What is the background of the study of psychology? - Chapter 1

Psychology is the science of behavior and the mind. Behavior means the observable actions of species. The mind means a person’s sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotions, and all other subjective experiences. These are the unconscious knowledge and operating rules in our brains that are the foundation of organizing behavior and conscious experience.

Science means the attempt to answer questions by systematic collection and logical analysis of data. This can be based on, for example, observations.

Psychology is also an applied discipline. Clinical psychologists help people who have to deal with everyday problems and serious psychological or behavioral problems.

What are the three fundamental ideas for psychology?

The three fundamental ideas of psychology come down to:

  1. Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes that can be studied scientifically.
  2. The way people behave, feel and think is shaped over time by their experiences in their environment.
  3. The body produces behavior and mental experiences, and is a product of evolution through natural selection.

What are the different trends of beliefs in the causation of behavior?

The different views that explain how behavior is shaped include dualism as formed by the church, dualism as formed by Descartes’ beliefs, materialism, and learning about machinery.

Dualism started in the eighteenth century when the church had the belief that a person consists of the material body and an immaterial soul, which are conjoined. The body could be studied scientifically, because it was part of the natural world. The soul could not be studied scientifically because it was seen as a supernatural entity that operates through its own free will.

Dualists before Descartes attributed the qualities of man to the soul. Descartes challenged this view. Descartes believed that even complex behavior arose through purely mechanical means, without interference from the soul.

According to Descartes, the difference between humans and animals was the mind. He defined thoughts as conscious considerations and judgments. He suggested that the soul influences the body in a specific place: a small organ (pineal body) located between the two hemispheres of the brain. Descartes argued that thread-like structures bring sensory information through physical pathways to the brain (we now know as nerves or neurons). The soul receives the information and processes this information. On the basis of thoughts, the soul will then let movements take place and carry out its will by triggering physical actions in nerves that in turn act on the muscles. This opened the door to psychology as a science.

Materialism was developed by Thomas Hobbes and included that the soul is a meaningless concept that consists of nothing but matter and energy. Hobbes argued that conscious thoughts are a product of the brain and therefore subject to natural laws. This philosophy does not impose any limitations on what people want to study in psychology.

Important discoveries and developments before the emergence of psychology are:

  • Increased knowledge of reflexes. This means the basic arrangement of the nervous system, which consists of the central nervous system and peripheral nerves that connect the central nervous system with the senses and muscles.
  • The concept of location of function. This means that specific parts of the brain perform specific functions in the production of mental experiences and behavior.

All of this evidence about the relationships between the mind and the brain helped to lay the foundation for psychology as a science, because it gave substance to the idea of ​​a material basis for mental processes.

What trends believe that the mind and behavior are shaped by experience?

Empiricism, the law of association by contiguity, nativism, and a priori/posteriori knowledge are examples of views that the mind and behavior are shaped by experiences.

Empiricism means that human knowledge and thought are formed by sensory experiences. We are machines that learn. Examples of such philosophers are Locke, Hartley, Mill and John Stuart Mill.

John Locke saw the mind of children as a tabula rasa or a blank page. According to this view, children are born without preferences to influence how they learn and develop. From this perspective, there is no human nature other than the ability to adapt behavior to the demands of the environment.

According to the empiricists, thoughts are not products of free will, but reflect the experiences of a person in the physical and social environment.

The law of association by contiguity means that if a person experiences two events at the same time or in succession, the events will be associated with each other in the mind of that person, causing the thoughts of the person to one future event will cause thoughts of the other event.

The opposite philosophy of empiricism is nativism. This view states that the most basic forms of human knowledge and the basic characteristics of the mind are native to the human mind. Which means that they are innate and need not be obtained through experiences. In order to learn something, the thing has to contain some initial machinery already built into the entity. This usually means that it contains sensation, rules for storing and combining sensory records, and rules for recalling them.

Kant made a distinction between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. The first is built into the human brain and does not need to be learned. The second is obtained through experience within the environment.

What is Darwin’s fundamental idea about evolution?

Darwin’s idea is that living things evolve gradually over generations through the process of natural selection. The individuals that are best adapted to their environments, are more likely to survive and reproduce than those less well-adapted to their environments.  Random changes in genetics happen within each generation. These variations are passed on from generation to generation, especially when they increase chances of survival and reproduction. Because of this evolution, innate characteristics of species can be studied for the function they served in survival or reproduction. Empiricists philosophers study the relationships between these innate characteristics and the environment.

Darwin's work offered the field of psychology a scientific way of thinking about all innate universal tendencies that form human nature. The inherited mechanisms that underlie human emotions, urges, perception, learning, and reasoning gradually came into being because they promoted the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. One approach to understanding such characteristics is to analyze their evolutionary functions.

What is the scope of psychology?

Psychologists strive to explain mental experiences and behavior. To explain, one must identify causes. The causes are complex and can be analyzed at different levels. The term level of analysis refers to the level of causal processes being studied. The following levels are possible:

  • Neural (the brain)
  • Physiological
  • Genetically
  • Evolutionary
  • To learn
  • Cognitive
  • Social
  • Culturally
  • Development

We now call the first four the biological cluster and the others are the second cluster explanations focused on environmental experiences, knowledge, and development.

Biological explanations are possible at many different levels:

  • Neural explanations. This research is focused on behavior and mental experiences as products of the nervous system. Examples are behavioral neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers study neurons as a group or separately. Others study larger areas of the brain.
  • Physiological explanations. These are physiological psychology or biopsychology. Biopsychologists study the effects of hormones and drugs on the brain.
  • Genetic explanations. This is the field of research that attempts to explain psychological differences between individuals in terms of differences in genes and is known as behavioral genetics.
  • Evolutionary explanations. One way to explain universal human characteristics is to explain how and why they originated during the evolutionary process. This is the field of evolutionary psychology.

Psychologists have developed different ways in which they can explain how people change in response to their environmental experiences, knowledge, and development:

  • Learning explanations. Learning psychology is concerned with explaining behavior in terms of learning, which is also called behavioral psychology. All forms of behavior and mental experiences can be changed through learning. They can therefore be influenced by previous experiences.
  • Cognitive explanations. Cognition refers to the information in the mind, such as thoughts, beliefs, memories. Some information is conscious and other information is unconscious. The discipline that focuses on this is cognitive psychology. Conclusions are drawn from observable behavior, because cognition is not directly measurable.
  • Social explanations. People are social beings and therefore our behavior is strongly influenced by our perception of others. Social psychology is concerned with how our behavior and mental experiences are influenced by other people, and by our beliefs about other people.
  • Cultural explanations. Culture consists of the general habits and beliefs of a social group. Some aspects of a person's behavior can be predicted based on knowledge about the culture in which the person grew up in. Cultural psychology is concerned with explaining behavior and mental experiences based on cultural theories.
  • Development explanations. Knowing the age of someone provides the ability to predict some aspects of a person's behavior. The discipline within psychology that tries to describe and record how people of different ages differ in how they feel, think and behave is called developmental psychology. Within this discipline, the other levels can be brought together for an analysis at a deeper level.

 

Personality psychology and abnormal psychology are concerned with understanding individual differences among people. Personality psychology deals with normal differences in the general ways in which people think, feel and behave.
Abnormal psychology deals with variations in psychic traits that are sufficiently extreme or restrictive for people's lives and can be classified as mental disorders. This discipline is closely related to clinical psychology. Both personality and abnormal psychology use various levels of analysis. This ranges from biological psychology to social psychology.

Most disciplines use different levels of analyses than what is mostly related to the discipline itself as well. This is because the levels complement each other and they give a more complete picture of important aspects in different ways.

What other academic fields are connected with psychology?

Psychology can be characterized in the light of other sciences. These sciences can be divided into three broad areas:

  1. Natural sciences
  2. Social sciences
  3. Humanities

Psychology fits in the middle of the three and is linked to the natural sciences mainly via biology and via the social sciences especially via sociology and anthropology. Psychology can be linked to the entire spectrum of humanities, because these sciences focus on "what people do and animals don't." Art, music, language, and philosophy are examples of what humanities includes.

Besides being an academic discipline, psychology is also a profession. The main workplaces are:

  • The university and colleges as researchers and teachers.
  • Clinical settings, such as mental healthcare settings.
  • Elementary and secondary schools, for example for conducting tests and for coming up with effective teaching techniques.
  • Companies and the government. The work here can vary widely, from researching to assessing whether someone will be a suitable employee.
    Voor toegang tot deze pagina kan je inloggen

     

    Voor volledige toegang tot deze pagina kan je inloggen

     

    Inloggen (als je al bij JoHo bent aangesloten)

       Aansluiten   (voor online toegang tot alle webpagina's)

     

    Hoe het werkt

     

    Aanmelden bij JoHo

     

     

      Chapters 

    Teksten & Informatie

    JoHo: paginawijzer

    JoHo 'chapter 'pagina

     

    Wat vind je op een JoHo 'chapter' pagina?

    •   JoHo chapters zijn tekstblokken en hoofdstukken rond een specifieke vraag of een deelonderwerp

    Crossroad: volgen

    • Via een beperkt aantal geselecteerde webpagina's kan je verder reizen op de JoHo website

    Crossroad: kiezen

    • Via alle aan het chapter verbonden webpagina's kan je verder lezen in een volgend hoofdstuk of tekstonderdeel.

    Footprints: bewaren

    • Je kunt deze pagina bewaren in je persoonlijke lijsten zoals: je eigen paginabundel, je to-do-list, je checklist of bijvoorbeeld je meeneem(pack)lijst. Je vindt jouw persoonlijke  lijsten onderaan vrijwel elke webpagina of op je userpage
    • Dit is een service voor JoHo donateurs en abonnees.

    Abonnement: nemen

    • Hier kun je naar de pagina om je aan te sluiten bij JoHo, JoHo te steunen en zelf en volledig gebruik te kunnen maken van alle teksten en tools.

    Abonnement: checken

    • Hier vind je wat jouw status is als JoHo donateur of abonnee

    Prints: maken

    • Dit is een service voor wie bij JoHo is aangesloten. Wil je een tekst overzichtelijk printen, gebruik dan deze knop.
    JoHo: footprint achterlaten