Psychology

Psychology is best described as the scientific study of the mind and how it can dictate and influence an individual's behavior. This includes communication, memory, thought, and emotion. Psychology looks to understand how the brain works and uses that understanding to address the problems of the individual and of the larger society.

As a science, psychology functions as an academic discipline and a professional practice, with both studying human behavior and the mind through observation, measurement, and testing to form conclusions based on sound scientific methodology. This means the psychologists make use of the scientific method to acquire knowledge, which uses a hypothesis for a tentative explanation of an action or phenomenon that is then tested to find evidence for or against that hypothesis. Research in psychology can be difficult though, as the evidence for how the mind works and how behavior is impacted can be difficult to gather, if not impossible, with technology being an important enabler of further research in the field.

The American Psychological Association (APA) adds that psychology embraces all aspects of the human experience, from the functions of the brain to the actions of nations, from child development to care for the elderly. Psychologists and psychiatrists work to treat people with mental health. The major difference between a psychologist and psychiatrist comes in the method of treatment of symptoms. Psychologists relieve symptoms through behavioral treatment, and psychiatrists are medical doctors who focus on the use of medication and other interventions for the management of mental health.

Psychology has been described as having four main goals: the description, explanation, prediction, and change in behavior and mental processes of others. The description refers to describing a behavior or cognition, which is often considered the first goal of psychology and helps researchers develop the general laws of human behavior. Explanation is the attempt of researchers to describe the general laws of behavior, or to explain how or why specific trends in psychology occur.Prediction refers to the aim of psychology to be able to predict future behavior from the findings of empirical research. If a prediction is not confirmed, that usually signals that an explanation the prediction is based on needs to be revised. And change refers to the work done by psychologists through interventions and medications to treat specific disorders within psychology.

The most obvious application of psychology is the field of mental health, in which psychologists work to help clients overcome symptoms of mental distress and psychological illness using findings, principles, research, and clinical findings. The following are some of the applications of psychology:

• developing educational programs
• ergonomics
• informing public policy
• mental health treatment
• performance enhancement
• personal health and well-being
• psychological research
• self-help
• social program design
• child development

Since the founding of psychology, the application of the research has benefited both individuals and society as a whole. A large part of psychology as part of this application has been focused on contributing to individuals and society, which includes the following:

• improving the understanding of why people behave as they do
• understanding the different factors that impact the human mind and behavior
• understanding the issues that impact health, daily life, and well-being
• improving ergonomics to improve product design
• creating safer and more efficient workspaces
• helping motivate people to achieve goals
• improving productivity

Because human behavior is varied, and because of the different possible applications of psychological research, there have been a number of subfields of psychology that have been developed and established as areas of interest, with colleges and universities offering specific degrees in some of these subfields. Often these fields represent a specific area of study in which a psychologist will specialize, and to work in a subfield often requires additional graduate study.

While psychology is generally considered to have been founded as a field in the late 19th century, when some of the earliest research would be foundational to modern psychology and psychological approaches, there are some questions about whether psychology could be considered to stretch back farther. For example, some of the earliest discussions over where the thoughts and feelings of a person came from came from early Greek thinkers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, each of whom had different theories of the seat of the mind, with some thinking it was the brain and others the heart.

Perhaps more closely related to the modern study of psychology, philosophy and physiology contained precursors, with philosophers such as John Locke (1632-1704) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796) largely promoting ideas of empiricism, emphasizing the role of the human observer and the primacy of the senses in defining how an individual comes to acquire knowledge. These principles would go on to be taught on mental and moral philosophy, which discussed questions of the faculties of intellect, will, and the senses.

William Wundt, founder of the Structuralism school.

In the 19th century, the two people who are given credit for founding psychology as a discipline are William Wundt and William James, who founded differing theories. William Wundt (1832-1920) is largely credited as the first person referred to as a psychologist. He viewed psychology as a scientific study and used introspection, which he called internal perception, in which a person examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible. Wundt set up one of the first psychological laboratories, where he attempted to bring experimental conditions to the study of introspection. The theory he developed out of this was called structuralism, which has fallen out of favor since 1927.

William James, founder of the Functionalism school.

William James (1842-1910) had a different perspective from Wundt on how psychology should operate. James was drawn to Darwin's theories and saw psychology's purpose as to study the function of behavior in the world, with his perspective later called functionalism. Functionalism focused on how mental activities helped an organism, or individual, fit into their environment. Similar to Wundt, James believed introspection was a significant tool of study for mental activities. This field of study would also fall out of favor, similar to Wundt's structuralism.

Both structuralism and functionalism, despite their differences, were studies of the mind. Whereas, a school of psychological thought that emerged in the early 20th century, behaviorism, reacted in part to the difficulties psychologists encountered when using introspection to understand behavior. Behaviorism was based on the premise that it is not possible to study the mind objectively, and therefore psychologists should limit themselves to the study of behavior, with many behaviorists believing the human mind is similar to a black box into which stimuli are sent and responses are received. They would further argue that trying to determine what happens in the box is pointless, without knowing what happens inside the box (or mind).

John B. Watson, largely credited with founding the school of Behaviorism.

Behaviorism grew out of worries that previous schools of thought and thinkers were beginning to have, in terms of the concept of consciousness. As well, it was born in part from the rise of animal psychology, such as the famous work of Russian Ivan Pavlov and his studies into conditioning of dogs, which was published in English in 1909. However, American psychologist John B. Watson is generally considered to be the founder of the movement, influenced in large part by Pavlov's experiments. Watson and other behaviorists would argue, based on the work of Ivan Pavlov and others, that events and other experiences in an individual's or organism's environment—also known as stimuli—can produce specific behavior, or responses. For example, Pavlov's research conditioned dogs to believe a tone meant food, and at the tone, the dogs would respond with saliva. These experiments would replicate in human subjects. One experiment placed a child with a rat in a room, and the researchers made loud noises that scared the child every time they touched the rat. The child became conditioned to cry and tried to move away from the rat after a short while.

This school of thought made contributions to psychology, especially in the principles of learning, but would eventually be abandoned due to some of the incorrect beliefs, such as it is impossible to measure thoughts and feelings. The school of thought did advance the debates and understanding of the nature-nurture debate and the question of free-will, while other findings in the field have been adopted into wider psychology.

Concurrent with the growth of behaviorism, and in juxtaposition to many of the theories of behaviorism, the psychoanalytical theories and therapeutic practices were developed by Vienna-trained physician Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. These theories undermined traditional views of human nature as essentially rational, with Freud arguing that reason is secondary, and the driving forces of much of human behavior and mental illness are often unconscious, with socially unacceptable and irrational motives and desires—particularly of the sexual and aggressive types. The concept of the unconscious thought was a product of Freud's theories, and making the unconscious conscious was the therapeutic goal of the psychoanalytical school.

Perhaps one of the more famous early psychologists, Sigmund Freud found the Psychoanalytical school of thought.

Further, Freud proposed that much of what humans feel, think, and do is outside of awareness, self-defensive in its motivations, and unconsciously determined, often grounded in conflicts from early childhood. and demonstrated in patterns of apparently paradoxical behaviors and symptoms. Followers of the psychoanalytical school would emphasize the importance of higher-order functions and cognitive processes, as well as the psychological defense mechanisms. In therapeutic practice, they would shift to focus on interpersonal relations, secure attachment, and adaptive functioning. The school of thought pioneered the use of analysis of these and other functions in the clinical setting.

At the same time as the development of behaviorism and psychoanalysis in America, Germany saw the rise of the Gestalt school of psychology, with Gestalt being a German word referring to wholeness. Founded by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffa, and Wolfgang Kohler, the school of thought focused on perception and argued that perception can not be broken into small pieces without losing the whole or essence of the perception. They would argue that humans actively organize information, and perception represents the wholeness and pattern of things that dominate. For example, when a person watches a movie, they perceive people and things in motion, but they see individual still pictures shown at a constant rate.

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, and influenced by the growing popularity of the computer, which influenced the way psychologists thought about the brain and human behavior, cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, such as perception, thinking, memory, and judgement. Some consider, too, that cognitive psychology followed Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of behaviorism and empiricism. This was in part a critique of behaviorist B.F. Skinner, who explained language acquisition in a behaviorist framework. As part of the critique, Chomsky argued that language is not solely learned from the operant conditioning postulated by Skinner. Rather, he believed that people can produce an infinite variety of sentences unique in structure and meaning, and those can not be generated solely through experienced language. Further, he would conclude that there has to be internal mental structures, the kinds of states of mind rejected by behaviorism.

Cognitive psychology has since gone on to become the dominant area of psychology. The field, in part, grew out of a response to who some call neobehaviorists, who wanted to limit the acceptable topics of study. While cognitive psychology attempts to study how mental processes work and how knowledge is formed and used, with topics expanding to include attention, reasoning, logic, decision-making, creativity, language, cognitive development, and intelligence.

Sometimes referred to as the "third force" of psychology, Humanistic psychology emerged in the late 1950s, around the same time as cognitive psychology. However, it had greater similarity to previous schools of thought. Humanistic psychology sought to stress the phenomenological view of human experience. The approach sought to understand human beings and their behavior by conducting qualitative research, and many proponents of the school rejected the scientific approach while arguing that it improperly stripped an experience of meaning and relevance.

Sometimes considered a school in psychology, and in other cases similar to cognitive psychology, the field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior. The field of thought grew in the late 20th century and was interested in how people perceive themselves and others and how that can influence their own and others' behavior. Important concepts from the social-cultural psychological study have included conformity, or the study of people's frequently changing beliefs and behaviors to be similar to those people an individual cares about; social norms, or the ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving being shaped by group members and perceived as appropriate; and the study of culture, which includes a common set of social norms, such as religious and family values, and moral beliefs, and the influence that culture has on aspects of an individual's life.

In the late 20th, early 21st century, positive psychology arose—a development from research on happiness, with a focus on treating mental health rather than on mental illness. Although the term originates with Maslow, Martin Seligman is considered to be the father of the modern positive psychology movement, which was introduced as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association. The approach is intended to complement traditional psychology, rather than replace it as a hierarchy, and focuses on nurturing genius and understanding normal growth and development.