Psychology The Study of the Human Mind

•Abnormal Psychology is the study of abnormal behavior. This specialty area is focused on research and treatment of a variety of mental disorders and is linked to psychotherapy and clinical psychology.

•Biological Psychology studies how biological processes influence the mind and behavior. This area is closely linked to neuroscience and utilizes tools such as MRI and PET scans to look at brain injury or brain abnormalities.

•Clinical Psychology is focused on the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of mental disorders.

•Cognitive Psychology is the study of human thought processes and cognitions. Cognitive psychologists study topics such as attention, memory, perception, decision-making, problem solving, and language acquisition.

•Comparative Psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the study of animal behavior.

•Developmental Psychology is the branch of psychology that looks at human growth and development over the lifespan.

•Forensic Psychology is an applied field focused on using psychological research and principles in the legal and criminal justice system.

•Industrial-Organizational Psychology is the area of psychology that uses psychological research to enhance work performance, select employee, improve product design, and enhance usability.

•Personality Psychology looks at the various elements that make up individual personalities.

•School Psychology is the branch of psychology that works within the educational system to help children with emotional, social, and academic issues.

•Social Psychology is a discipline that uses scientific methods to study social influence, social perception, and social interaction. Social psychology studies diverse subjects including group behavior, social perception, leadership, nonverbal behavior, conformity, aggression, and prejudice.

Today, psychologists prefer to use more objective scientific methods to understand, explain, and predict human behavior. Psychological studies are highly structured, beginning with a hypothesis that is then empirically tested. Academic psychologists focus on the study of different sub-topics within psychology including personality psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology. These psychologists conduct basic research that seeks to expand our theoretical knowledge, while other researchers conduct applied research that seeks to solve everyday problems. Applied psychology focuses on the use of different psychological principles to solve real world problems. Examples of applied areas of psychology include forensic psychology, ergonomics, and industrial-organizational psychology. Many other psychologists work as therapists, helping people overcome mental, behavioral, and emotional disorders.

Psychology is a broad and diverse field with a variety of related professions. If you are considering studying psychology, you are pursuing one of the most important and basic of the human sciences. You can expect to have a long, satisfying, and fascinating career if psychology is your field.

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Human Psychology History

Medieval Perspective

Basic ideas of Structuralism and Functionalism

In 1879, studies in the field of human psychology began as a science of its own in Leipzig, Germany. With the establishment of Wundt’s psychology laboratory, he developed the technique of objective introspection. Later Titchener brought psychology in the form of structuralism to America. He was originally a student of Wundt. But structuralism died out in the early twentieth century. It was only in 1894 when M. F. Washburn received a Ph. D. in psychology. She was the first woman to do so and published The Animal Mind. She was a student of Titchener.

William James proposed the term functionalism, which was a counter argument against structuralism. It put across that the human mind allows us to adapt, live, work, play and to the stressful situations in our lives. It was due to functionalism that the modern fields of educational psychology, evolutionary psychology and organizational psychology have emerged in human psychology.

Gestalt psychology, Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism.

Wertheimer and other researchers studied a new perspective of study known as Gestalt psychology which focuses on sensation and perception, particularly patterns and whole figures.

The theory and therapy based on the work of Sigmund Freud is psychoanalysis. He believed that the unconscious mind controls much of our conscious behaviour. His extensive research and ideas are still influential today. His medical profession took a whole different approach to human psychology.

Later Behaviorism emerged studied by Watson. It focused exclusively on the observable stimuli and responses. As an illustration, Watson demonstrated that a phobia could be learned by conditioning a baby to be afraid of a white rat. Further, as a counter argument, Mary C. Jones established that a learned phobia could also be counter conditioned.

Modern perspectives

Psychodynamics, Behaviorism.

Modern Freudians such as Anna Freud, Jung and Adler change the emphasis in Freud’s original theory into a kind of neo-Freudianism. The modern version of psychoanalysis focuses more on self-development and discovers other motivations behind a persons behavior than sexual motivations.

Skinner’s operant conditioning of voluntary behavior became a major force in the twentieth century. He introduced the concept of reinforcement to behaviorism.

Humanism, Bio-psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Evolutionary perspective, and the Socio-Cultural perspective.

As a reaction to the deterministic nature of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, Maslow and Roger’s studies led to a new force known as humanism. Humanism focuses on free will and the human potential for growth. Bio-psychology emerged as the study of the biological bases of behavior. According to human psychology, human and animal behavior is seen as a direct result of events in the body. Cognitive Psychology is the study of language, memory, learning, and problem solving. The principles of evolution and the knowledge we currently have about evolutions are used in this perspectives to look at the way the mind works and why it works as it does. Human behavior is seen as having an adaptive or survival value.

Thus with the passage of time, human psychology has greatly expanded in scope and attention. 

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