Psychology studies human behavior, thoughts, and emotions. It has many sub-disciplines, including social, clinical, and cognitive psychology. Some psychologists focus on research, while others apply their knowledge to help people. The field uses tools like neuroimaging to understand the brain’s impact on mental health. Critics argue that psychology lacks scientific rigor, but the field continues to try to better understand the mind.
Psychology is a broad discipline that seeks to analyze the human mind. Several disciplines within this field study why people behave, think, and feel the way they do. There are many different ways to approach psychology, from examining the role of biology in mental health to the role of the environment in behavior. Some psychologists focus only on how the mind develops, while others advise patients to help them improve their daily lives.
The history of psychology dates back at least to 1879, when the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychology. The most famous psychologist is perhaps Sigmund Freud, an Austrian founder of the field of psychoanalysis. Although Freud’s theories had a huge impact on a wide variety of areas, including literature and cinema, many of his ideas are considered subjective from a modern perspective.
There are dozens of different subdisciplines of psychology, each with a slightly different approach to understanding the mind. Some sub-disciplines include social psychology, clinical psychology, occupational health, and cognitive psychology. It is important to note that, even within a particular field, there can be different approaches. Clinical psychology, for example, has four major schools: psychodynamics, humanities, cognitive and behavioral, and systems therapy.
The field of psychology is much broader than the image of a patient lounging on a couch, talking to his therapist, or a researcher studying a rat going through a maze. A forensic psychologist can help legal professionals investigate allegations of child abuse or assess a suspect’s competence. A forensic psychologist might act as a judge’s counsel or as a trial counselor. An industrial-organizational psychologist might work with a company to help hire the best candidates or help improve workplace morale. A sports psychologist might work one-on-one with a player to help overcome a performance barrier or work with an entire team to help improve group cohesion.
Psychology should be further distinguished between research psychology, which seeks to establish facts about the mind by conducting experiments, and applied psychology, which seeks to help people with their problems. Some experiments have shown that the success rate for solving one’s problems using psychotherapy alone – talking to a professional psychologist – is the same as talking to a close friend, so the effectiveness of applied or clinical psychology as a discipline can sometimes be difficult to quantify. Alternatively, many patients report that the therapy has been of great help in their life.
Compared to other hard sciences, such as physics and biology, some critics argue that the field suffers from a lack of scientific rigor. The objectivity of tools such as surveys, through which data is sometimes collected, is often questioned. This is perhaps closely associated with the complexity of the mind which we have not been able to fully or substantially understand. However, psychological studies continue to try to better understand the mind and how it works.
Fields such as neuropsychology, which examines how the structure of the brain affects mental health, use neuroimaging technology. Tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) have helped psychologists establish correlations between mental problems and biological states. For example, in the 1980s, it was realized that schizophrenia was caused primarily by biological factors rather than maternal neglect or some other environmental explanation.
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