Human behavior

Fear of snakes, also known as ophiophobia is perhaps one of the most common phobias among a many. This is mostly because a lot of people have lived believing that snakes are dangerous and hence therefore the expected human instinct would be to turn away or escape that danger. This does not however mean that everyone is expected to react this way. It all depends on an individual’s psychology. Among the branches of psychology, cognitive is the branch that deals with mental processes of an individual such as how a person thinks, perceives a certain information, remembers and how a person learns. Although both sensation and perception affect how we react to stimuli in our environment, they are a bit different. Sensation can be defined as the process through which we sense our environment such as touch, sound, smell and sound. This information is then sent to the brain for interpretation and this is what is referred to as perception. So if one perceives snakes to be dangerous, at the first sight of a snake an individual is likely to react in a manner that suggests fear of that danger since the message through sensation had already been sent to the brain and registered as danger (James, 2001).

Behavioral psychology is the branch of study which mainly believes that every behavior that human beings may have are acquired through conditioning. Conditioning in psychology may be defined as previously neutral stimulus in our environment maybe evoke a specific response from a person after it has been put together with another stimulus that evokes a similar response from a person. This therefore means that a person’s behavior is mostly affected by the environment in which that individual is. There are several biological factors that may influence a person’s behavior (Martin, 2008). These are: self-preservation, the reason for self-preservation and a method of self-preservation. Self- preservation simply implies keeping one alive. In some instances it may extend to the family. All human beings are created with the need to survive and will go to any extent to stay alive, which would imply using a few strategies in the environment in order to ensure ones survival (James, 2001). Over the years, psychologists have come up with several theories to try and explain different human behaviors and this paper will try and explain a few of those theories. Alt.............