Psychology

From Wikinfo

Psychology is a collection of academic disciplines concerned with how people work, including their behavior, mental processes, and pathologies. (Effectively, two related disciplines live under the same name: Experimental psychology, which focuses on basic science, and Clinical psychology, which focuses on a specific realm of application.)

Psychology differs from sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, in part, by studying the behavior of individuals (alone or in groups) rather than the behavior of the groups or aggregates themselves. While psychological questions were asked in antiquity (c.f., Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia or "On Memory and Recollection"), psychology emerged as a separate discipline only recently. The first person to call himself a "psychologist", Wilhelm Wundt, opened the first psychological laboratory in 1879.

The root of the word psychology (psyche) means "soul" or "spirit" in Greek, and psychology was sometimes considered a study of the soul (in a religious sense of this term), though its emergence as a medical discipline can be seen in Thomas Willis' reference to psychology (the "Doctrine of the Soul") in terms of brain function, as part of his 1672 anatomical treatise "De Anima Brutorum" ("Two Discourses on the Souls of Brutes").

Until about the end of the 19th Century, psychology was regarded as a branch of philosophy. Experimental psychology, as introduced by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879 at Leipzig University in Germany, did not contain any religious implications. At the beginning of the 20th Century, psychology was typically considered the study of consciousness. Since then, psychology has typically considered to be about behavior (e.g., the behaviorism of John B. Watson), the mind (i.e., Cognitive psychology), or both. Today it would be rare to find someone who considered psychology the study of immaterial minds, let alone souls. However, there are many psychologists who believe in souls and some who bring this into their psychological work. Of course, like all sciences that have broken off from philosophy, purely philosophical questions about the mind are still studied by philosophers; the name of the philosophical subdiscipline which studies those questions is philosophy of mind. Few universities, journals, or researchers today treat psychology as a branch of philosophy, but there is much work which is not strictly experimental (such as survey research) conducted in psychology.

A frequent complaint against psychologists and therapists is that they pressurize vulnerable patients to agree with them when the therapists are wrong. Then they say something like, "My theory is true. I've proved it with my patients." Practitioners of Psychoanalysis of the schools of Sigmund Freud , Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler all insisted they had proved their own theories through their patients. It is clear that the mutually contradictory theories of those different schools cannot all be true. Between about 1975 and 1985 psychologists assumed that all women who complained about Sexual harassment must have been encouraging it intentionally. They never asked themselves, "Are we sure this is true?" They never asked themselves, "Just suppose this is not true, how much harm are we doing?" It will probably never be known how often expert psychologists manipulated women, (vulnerable due to harassment) into making false confessions. How much psychology is based on False premises?

Experimental psychology, the field founded by Wundt and James, focuses on general and basic questions concerning behavior, mental states, or both, including theories of pathology which are also important to clinical psychology.

Clinical psychology focuses on understanding and treatment of behavioral or mental problems. Psychiatry is the medical field specializing in mental health issues, thereby overlapping with clinical psychology. Clinical psychologists often work in co-operation with psychiatrists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and 'lay' counselors. Services aimed at mental or behavioral problems also often provided by traditional healers and religious counselors. Fields such as neuroscience, political science, media studies and Gender study have also come to be seen as closely related to psychology.

Behaviorism describes positions ranging from the belief that the study of behavior is independently valuable of other concerns, to the claim that behavior is the one appropriate subject of psychology, and sometimes that mental terms (belief, goal, etc.) have no referents and/or only refer to behavior.

Applied psychology is a more general term, referring not just to clinical applications but also to education, industry/organizational psychology (and so on, please list if you can think of some).