1. Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental process. Psychology analyzes the things people do and why they do those certain things. It looks into why children grow up and act the way they do. The goals of psychology are to describe, understand, predict, and control behavior. Describing behavior is important because detailed records are the basis to answering important questions. It is important to be able to understand behavior in order to explain why certain behaviors were demonstrated. Prediction is the ability to forecast behaviors accurately. Psychologists want to be able to control behavior, so they can alter the conditions that affect behavior. 2. The scientific method is applied in psychological research through the use of making observations, defining a problem, proposing a hypothesis, …show more content…
The biological perspective seeks to explain the behavior of people in terms such as brain processes, evolution, and genetics. The psychological perspective says that behavior is the result of psychological processes within individual people. This perspective wants to explain how mental processes affect thoughts, actions, and feelings. The sociocultural perspective stresses the impact that social and cultural context have on people. In america alone there are multiple cultures that people interact with every day. The sociocultural perspective wants to explain how this shapes people. 4. An experiment is performed by directly varying a condition that you may think may be the cause of a behavior, create two or more groups of subjects to be tested, and record whether the varying condition has any affect on the behavior. There must be an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group is exposed to the variable believed to alter behavior. The control group is in all the same conditions, except they do not receive the altering
The laboratory experiment gives the experimenter a greater chance to control the conditions and enables you to measure behaviour with greater precision. This method also allows for quantative research and also enables greater control of variables. Although it gives the experimenter greater control, this can also seem daunting to the subject who may feel more uncomfortable and is less likely to ...
The scientific method is how psychologists gain knowledge about the mind and behavior. It is used by all scientists. The experimental method is the one way to engage the scientific method, and the only way to find a cause and effect in relationships. It is summarized in five steps, observing some phenomenon in the world, forming a hypothesis which is an educated prediction about relationships between two or more variables, examining the gathered information by using empirical research, determining what the results are and drawing them, and evaluating the results whether it will support the hypothesis or not. Researchers, at the end, submit their work for publication for all to see and read (King, 2016). There are three types of psychological research in the scientific method, descriptive research, correlation, and experimental research (King, 2016). The article The Effects of Negative Body Talk in an Ethnically Diverse Sample of College Students (Katrevich, Register, & Aruguete, 2014) is an example of the experimental method.
Psychology can be broadly defined as the scientific and systematic study of people’s behavior and mental processes.
The birth of psychology was in December of 1879, at Germanys University of Leipzig (Myers, 2014, p.2). In 1960, Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener defines psychology as “the science of mental health” (Myers, 2014, p.4). However, two provocative American psychologists, John Watson and B.F Skinner, redefined psychology in 1920. They redefined psychology as “the scientific study of observable behavior” (Myers, 2014, p.4). The problem arose when psychologists realized people could not observe feeling or thought so they needed to come up with a new definition for psychology. We define psychology today as “the science of behavior and mental processes” (Myers, 2014, p.4). Psychology includes many subfields such as human development, social behavior,
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.
Psychology itself is a broad term where everyone may be ambiguous to it. There’s a lot of subjects psychology talks about, but it’s main definition is the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. The brain is the function to life and without it, there is no life. The brain has so many functions such as the ability for a person to see, hear, make decisions, sensing and touching, and many more. The brain regulates and sends signals to the body from birth to death. It was said, “ A person only uses 10% of it’s brain” which is completely false, everyone uses 100% of the brain even when they don’t realize it. No matter what situation anyone is dealing with, it’s how the brain would interpret the problem and that’s how one would act upon
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.
Biological and cognitive are both different theoretical perspectives. They both have unique differences. The biological and cognitive approaches differ in their view on the nature versus nurture debate. The biological approach focuses on nature rather than nurture. It believes that behavior is determined by internal physiological processes such as the structure and functions of the neurons, hormones, DNA and structure of the brain. The cognitive perspective goes into the domain of mental processes to understand human nature. This perspective shows how we learn, make decisions, use language, plan for future, and form judgments.
Personal observations of human behavior are often unreliable because their interpretations are not conducted in an objective, unbiased manner. The observations will often be subjective, and may reflect that person’s feelings or perspectives. When a personal observation is made of human behavior, prior life experiences, personal feelings and perceptions render the results unreliable, because they cannot be viewed or interpreted by anyone else. The general purpose of psychology is to describe, explain, predict and control or influence behavior and mental processes. Psychologists use these goals to observe and research, along with the use of the scientific method. The scientific method is a way of conducting research, and is used to guide scientists by demanding that the evidence is always valid and verifiable, and not subjective. The scientific method serves as a guideline for researchers and assists in lessening the possibility of unreliable results or errors in their conclusions.
...ses influences behavior. The evolutionary perspective explains, how evolution explains mental processes. The psychodynamic perspective assumes that human behaviors are driven by unconscious forces. The behavioral perspective is primarily concerned with learned behaviors. The humanistic perspective emphasizes on personality growth. The cognitive perspective examines our internal thought processes. Finally, the sociocultural perspective compares human behaviors to other cultures, and social settings. There are many ways to examine human behaviors, and these perspectives can help to explain these behaviors, and come up with possible solutions.
"The premise behind the biological perspective in psychology is that all actions, feelings, and thoughts are associated with bodily events." Biological psychologists examine how all of the electrical impulses, hormones, and chemicals flowing through the body can effect behavior and how changes to these bodily functions can change behavior. They are concerned with how the aspects of biology effect peoples' emotions, learning abilities, and their perception of events.
Introduction to Psychological Perspective: There are numerous different methods in psychology that involves various assumptions regarding human/animal behavior. For every perspective, it has its own strengths and weaknesses, and brings something different to our understanding of human (animal) behavior. It is important that psychology does have diverse perspectives to understanding and study of human and animal behavior.
The Science of Psychology “Psychology is the scientific study of mind, brain and behaviour. Some of what you do learn may seem like ‘common sense’, or at least familiar to you because you are learning about topics in which you can relate to. However some things you may believe is true, but is incorrect. The way we know this is through the application of scientific methods.” Mark Leary suggests that the subject matter of psychology is much more familiar to most people than is the subject matter of physics or biology; we see behaviour all around us.
There are six main perspectives in psychology; cognitive, biological, humanistic, psychodynamic, behavioral, and social cultural. The cognitive perspective studies how the brain processes and perceives information while the biological perspective studies things that affect behavior. The psychodynamic perspective digs into subconscious thoughts and behaviors based off of childhood experiences and the behavioral perspective studies behavior learned by experiences and interactions with the world. Finally, the social cultural perspective studies how social and cultural factors influence behavior. In this essay, I will go over the strengths and weaknesses of the social cultural perspectives in psychology. The social cultural perspective in psychology helps recognize patterns in behaviors through social cognition and helps build communities through social influence, but falls short in recognizing individuality.
Psychology is the scientific study and practical application of observable behavior and mental processes of organisms. Psychology differs from other social sciences such as: Sociology, History, or Economics, because psychology specifically deals with the study of an individual. The other social sciences will study groups, or history. Psychology is less a science of reported findings, it attempts asks and answers questions using observable behavior and what can be determined as mental processes of the subject. The symbol for psychology is the Greek letter “psi” (Ø). The subject matter of psychology is, affect, behavior, and cognition. The affect for psychology is the actual mental processes that make up: moods, feeling, and emotional state. An example for affect would be feeling sad about something happening. Behavior includes the actually actions and responses of organisms. Behavior can include the way we act in any given situation, for example when we get up in the morning. The order in the way we prepare ourselves for going out into public can be categorized as our behavior. Cognition is the actual mental events and the processes that result from them. Memories of an event are a great example of an organism’s cognition. The components and corresponding faces of psychology include the body of knowledge which is considered the teaching face, set of investigative methods or research face, and array of techniques the therapy face. The goals of psychology are: to explain behaviors, to describe behaviors, to predict behavior, and to modify inappropriate behaviors. Explaining behaviors would be a question similar to “Why does this happen?”, and example of how describing behavior could be accomplished would be asking “What causes this behavior, where does it come from?”. Predictions can be elaborated on by asking “When will the behavior occur?”. An example of a behavioral modification question is “What can be changed in the environment to alter this behavior?”. A specialized subfield of psychology that most interests me is, Forensic Psychology, because it would be appealing to me to understand a potential criminal mind and to make the determination if the criminal was sane at the time the crime was committed or if he/she was operating with full judgment. In studying the 9/11 attack on America, a Forensic Psyc...