psychology - History, Principles, Scope of psychology, Research methods, Criticism, Art Psychology

The science of mental life - a succinct definition used by William James in 1890. Modern psychology began with the great advances in science and medicine of the 19th-c, including the work of Darwin on comparative studies of behaviour, Galton on inheritance and variation in human abilities, Helmholtz and others on the functions of the nervous system, Fechner on the basis of psychophysics, and Freud on the explanation of irrational behaviour. In 1879, Wundt established in Leipzig the first laboratory entirely devoted to experimental psychology. The turn of the century saw the publication of Binet and Simon's work on testing the intelligence of French school children. Pavlov's work on the conditioned reflex had a profound influence on theories of learning and their practical applications. At the same time, Thorndike's studies of animal learning in the USA laid the basis for behaviourism, developed by Watson, and later by Skinner, in an attempt to give a complete account of human behaviour without any reference to mental states.

Portions of the summary below have been contributed by Wikipedia.

Contemporary psychology has seen a revival of interest in cognitive processes, with new interpretations using concepts from communication theory, information processing systems, control systems, and goal-seeking devices, and computer systems for the organization and representation of knowledge. The application of psychological methods pervades many aspects of everyday life. These methods are used, for example, in learning methods, the assessment of food preferences, the investigation of attitudes, opinions, and prejudices, the design of work and leisure environment, personnel selection and management, counselling, and therapy.

Areas
Psychology

Portal - History
Applied
Biological
Clinical
Cognitive
Developmental
Educational
Evolutionary
Experimental
Industrial/Org
Linguistics
Social
Lists
Publications
Topics

Psychology Portal

Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of the human brain and behavior. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental illness.

Psychology differs from anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology in seeking to explain the mental processes and behavior of individuals. Psychology differs from biology and neuroscience in that it is primarily concerned with the interaction of mental processes & Biological psychology is the scientific study of the biological bases of behavior and mental states.

History

The first use of the term psychology is often attributed to the "Yucologia hoc est de hominis perfectione, anima, ortu", written by the German scholastic philosopher Rudlof Goeckel (1547-1628), who often goes by the Latinized Rudolph Goclenius, and published in Marburg in 1590. This distinction between empirical and rational psychology was picked up in Diderot's Encyclodedie and was popularized in France by Maine de Biran.

The root of the word psychology (psyche) is very roughly equivalent to "soul" in Greek, and psychology came to be considered a study of the soul (in a religious sense of this term) much later, in Christian times. Psychology as a medical discipline can be seen in Thomas Willis' reference to psychology (the "Doctrine of the Soul") in terms of brain function, as part of his 1672 anatomical treatise "De Anima Brutorum" ("Two Discourses on the Souls of Brutes").

Until about the end of the 19th century, psychology was regarded as a branch of philosophy.

In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)(known as the father of Psychology) founded a laboratory at the Leipzig University in Germany specifically to focus on the study of psychology.

Meanwhile, Sigmund Freud, who was trained as a neurologist and had no formal training in experimental psychology, had invented and applied a method of psychotherapy known as psychoanalysis. Although Freud's theories are of virtually no interest today in psychology departments, his application of psychology to clinical work has been very influential.

Partly as a reaction to the subjective and introspective nature of psychology and its exclusive dependence upon the recollection of vague and faraway childhood experiences, behaviorism began to become popular as a guiding psychological theory. Skinner, behaviorists argued that psychology should be a science of behavior, not the mind, they rejected the idea that internal mental states such as beliefs, desires, or goals, could be studied scientifically. In his paper "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (1913), Watson argued that psychology "is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science," "introspection forms no essential part of its methods" and "The behaviorist recognizes no dividing line between man and brute."

Behaviorism was the dominant model in psychology for much of the early 20th century, largely due to the creation and successful application (not least of which in advertising) of conditioning theories as scientific models of human behavior.

Humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s and has continued as a reaction to positivist and scientific approaches to the mind.

Some of the founding theorists behind this school of thought were Abraham Maslow who formulated a hierarchy of human needs, Carl Rogers who created and developed client-centred therapy, and Fritz Perls who helped create and develop Gestalt therapy.

Links between brain and nervous system function were also becoming common, partly due to the experimental work of people like Charles Sherrington and Donald Hebb, and partly due to studies of people with brain injury (see cognitive neuropsychology). With the development of technologies for accurately measuring brain function, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience have become some of the most active areas in contemporary psychology.

With the increasing involvement of other disciplines (such as philosophy, computer science and neuroscience) in the quest to understand the mind, the umbrella discipline of cognitive science has been created as a means of focusing such efforts in a constructive way. Coming full circle, Transpersonal psychology and the Analytical Psychology of Carl Jung seek to return psychology to its spiritual roots. Others, such as Serge Moscovici and Gerard Duveen, argue that behavior and thought are essentially social in nature and seek to embed psychology in a broader social scientific study that incorporates the social meaning of experience and behavior.

see also: meta-semantics

Principles

Mind and brain

Mind and Brain Portal

Psychology describes and attempts to explain consciousness, behavior and social interaction. Empirical psychology is primarily devoted to describing human experience and behavior as it actually occurs. In the past 20 years or so psychology has begun to examine the relationship between consciousness and the brain or nervous system.

Schools of thought

Various schools of thought have argued for a particular model to be used as a guiding theory by which all, or the majority, of human behavior can be explained.

See also: List of psychological schools

Scope of psychology

Psychology is an extremely broad field, encompassing many different approaches to the study of mental processes and behavior. Below are the major areas of inquiry that comprise psychology. A comprehensive list of the sub-fields and areas within psychology can be found at the list of psychological topics and list of psychology disciplines.

Research psychology

Research psychology encompasses the study of behavior for use in academic settings, and contains numerous areas. It contains the areas of abnormal psychology, biological psychology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, developmental psychology, personality psychology, social psychology and others. Research psychology is contrasted with applied psychology.

Abnormal psychology

Abnormal psychology is the study of abnormal psychological behavior in order to describe, predict, explain, and change abnormal patterns of functioning. Abnormal psychology studies the nature of psychopathology and its causes, and this knowledge is applied to treating patients with psychological disorders in clinical psychology.

Biological psychology

Biological psychology is the scientific study of the biological bases of behavior and mental states. Neuropsychology is the branch of psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relate to specific behavioral and psychological processes.

The approach of cognitive neuroscience to studying the link between brain and behavior is to use neuroimaging tools, such as fMRI, to observe which areas of the brain are active during a particular task.

Cognitive psychology

The nature of thought is another core interest in psychology. Cognitive psychology studies cognition, the mental processes underlying behavior. Cognitive psychology is associated with a school of thought known as cognitivism, whose adherents argue for an information processing model of mental function, informed by positivism and experimental psychology.

Cognitive science is very closely related to cognitive psychology, but differs in some of the research methods used, and has a slightly greater emphasis on explaining mental phenomena in terms of both behavior and neural processing.

Comparative psychology

Comparative psychology refers to the study of the behavior and mental life of animals other than human beings. It is related to disciplines outside of psychology that study animal behavior, such as ethology. Although the field of psychology is primarily concerned with humans, the behavior and mental processes of animals is also an important part of psychological research, either as a subject in its own right (e.g., animal cognition and ethology), or with strong emphasis about evolutionary links, and somewhat more controversially, as a way of gaining an insight into human psychology by means of comparison or via animal models of emotional and behavior systems as seen in neuroscience of psychology (e.g., affective neuroscience and social neuroscience).

Developmental psychology

Mainly focusing on the development of the human mind through the life span, developmental psychology seeks to understand how people come to perceive, understand, and act within the world and how these processes change as they age. Urie Bronfenbrenner's theory of development in context (The Ecology of Human Development - ISBN 0-674-22456-6) is influential in this field, as are those mentioned in "Educational psychology" immediately below, as well as many others. Developmental psychologists draw on the full range of theorists in scientific psychology to inform their research.

Personality psychology

Personality psychology studies enduring psychological patterns of behavior, thought and emotion, commonly called an individual's personality.

Social psychology

Social psychology is the study of the nature and causes of human social behavior, with an emphasis on how people think towards each other and how they relate to each other. Social Psychology aims to understand how we make sense of social situations.

A related area is community psychology, which examines psychological and mental health issues on the level of the community rather than using the individual as the unit of measurement.

Applied psychology

Applied psychology encompasses both psychological research that is designed to help individuals overcome practical problems and the application of this research in applied settings. Much of applied psychology research is utilized in other fields, such as business management, product design, ergonomics, nutrition, and clinical medicine. Applied psychology includes the areas of clinical psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, human factors, forensic psychology, health psychology, school psychology and others.

Clinical psychology

Clinical psychology is the application of abnormal psychology research to the understanding, treatment, and assessment of psychopathology, including behavioral and mental health issues. It has traditionally been associated with psychological treatment and psychotherapy, although modern clinical psychology may take an eclectic approach, including a number of therapeutic approaches.

In recent years and particularly in the United States, a major split has been developing between academic research psychologists in universities and some branches of clinical psychology. Beck's cognitive therapy and Albert Ellis's rational emotive behavior therapy (with cognitive therapy being, by far, the most extensively studied therapy in contemporary clinical psychology).

Counseling psychology

Counseling psychology as a psychological specialty facilitates personal and interpersonal functioning across the life span with a focus on emotional, social, vocational, educational, health-related, developmental, and organizational concerns. Counseling psychology differs from clinical psychology in that it is focused more on normal developmental issues and everyday stress as opposed to severe mental disorders.

The emerging field of relationship counseling which seeks to describe typical human relationship successes and failures in rather concrete form, has the very specific appeal of avoiding psychology's rather universal assignation of pathology on all persons who seek assistance.

Educational psychology

Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations.

Forensic psychology

Forensic psychology is the area concerned with the application of psychological methods and principles to the legal arena. Most typically, forensic psychology involves a clinical analysis of a particular individual and an assessment of some specific psycho-legal question.

Health psychology

Health psychology is the application of psychological theory and research to health, illness and health care. Whereas clinical psychology focuses on mental health and neurological illness, health psychology is concerned with the psychology of a much wider range of health-related behavior including healthy eating, the doctor-patient relationship, a patient's understanding of health information, and beliefs about illness.

Human factors psychology

Human factors psychology is the study of how cognitive and psychological processes affect our interaction with tools and objects in the environment. The goal of research in human factors psychology is to better design objects by taking into account the limitations and biases of human mental processes and behavior.

Industrial and organizational psychology

Industrial and organizational psychology (I/O) is among the newest fields in psychology. Industrial Psychology focuses on improving, evaluating, and predicting job performance while Organizational Psychology focuses on how organizations impact and interact with individuals. In 1910, through the works and experiments of Hugo Munsterberg and Walter Dill Scott, Industrial Psychology became recognized as a legitimate part of the social science . Organizational Psychology was not officially added until the 1970s and since then, the field has flourished. The Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology has approximately 3400 professional members and 1900 student members. These two numbers combine to make up only about four percent of the members in the American Psychology Association but the number has been rising since 1939 when there were only one hundred professional I/O psychologists . Various universities across the United States are beginning to strengthen their I/O Psychology programs due to the increase of interest and job demand in the field .

School psychology

School psychology is the area of discipline that is dedicated to helping young people succeed academically, socially, and emotionally. Currently, school psychology is the only field in which a professional can be called a "psychologist" without a doctoral degree, with the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) recognizing the Specialist degree as the entry level.

Research methods

Research in psychology is conducted in broad accord with the standards of scientific method, encompassing both qualitative ethological and quantitative statistical modalities to generate and evaluate explanatory hypotheses with regard to psychological phenomena. Psychology tends to be eclectic, drawing on scientific knowledge from other fields to help explain and understand psychological phenomena. Research in humanistic psychology is more typically pursued by ethnographic, historical, and historiographic methods.

The testing of different aspects of psychological function is a significant area of contemporary psychology.

Academic psychologists may focus purely on research and psychological theory, aiming to further psychological understanding in a particular area, while other psychologists may work in applied psychology to deploy such knowledge for immediate and practical benefit. However, these approaches are not mutually exclusive and most psychologists will be involved in both researching and applying psychology at some point during their work. Clinical psychology, among many of the various discipline of psychology, aims at developing in practicing psychologists knowledge of and experience with research and experimental methods which they will continue to build up as well as employ as they treat individuals with psychological issues or use psychology to help others. Similarly, requirements may be laid down for university degrees in psychology, so that students acquire an adequate knowledge in a number of areas. Additionally, areas of practical psychology, where psychologists offer treatment to others, may require that psychologists be licensed by government regulatory bodies as well.

Controlled experiments

Experimental psychological research is conducted in the laboratory under controlled conditions.

Longitudinal studies

A longitudinal study is a research method which observes a particular population over time.

Neuropsychological methods

Neuropsychology involves the study of both healthy individuals and patients, typically who have suffered either brain injury or mental illness.

Cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry study neurological or mental impairment in an attempt to infer theories of normal mind and brain function.

Computational modeling

Computational modeling is a tool often used in cognitive psychology to simulate a particular behavior using a computer.

Criticism

Although modern mainstream psychology largely attempts to be a scientific endeavour, the field has a history of controversy. Some criticisms of psychology have been made on ethical and philosophical grounds. because it treats human beings as things, as objects that can be examined by experiment, psychology is sometimes portrayed as dehumanizing, ignoring or downplaying what is most essential about being human.

A common criticism of psychology concerns its fuzziness as a science. Since some areas of psychology rely on "soft" research methods such as surveys and questionnaires, some have said that those areas of psychology are not as scientific as psychologists claim. The question has been raised whether psychology should be classified as a science, because objectivity, validity, and rigour are key attributes one rule for empiricism and science, and some approaches to psychology have fallen short on these criteria, notably psychodynamic theory and introspection. On the other hand, greater use of statistical controls and increasingly sophisticated research design, analysis, and statistical methods, as well as a decline - at least within academic psychology departments - in the use of some of the more problematic methods such as introspection, have lessed tne impact of this criticism to some degree. However, debates continue within the field of psychology concerning the effectiveness of "Null Hypothesis Testing" as a valid research tool.

There is also a criticism from empirical psychology researchers concerning the gap between research and clinical practice in psychology.

Art Psychology

Psychology has, of course, had a profound impact on the arts and their definition in the twentieth century. One of the earliest to integrate psychology with art history was Heinrich Wölfflin (1864 – 1945), a Swiss art critic and historian, whose dissertation Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886)attempted to show that architecture could be understood from a purely psychological (as opposed to a historical-progressivist) point of view. In the US, the impact of psychology was particularly strong between 1950 and 1970 when it coincided with the expansion of art history and museum programs, as well as with the development in the post-WWII years of expanded undergraduate teaching curriculi. His Toward a Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press) was published in 1966. By the 1970s, the centrality of art psychology in academe began to wane. Historians critiqued psychology for being anti-contextual. Today, psychology still plays an important role in art discourse, though mainly in the field of art appreciation.

Related areas

Anthropology Aging Artificial consciousness Artificial intelligence Cognitive science Biology Economics

Education Ethology Linguistics Marketing Medicine Neuroscience Psychiatry

Philosophy of mind Philosophy of psychology Political science Relationship Education Social work Sociobiology Sociology Statistics

Learning about Psychology

Dictionary of Psychology Encyclopedia of Psychology Learn Psychology Glossary Simply Psychology

History of Psychology

The Archives of the History of American Psychology A Century of Psychology (APA) Classics in the History of Psychology

Other

PsychWiki - Wiki for psychology researchers (theory, findings, research methods, funding sources, and more) Find a Therapist - Psychology Today AmoebaWeb Psychology Directory Wikia has a wiki about: Psychology Psychology at the Open Directory Project Psychology

General	Psychology · History of psychology · Psychologist
Lists	Topics · Basic topics · Publications · Psychologists · Psychology organizations · Psychological schools · Disciplines
Areas	Research psychology — Quantitative psychological research · Qualitative psychological research; Abnormal · Biological · Cognitive · Comparative · Developmental · Evolutionary · Experimental · Neuropsychology · Personality · Physiological · Social Applied psychology — Clinical · Counseling · Educational · Forensic · Health · Industrial and organizational · School · Sport
Main schools	Behaviorism · Cognitivism · Evolutionary · Humanistic · Psychoanalysis
Historically important writers	B.F.