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nature and meaning of psychology
what is psychology about
what is psychology about
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What Psychology is to Me
After taking Psychology 1000, psychology means much more to me than it
did prior to taking the class. At the beginning of the semester, I was asked to
define the word psychology, and the best definition I could muster was simply
the study of the mind and how it works. After examining the large realm of the
science of psychology I now realize that this definition was quite incomplete.
My initial definition simply covered the branch of psychology known as
cognitive psychology, and this is only one of many areas that are actually
included under the title psychology. Many psychologists focus on more
quantitative aspects than the function of the human mind. There are several
different areas that are more easily researched than that of the brain...
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
All things considered, as I’ve grown up several instances influenced my frame of mind and how I perceive the world around me. If I had to look back onto the starting domino of this chain of events, I’d have to say it's something my aunt told me; “You should only cry when you’re bleeding.” Granted, I don’t think she said that exactly. At 5 or 6 when she said that to me. But I took it that way, especially as I grew up in Oregon.
All actions entail an inner, psychological cause. This idea can be applied in literary analysis, one novel being Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Throughout Brave New World, the World State emerges as ideal and flawless with scientific and technological advancements. One way to examine such world is with the psychoanalytical lens–an approach in literature focusing on character psychology–to divulge significant meanings in conscious and unconscious behaviors. Utilizing the psychoanalytic lens, one can perceive the flaws of the World State through various people.
Psychology is the study of the behavior of living organisms. The people that study the behaviors are called psychologists. There have been many studies done by these people to try and figure out why people or animal do the things they do. Psychology's four main goals are to describe what occurred, explain why it occurred, predict what event is likely to occur next, and to change to prevent unwanted outcomes. Psychologists study the process of thinking, learning, cognition, emotions, motivations, and personalities. An example of one study that has been done would be why a dog salivates to the sound of a bell and show. This behavior is due to a conditioned stimulus becoming a conditioned response. Another experiment done was with a baby and a white mouse to see if the baby would be scared if something happened while grabbing for the mouse.
This essay will discuss the topic Philosophy of Mind (POM) which is split into four areas; Dualism, Materialism, Idealism and Neutral Monism. However, due to the depth of these four areas, only Dualism and Neutral Monism will be discussed more in-depth during this essay.
My choice of research was in the play behaviors of children as well as aggression. Breaking the topic down more, behavior relates to the psychology and the psyche of each individual. The definition of psychology is “science of mind and behavior” (Clavijo, 2013). After reading the article by Clavijo, I have realized that psychology can be defined in three ways such as the study of the mind, the study of behavior, and the study of the mind and behavior. In the text “The Developing Person” by Berger, behavior is learned through social learning. Children learn different behaviors through the observation of others, others being children and adults. Different people have affects on a child’s life that can affect their behavior. A child’s behavior is heavily influenced by their parents. A son may speak aggressively and without respect towards his mother because this is the way that his father speaks to her therefore he feels that is how to communicate with his mother (Berger, 200, 2012). Moving into play behaviors, children learn from other children in how to play. Most believe cognitive growth relies on child’s play time. Vygotsky and Piaget both believe that when children play it is beneficial, but according to Vygotsky, playing enables a child to think outside the box and create their own meaning from objects, using their imagination. Piaget believes that child benefit from playing together because children and sharing their knowledge and making it more concrete ideas and thoughts. There are four stages of plays, with the fourth stage being the highest most complicated play which consists of rules and guidelines for the game. The lowest level or play would be functional play being infants shaking rattles, clapping their hands, or blow...
Psychology is define as the study of human and animal behavior and of the mind. Psychology is a science because new use research and empirical data to answer theories and make predictions to explain different phenomena. In science we use observation, experiment, analysis and asking questions. You also must do your background research and form a hypothesis. In psychology there are typically several different hypotheses. Framework is one of them, it’s when a particular outcome is predicted based on a set of particular facts. A psychologists would test the hypothesis by using experiments for a scientific method. What makes psychology a science is the fact that they test their theories and modify them to fit new things.
My paper is based on an article from the text’s web site (chapter 9) entitled “Lack of sleep ages body’s systems.” The basic claim of the article is that sleep deprivation has various harmful effects on the body. The reported effects include decreased ability to metabolize glucose (similar to what occurs in diabetes) and increased levels of cortisol (a stress hormone involved in memory and regulation of blood sugar levels). The article also briefly alludes (in the quote at the bottom of page 1) to unspecified changes in brain and immune functioning with sleep deprivation.
It is common to consider the founding year of psychology to be where psychology became a separate science. According to Hergenhahn (2009), this approach is unsatisfactory for two reasons: (1) It ignores the vast philosophical heritage that molded psychology into the type of science it eventually became; and (2) it omits important aspects of psychology that are outside the realm of science. Since the mid-19th century, psychologists have incorporated the scientific method into their work however, the work of many psychologists who did not embrace the scientific method before the mid-19th century cannot be ignored. According to Kendra Cherry, before 1879 there have been many potential contributors to the beginning of what is often called "modern science," the ideas of the French philosopher Rene Descartes are important to science but particularly to psychology. During the 17th-century, he worked to answer the question "Are the mind and body the same, or different?” and that resulted in the development of Cartesian Dualism, which is the idea that mind and body are different, but that the mind can influence the body and the body can influence the mind. This stated that the mind and body were two separate entities that interact to form the human experience. Descartes is mostly known for his principle that thoughts exist which is known as cogito ergo sum. His reason was since thoughts cannot be separated from him, he existed. Additionally, he stated that if he could doubt, then something or someone must also be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. The questions of the mind are a major aspect of psychology hence this could have been the beginning of psychology.
This topic focuses on a multitude of frontiers and provides examples. For example, they speak of mind reading and the possible approaches presented. This can only be done through research.
Psychology is the investigation of the mind and how it processes and directs our thoughts, actions and conceptions. However, in 1879 Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Nevertheless, the origins of psychology go all the way back thousands of years starting with the early Greeks. This foundation is closely connected to biology and philosophy; and especially the subfields of physiology which is the study of the roles of living things and epistemology, which is the study of comprehension and how we understand what we have learned. The connection to physiology and epistemology is often viewed as psychology, which is the hybrid offspring of those two fields of investigation.
The mind is a very interesting phenomena, it is something that we know exists in a basic sense, but there are just some things that we cannot know about the mind, for example, we know that the mind is directly tied to the brain, but we do not know whether the brain is a spiritual entity that controls the brain, or if the brain creates what we call the mind, which embodies our conscience. this, in a basic sense is a start to the problem to be discussed, the mind-body problem is the challenge of explaining how mental states such as thoughts and other mental processes relate to the physical worlds events states and processes, since the body and mind operate on two completely different planes; the physical and non-physical. This is known as the mind-body problem, which is a crucial problem understand in
The British Psychological Society states that ‘Psychology is the scientific study of people, the mind and behaviour’ (BPS). In this essay I will be discussing what is actually meant by this and whether psychology fits into both the traditional views of a science, as well as more contemporary perspectives. It is widely suggested that Psychology is a “coalition of specialities” meaning it is multi-disciplinary (Hewstone, Fincham and Foster 2005, page 4). I will therefore examine whether it could be considered wrong to think that all parts of the discipline should neatly fit into one view of a scientific approach.
The world is made up of two types of ‘things’- mental and material. While material things are characterized by physical properties such as shape, mass, and color, and are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, mental things are made up of properties such as consciousness, awareness, beliefs, and desires, all of which are not limited to space (Fieser, 2008; Yang, 2012). Philosophy of mind is concerned with the relationship between these two sets of properties and tries to explain whether there are such things as minds, such properties as mental properties, and whether mental and physical bodies interact with each other (Mandik, 2010).
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind In Society:the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.