SPECIAL FIELDS OF PSYCHOLOGY


Contents

1. Introduction
2. Physiological psychology
3. Psychoanalysis
4. Behaviourism
5. Gestalt psychology
6 .Cognition
7. Tests and Measurements
8. Development psychology
9. Social psychology
10. Psychiatry and mental health
11. Forensic psychology and criminology
12. Psychology, religion and phenomenology
13. Parapsychology
14. Industrial Psychology
      Vocabulary
      Literature



                              1.  Introduction
    Psychology, scientific study of behavior and experience—that is, the
    study of how human beings and animals sense, think, learn, and know.
    Modern psychology is devoted to collecting facts about behavior and
    experience and systematically organizing such facts into psychological
    theories. These theories aid in understanding and explaining people’s
    behavior and sometimes in predicting and influencing their future
    behavior.

    Psychology, historically, has been divided into many subfields of
    study; these fields, however, are interrelated and frequently overlap.
    Physiological psychologists, for instance, study the functioning of the
    brain and the nervous system, and experimental psychologists devise
    tests and conduct research to discover how people learn and remember.
    Subfields of psychology may also be described in terms of areas of
    application. Social psychologists, for example, are interested in the
    ways in which people influence one another and the way they act in
    groups. Industrial psychologists study the behavior of people at work
    and the effects of the work environment. School psychologists help
    students make educational and career decisions. Clinical psychologists
    assist those who have problems in daily life or who are mentally ill.

    History. The science of psychology developed from many diverse sources,
    but its origins as a science may be traced to ancient Greece.

    Philosophical Beginnings.  Plato and Aristotle, as well as other Greek
    philosophers, took up some of the basic questions of psychology that
    are still under study: Are people born with certain skills, abilities,
    and personality, or do all these develop as a result of experience? How
    do people come to know the world? Are certain ideas and feelings
    innate, or are they all learned?

    Such questions were debated for many centuries, but the roots of modern
    psychological theory are found in the 17th century in the works of the
    French philosopher Ren Descartes and the British philosophers Thomas
    Hobbes and John Locke. Descartes argued that the bodies of people are
    like clockwork machines, but that their minds (or souls) are separate
    and unique. He maintained that minds have certain inborn, or innate,
    ideas and that these ideas are crucial in organizing people’s
    experiencing of the world. Hobbes and Locke, on the other hand,
    stressed the role of experience as the source of human knowledge. Locke
    believed that all information about the physical world comes through
    the senses and that all correct ideas can be traced to the sensory
    information on which they are based.

    Most modern psychology developed along the lines of Locke’s view. Some
    European psychologists who studied perception, however, held onto
    Descartes’s idea that some mental organization is innate, and the
    concept still plays a role in theories of perception and cognition.

    Against this philosophical background, the field that contributed most
    to the development of scientific psychology was physiology—the study of
    the functions of the various organ systems of the body. The German
    physiologist Johannes Miller tried to relate sensory experience both to
    events in the nervous system and to events in the organism’s physical
    environment. The first true experimental psychologists were the German
    physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner and the German physiologist Wilhelm
    Wundt. Fechner developed experimental methods for measuring sensations
    in terms of the physical magnitude of the stimuli producing them.
    Wundt, who in 1879 founded the first laboratory of experimental
    psychology in Leipzig, Germany, trained students from around the world
    in this new science.

    Physicians who became concerned with mental illness also contributed to
    the development of modern psychological theories. Thus, the systematic
    classification of mental disorders developed by the German psychiatric
    pioneer Emil Kraepelin remains the basis for methods of classification
    that are now in use. Far better known, however, is the work of Sigmund
    Freud, who devised the system of investigation and treatment known as
    psychoanalysis. In his work, Freud called attention to instinctual
    drives and unconscious motivational processes that determine people’s
    behavior. This stress on the contents of thought, on the dynamics of
    motivation rather than the nature of cognition in itself, exerted a
    strong influence on the course of modern psychology.

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