UNIT 1

PSYCHOLOGY
One of the most common questions asked by students new to the study of psychology is "What is psychology?" Misconceptions created by popular media as well as the diverse careers paths of those holding psychology degrees have contributed this confusion. Psychology is both an applied and academic field that studies the human mind and behavior. Research in psychology seeks to understand and explain thought, emotion and behavior. Applications of psychology include mental health treatment, performance enhancement, self-help, ergonomics and many other areas affecting health and daily life.

INTRODUCTION
Psychology is the scientific study of human and animal behavior with the object of understanding why living beings behave as they do. As almost any science, its discoveries have practical applications. As it is a rather new science, applications are sometimes confused with the science itself. It is easier to distinguish what is 'pure' and 'applied' in older disciplines: everybody can separate physics and mathematics from engineering, or anatomy and physiology from medicine. People often confound psychology with psychiatry, which is a branch of medicine dedicated to the cure of mental disorders. Physiological psychology is a field akin to neurophysiology that studies the relation between behavior and body systems like the nervous system and the endocrine system. It studies which brain regions are involved in psychic functions like memory, and activities like learning. It also studies the complex interaction between brain and hormones that gives rise to emotions.

DEFINITIONS
Eric Pettifor at GIGANTOPITHECUS defines psychology as "an art which presents itself as science". H. D. Hamm Ph.D., who authored and maintains a site for Northern Michigan University, defines psychology as the "scientific study of the behavior of humans and animals".

HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
Until the last decades of the 19th century, psychology was considered a branch of philosophy and its object was defined as the study of the mind. As a philosophical discipline, it was not subject to experimental control because the only condition of philosophical arguments--and also of other abstract disciplines like mathematics--is to be internally coherent. Philosophers can thence propose different views about a same phenomenon, and it is up to each person to decide what proposal is more appealing. During this period, philosophers of the Modern Age who deal significantly with psychological topics were Ren Descartes and the British empiricists: Hume and Locke. They were concerned with issues like: the nature of mind, the relation of mind with body, and how men elaborate a mental representation of the world and arrive to abstract concepts. The first psychological laboratory, founded in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany, was committed to the experimental study of sensation and perception. Several scientists of the time: Wilhelm Wundt, Herman Ebbinghaus, Gustav Theodor Fechner, and Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, collaborated in the formulation of the laws of perception.

In the United States of America, Edward B. Titchener and William James help to separate psychology from philosophy. Titchener insisted in the study of experience, and James published in 1890 a book that became a landmark: Principles of Psychology. James, who was a philosopher, is mostly known for his theories on learning and emotion. He maintained that the mastering of new situations results in the formation of habits, which are then the result of the adaptation to environment changes. As to emotion, he stated that it was the consequence of physiological changes. The first laboratory of psychology in the United States was founded in 1883 by G. Stanley Hall at Clark University. He was also the first president of the American Psychological Association (APA). The end of the nineteenth century saw psychology as a new discipline heavily influenced by the functionalist doctrine of the philosophers at the University of Chicago. In the early twentieth century, a book was published that marked a change in the orientation of psychology. This change was going to influence the work of psychologists till the century was well into its second half. The philosophical conception of psychology as the introspective study of the mind had been preserved by the founders of the new discipline, though introducing experimental methods. This approach was first challenged by the movement known as functionalism, which endorsed the use of other methods than introspection, such as the intelligence tests that at the moment were having increased use in the United States. The intent of making psychology an experimental science was curtailed by the emphasis in the importance of introspection, as introspection is an internal phenomenon that cannot be replicated or evaluated. The classical conception of psychology, which became known as mentalism, was particularly under attack by animal psychologists, who cannot make their subjects to introspect. One of these animal psychologists was John B. Watson, disciple of the leader of functionalism, James Rowland Angell. A graduated from the University of Chicago working at John Hopkins University, Watson postulated a new conception of animal psychology, that he later expanded to psychology as a whole. In a work published in the scientific journal Psychology Review in 1913, Watson defined psychology as a natural science whose goal was the study of behavior. Thus, Watson dispensed with any use of introspection and any reference to mind. Data obtained by introspection, he said, was only evident to the person who produced them. The only objective evidence was externally observable behavior. Watson's ideas were shared by many psychologists, and soon a movement was formed called behaviorism, of which Watson is considered the founder.

METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY
The method of classical psychology as practiced by Wilhem Wundt at his Leipzig laboratory and taught by Edward Titchener at Cornell was introspection. Introspection is the consideration of one's own inner events. Systematic introspection, an orderly method of recording one's insights, was the research method used from approximately 1880 to 1920. The use of introspection was backed by the philosophical doctrines of Locke and Descartes: they maintained that the person was able to observe each and every of his mental states. This concept was known as the transparency of the mind, and reached its highest point with the theories of Wundt and Titchener, who insisted that the examination of the stream of consciousness allowed psychologists to completely analyze mental processes.

The idea that the mind can infallibly perceive its own activity was challenged first by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. Freud found that unconscious motives, entirely hidden to introspection, can actually influence human behavior. The method of introspection was also of no use to psychologists when an upsurge of evolution theory led them to the study of animals. In experiments with animals, psychologists had only behavior to observe as the subjects could not make a report of their inner events. Behaviorism further attacked the use of introspection as a research method arguing that inner events were known only by the person who experienced them. Behaviorists even rejected the concept of psychology as the science that studies the contents of the mind or how the mind works. To them, psychology should deal only with observable behavior, so psychology is the science that studies behavior. Thus, introspection lost its central position, and it is currently used only as a complement to observation. Experimental work in psychology can be seen as belonging to the tradition initiated in the 17th century by Francis Bacon. Bacon was the proponent of scientific knowledge based only in observation and built up by inductive reasoning. In his work New Organon published in 1620, he propounds that scientists should clean their minds of any preconception before setting to observe facts. This would produce the most objective knowledge that men could obtain. Bacon's view was considered to be confirmed by the success of the natural laws discovered by eminent scientists like Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, Isaac Newton, and Robert Boyle. It is now considered, however, that the clean state of mind advocated by Bacon is impossible to achieve. Every observation of a natural phenomenon or of the outcome of an experiment must be interpreted, and this interpretation is only possible within the frame of a theory. Furthermore, theories suggest what facts should be observed and what experiments must be done. When a theory has been set forth that is based on wrong data, or wrongly inducted from good data, it is usually easy to signal this circumstance. It is not so easy to prescribe methods to determine the correctness of a theory

THE IMPORTANCE OF PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology is important as it is concerned with the study of behavior and mental processes and at the same time, it is also applied to many different things in human life. Everything we perform is very much related to or with psychology. Psychology, primarily studies who and what we are, why we are like that, why we act and think like that and what we could be as a person. Psychology is important in a lot of different ways, for instance the studies that has been conducted in various life threatening illnesses. Through the process of utilizing psychology, the psychologist determined different diseases such as Parkinsons disease, Alzheimers disease and some other Neurological diseases. By making use of psychological research, doctors have now developed medicines and even able to alleviate different illnesses. Through studying psychology we are able to understand and determine how the mind and body of an individual works. With that said, people would no longer make things complicated for themselves and for their health as well. They are going to avoid things that can cause stress, they are able to manage time very well, and are more effective with their studies or chosen career.

PSYCHOLOGY - A BRIEF HISTORY

Psychology as a separate, scientific discipline has existed for just over 100 years, but since the dawn of time people have sought to understand human and animal nature. For many years psychology was a branch of philosophy until scientific findings in the nineteenth century allowed it to become a separate field of

scientific study.In the mid-nineteenth century a number of German scientists (Johannes P. Muller, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Gustav Fechner) performed the first systematic studies of sensation andperception demonstrating that mental processes could be measured and studied scientifically. In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt, a German physiologist and philosopher, established the first formal laboratory of psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Wundt's work separated thought into simpler processes such as perception, sensation, emotion, and association. This approach looked at the structure of thought and came to be known as structuralism. In 1875 William James, an American physician well-versed in philosophy, began teaching psychology as a separate subject for the first time in the United States, and he and his students began doing laboratory experiments. In contrast to structuralists, James thought consciousness flowed continuously and could not be separated into simpler elements without losing its essential nature. For instance, when we look at an apple, we see an apple, not a round, red, shiny object. James argued studying the structure of the mind was not as important as understanding how it functions in helping us adapt to our surroundings. This approach became known as functionalism. In 1913, the American psychologist John B. Watson, argued that mental processes could not be reliably located or measured, and that only observable, measurable behavior should be the focus of psychology. This approach, known as behaviorism, held that all behavior could be explained as responses to stimuli in the environment. Behaviorists tend to focus on the environment and how it shapes behavior. For instance, a strict behaviorist trying to understand why a student studies hard might say it is because he is rewarded by his teacher for getting good grades. Behaviorists would think posessing internal motivations such as a desire to succeed or a desire to learn is unnecessary. At about the same time behaviorism was gaining a hold in America, Gestalt psychology, founded by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler, arose in Germany. Gestalt (a German word referring to wholeness) psychology focussed on perception and, like William James, argued that perception and thought cannot be broken into smaller pieces without losing their wholeness or essence. They argued that humans actively organize information and that in perception the wholeness and pattern of things dominates. For instance, when we watch movies we perceive people and things in motion, yet the eye sees what movies really are, that is, individual still pictures shown at a constant rate. The common saying "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" illustrates this important concept. Sigmund Freud, an Austrian physician, began his career in the 1890s and formulated psychoanalysis, which is both a theory of personality and a method of treating people with psychological difficulties. His most influential contribution to psychology was his concept of the unconscious. To Freud our behavior is largely determined by thoughts, wishes, and memories of which we are unaware. Painful childhood memories are pushed out of consciousness and become part of the unconscious from where they can greatly influence behavior. Psychoanalysis as a method of treatment strives to bring these memories to awareness and free the individual from his or her often negative influence. The 1950s saw the development of cognitive and humanistic psychologies. Humanistic psychology was largely created by Abraham Maslow who felt psychology had focused more on human weakness than strength, mental illness over mental health, and that it neglected free will. Humanistic psychology looks at how people achieve their own unique potential or self actualization.

Cognitive psychology focuses on how people perceive, store, and interpret information, studying processes like perception, reasoning, and problem solving. Unlike behaviorists, cognitive psychologists believe it is necessary to look at internal mental processes in order to understand behavior. Cognitive psychology has been extremely influential, and much contemporary research is cognitive in nature.

TEN MAIN FIELDS OF PSYCHOLOGY

The scope of Psychology is very broad but we will just get to know the common ones. Counseling Psychology -> normal individuals as subjects Clinical Psychology -> individuals with behavioral or psychological problems as subjects, concerned with the treatment and rehabilitation of clients Environmental Psychology -> concerned with the ecology Humanistic Psychology ->concerned with the understanding of the whole person Industrial Psychology -> concerned with the problems of business and industry School Psychology -> concerned with the problems of the school system Educational Psychology ->concerned with the aspects of the educational process like learning, motivation, forgetting Social Psychology -> concerned with the understanding of an individual in the group Developmental Psychology ->concerned with the life stages of the individual Personality Psychology ->concerned with the traits of a person