Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. In psychology, and all of the other sciences, relying on opinions is abandoned in order to find out which explanations best fit the evidence or data given. Science continually forces us to question our findings and conclusions. Over time, psychology has advanced greatly and a main reason for such progressiveness is because of the change in the research model used. Psychology did not begin to progress until it moved from an introspective model to an experimental model. The introspective model was a central component to the early day’s of psychology, more specifically during the Structuralist period. It is the process of examining yourself and your actions. People would have …show more content…
This new model is called the experimental model. The experimental model uses sophisticated research methods to study memory, language, and the thinking process of humans. The experimental model also used human participants, usually in groups, for its experiments. Typically, these groups were split into two and then exposed to different experiences. This was done in order to gauge the effect of independent variables and to measure the dependent variables. Although the experimental model pushed psychology into a more advanced period, it still had its own issues that could ultimately ruin experiments. For a long time, research was conducted at colleges and universities by students who were participating just for class credit. In addition, the participant pool mostly consisted of white males. That creates a problem - a WEIRD problem. These participants were WEIRD: Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic …show more content…
Sixty-seven percent of research studies use college students as their participants. This means that most of the participants are teenagers and young adults. The participants age has a major consequence on behavior. Our brain is constantly developing and even though a large portion of our brain 's development occurs when we are adolescent, our brain is still undergoing change during the late teenage years. All though it may not seem, there are differences between the brain of an adult and a college student. For example, college students and adults have a much different approach to risk evaluation. College students are more likely to be sensitive to reward and to overestimate risks. These differences could extremely influence the outcomes of a research study, causing the reliability of the study to be
Psychology comprises of two words originally used by the ‘Greeks’, ‘psyche’, defining the mind, soul or spirit and lastly ‘logos’ being study. Both words define together the ‘study of the mind’. Psychology perspectives evaluate the normal and abnormal behaviour and how persons’ deal with different concepts of issues and problems. Psychology theories’ are based on ‘common sense’, but its scientific structure, everything needs to be evaluated and tested, therefore, promoting different psychological theories’.
Psychology is a type of science because psychologists share a basic assumption with all other scientists. Psychology methods can range from simple to complex. There are several research methods in psychology, and the outcome is relatively different for each. Each method studies and tests different situations. “The goals of psychologist are to make predictions about the conditions that gave rise to them, and then use that knowledge to predict and possibly to control events in the future”. (Stephen F.Davis, 2007)
Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist rejected the idea of introspection and the role of the human conscious, or unconscious, in the behaviors of human beings. Instead, it focused on the experimental exploration of human behavior based on stimuli and human response to the stimuli. Watson’...
Psychology can be broadly defined as the scientific and systematic study of people’s behavior and mental processes.
“People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings” - Daniel Kahneman.
The career that I decided to pursue when I came to college is Clinical psychology. The reason why I decided on majoring in Psychology is because I took an AP Psychology course during my junior year of high school and the Teacher I had made me love Psychology. The reason why I enjoy Psychology so much is because it expands the mind to so many different things like why people have certain behaviors and teaches you the real difference between Nature and Nurture. You are also given the chance to learn new things about why we humans are the way we are. I have also been fascinated with the thought process of a serial killers and why they continuously kill innocent people and I feel like getting a Psychology degree will help me understand that more
Everything people do is connected to psychology. As a multi-faceted and wide-ranging discipline, the focus of psychology the mental activity and behavior of people (Grison, Heatherton & Gazzaniga, 2016). Cognitive processes such as perception enable an individual to make sense of the endless environmental stimulus encountered in daily life (Grison, Heatherton & Gazzaniga, 2016). From reading this text, to walking a dog, reaching a personal goal, or deciding which shoes to wear, perceptions not only influence decision making, they allow an individual to navigate the world. Moreover, it is an individual’s perceptions that can affect their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. Who a person is in terms of their intelligence, motives, goals,
The term psychology has many meanings to different people, even to those who work within the psychological field. The word psychology derives from two Greek roots; 'psyche' refers to 'soul' or 'mind' and logo refers to 'the study of'. A more update definition of the word psychology can be found from Atkinson, et al (1991) “The scientific study of behaviours and mental processes.” However on Google Definitions the definition of psychology is “the mental characteristics and attitudes of a person” [accessed 16 September 2011], which gives somewhat of a contradiction. In this assignment I will be outlining and evaluating four key psychological perspectives. The psychological perspectives I have chosen are the behavioural approach, biological approach, cognitive approach and the psychodynamic approach.
The adolescent brain is in many ways much different than the adult brain. It processes and learns things much different than the adult brain. For many years scientists have been studying the adolescent brain trying to find out what really happens as children grow older. Scientist have found that teenagers (adolescent) process actions without thinking about the possible outcomes. Based on the technology these days our brains have been able to learn and adapt to new challenges.
I think that if we were able to keep doing these experiments, we would have much more information and knowledge about psychology and sociology. If we truly do want to know more about these subjects, then we need to realize that we have to do these types of experiments and accept the risks and just do these types of experiments.
Psychology is a social science that aims to study the mind and the behaviors of humans. It aims to understand what drives humans to act the way they do. It differs from sociology and anthropology in that it takes accounts the individual rather than society as a whole.
Psychology is a relatively new field in the realm of the sciences with only about 130 years old. Wilhelm Wundt was known as the “father of psychology” the first psychologist. Wundt was in the philosophy filed in the beginning of his study; later on in his life, he opened the first psychology laboratory. A well known method in Wundt’s experiment was the Introspection, “this was a description of an experience broken down into its simplest terms, its elements” (Watson, Evans 278). William James was one of the most famous founder of American psychology. He was interested in how people are influenced by their environment, “rather than breaking consciousness down into its elements, he preferred to look at the human experience as complete wholes” (McMahon, Judith 8). The most well known and popular psychologist in modern day is Sigmund Freud, an Austrian Physician in the late 1800’s. Freud established the theory of personality, in his view, “problems that appear in adolescence or adulthood can be tranced to things that happened in the first five or six years of life” (McMahon, Judith 7). Freud’s concepts of mind, the conscious, pre-conscious, and the unconscious are still widely used in present books and movies.
Psychology started, and had a long history, as a topic within the fields of philosophy and physiology. It then became an independent field of its own through the work of the German Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology and structuralism. Wundt stressed the use of scientific methods in psychology, particularly through the use of introspection. In 1875, a room was set-aside for Wundt for demonstrations in what we now call sensation and perception. This is the same year that William James set up a similar lab at Harvard. Wilhelm Wundt and William James are usually thought of as the fathers of psychology, as well as the founders of psychology?s first two great ?schools? Structuralism and Functionalism. Psychologist Edward B Titchner said; ?to study the brain and the unconscious we should break it into its structural elements, after that we can construct it into a whole and understand what it does.? (psicafe.com)
This concept led to a broadening of psychology. Many groups that were often overlooked by psychologists were being discovered and observed. Behavior became the dominant school of psychology in the U.S. until the 1960's.
O’Connell, D. C., & Kowal, S. (2009). The evolution of modern psychology: A critical, forward-looking perspective on some pioneers. Journal of Psychology, 217, 73-78. Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com