of deciding; functionalism would ask what skipping accomplishes. Behaviorism points to cues and consequences, psychoanalysis to hidden conflicts about illness, humanism to dignity and self-direction and the cognitive school to beliefs and memory. Research on patients' beliefs about necessity and harm shows which tradition guides most current adherence studies. The paper ends by arguing that modern psychology combines these schools rather than choosing one.
PSYCH 599 Week 2 grading rubric: where the points go
History papers in graduate psychology are judged on accuracy, comparison and relevance. Instructors look for each school to be described with its core question, method and representative figures, for historical change to be explained by the problems each school could not solve and for the student to show how earlier ideas survive in current research. Comparing perspectives on one behavior earns credit because it reveals what each lens notices and misses. Primary sources, such as founding articles, strengthen the paper, as long as their claims are read in historical context. Clean APA formatting, clear headings and a closing argument about the field's present state round out a strong submission.
PSYCH 599 Week 2 help: mistakes to avoid
Students often write a list of schools with dates and names but no comparison, which reads like a textbook summary and earns little credit at the graduate level. Another weakness is presenting each school as simply right or wrong, rather than explaining what problem it solved and which questions it could not answer. Some papers attribute ideas to the wrong founder or treat psychoanalysis as the only clinical tradition. Applying perspectives to a behavior helps, but only if each application is specific. Pick one ordinary behavior, show what each school would measure and explain, and end with a judgment about how the field uses these ideas today. Our tutors can check names, dates and founding claims before you submit.
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PSYCH 599 Week 2 questions, answered
What does PSYCH 599 Week 2 usually cover?
The history of psychology and its major schools of thought, and how those perspectives still shape research.
Where can I find a free PSYCH 599 Week 2 sample paper?
The complete PSYCH 599 Week 2 paper applying six schools of thought to missed medication doses is available above at no charge.
What are the main schools of thought in psychology?
Structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology and biological perspectives.
Why did behaviorism decline?
It could not explain language, memory and planning well, which cognitive psychology addressed from the 1950s on.
Do schools of thought still matter today?
Yes; modern research blends them, and their questions still guide how problems are framed and measured.
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