Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on humanistic, cognitive and positive psychology. Humanistic psychology is contrastingly focused on individual potential and emphasizes the significance of growth to attain actualization. The central principles of humanistic psychology argue that people are instinctively good and so mental, and social complications result from nonconformities to natural tendency.

Humanism suggests that individuals have personal agency and are motivated to exercise the free will to follow things or ideas that will aid them in achieving their optimal potential as human beings. The need for personal growth and personal fulfillment is a crucial motivator for all human behavior. People are constantly seeking new ways to learn new things, to grow and become better, and experience psychological self-actualization through growth. Therefore, humanistic psychology stresses creativity, individuality, and self-actualization as the key themes of its approach to psychology (Maslow, 1965). The three schools of thought are not perceived to be in competition rather each provides a different dimension of examining and understanding the human mind and behavior. Humanistic psychology focuses on a dimension that implores a universal perception of the human mind and behavior.

Cognitive psychology focuses on cognition, the underlying mental process that leads to overlying activities. Attention, thinking, reasoning, language, learning, emotion and problem-solving are areas covered in the research. Cognitive psychology is associated with a school of thought referred to as cognitivism. Cognitivism advocates for an information processing system of mental function that is supported by experimental psychology and functionalism. Cognitive psychology is focused on the way information is processed by humans, examining how incoming information is treated (stimuli) and how the treatment results in a response (Anderson, 1990). In a simple examination, cognitive psychology focuses on variables that intercede stimuli reception and response output. The cognitive perspective employs a nomothetic approach to studying human cognitive processes but also implements idiographic techniques by using case studies.