Best of The Century 1. What have been the major changes in psychotherapy this century? There are many major changes in psychotherapy this century as stated in the article. Before, only wealthy people can afford to pay to have a weekly seesion with the therpaists which could go on for months or even years without any progress. However as time changes many great improvements have been discovered. One of the most important changes mentioned was the biological and neurological study of emotional disorders that recently picked up speed. This improvement allow distinctly improved medications for some disorders ,and because of these improvement, many more people become more aware of their mental state and would pay more than a thousand dollars to see the therapists every week or month to discuss the problem they have. Now psychology have gained public interest and I think this is one of the major changes in psychotherapy during this century. 2. Twenty breakthroughs are identified. Which 5 do you think are the most important? Justify your answers. One of the most important breakthrough mentioned in the passage is the first one where they done an experiment on a child. This experiment was discovered by the guy name Piaget where they pour a glass of milk into a wide bowl and the child think that he or she got less milk in the bowl. The conclusion of this experiment showed that human intelligence develops in stages. If we was the same age as the child in the experiment, we would answer the same way as he did. However if we have been tested the same way now, we would know the correct answer right away even without thinking. This showed that when we was a child our brain works almost the same, therefore we might be able to understand the thought of a person by tracing back to their origin and study the development of their thinking as they proceed through their life. This breakthrough is important because it will show us different level of intelligence and what factors or age make them develop those intelligence which might lead to a deeper understading of human’s thought. Anoter important breakthrough was conducted by Stanley Milgram on the human fear of breaking rules.. The example she gave was that everyone have the possibility to follow the authority to the point of commiting murder because of fear. This experiment suggested that we all feared rules to some extent even if that rule was pointless. In my opinion I think that this experiment is very important and I believed that we all feared rules. All of us live in a society where laws must be obeyed. If anyone break that rules we will be punished and rejected from the society. Because of this we was taugth since we was a child to obeyed the rules and not to break it. This basic instinct of fear can be apply to many circumstances. It is hard to understand people who did things because of fear because fear is a very strong inner-drive that can drive a person into madness. So by understanding the fear of human, we are one step closer to understanding the thought of human. One of the strangest and most interesting experiment was conducted by Harry F. Harlow. This experiment was done on monkeys. Harry showed that love and care from the mother in the early years was very crucial for a normal and intellectual growth of the baby monkey. Interestingly some evidences showed that this can be applied to human as well. This might prove to be true because we usually see people that didn’t get loved and cared from the parents when they were a child, grew up into a bad person. This might prove to be an important aspect to analyze the behaviours by looking at their past for evidences and other things that might shaped them into the person they are today. Another interesting discovery was made by Phillip G. Zimbardo in a very famous 1971 stanford prison experiment. In this experiment, students were places with a different jobs. One group of the students were to act as a prisons guard, while the other group was acting as a prisoners. However the experiment was stopped mid-way because it became too dangerous. The reason this is interesting is because it suggested that the society roles can determine much of our behaviour. Staying in any circumstances too long might change your personality as long as your behaviour. In this case, the prison guard must be cruel and mean and these personalities had altered the behaviour of students that acted these roles. Nowaday as psychologists studied into the mind of the patient, they might as well look at the patient’s occupation because their job can alter the personalities and their behaviours as well. Another experiments was made on human’s creativity. This experiement exposed many mysterious we used to have in the subject of creativity. As research are done we concluded that creativity stem out from our prior knowledge because creativity came from using our knowledge to apply into something new. We can also assume from this experiment that creativity of an individuals is orderly and predictable because as the person grew older and get more training their potential creativity is shown at a greater degree in their output. This suggest that we can understand about the person’s thought by looking at their past knowledge as well. All of these breakthrough are new important discoveries in psychology made during this century.