Psychology
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
Psychology is the science of human behavior and the way people think. It deals with all actions and reactions of people. Because behavor is very difficult to study as a whole, psychologists often only look at small parts of it at a time. To get a better understanding of how people act and react, sometimes Psychologists study animals because they may be simpler and easier to understand, or because we are able to try things on animals that would be dangerous or unfair to try on a person. Psychology overlaps with many other sciences including Medicine, Biology, Computer Science and Linguistics.
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[change] Branches of Psychology
Because people are complicated to study as a whole, psychology has developed many branches. These are subjects in psychology that try to answer a particular group of questions about how people think. Branches include:
- Cognitive Psychology which is interested in how people think, remember and forget, and solve problems.
- Perceptual Psychology which asks questions about how people make sense of what they view and hear and how they use that information to get around.
- Social Psychology which looks into how groups of people work together and how societies build and work.
- Developmental Psychology which is interested in how people develop and change as they get older, especially how children learn and change as they grow.
- Evolutionary Psychology studies how evolution has shaped the way people think and do things.
- Neuropsychology looks at the brain and asks what we can learn about a person's mind by looking at their brain and how the brain works to make people the way they are.
- Abnormal Psychology tries to work out what differences there are between people who are healthy and people who have a mental illness.
- Clinical Psychology is about finding the best way to help people to recover from mental illness.
[change] Methods in Psychology
Psychology is a type of science so psychologists like to use the same types of methods that scientists from other fields use. Psychologists will make theories and to try and explain the thing that they are studying. Based on their theory they will make some predictions. They may then carry out an experiment that will tell them whether their hypothesis (a scientific guess) was right or wrong. A good psychologist will try to do many different experiments to try and show that his or her theory may be wrong. This sounds silly, but each time we try to show that our theory is wrong and we can't, it makes us more confident that our theory is actually right. Just like in any other science, we can never be completely sure that our theory is the right one, but if we keep trying to show that it's wrong and we never can, we can be quite confident. If we can't think of an experiment that might show our theory to be wrong, then our theory is unscientific. In technical terms this is called falsifiability.
When Psychology was still a new science, psychologists were much less interested in doing science properly and were more interested in learning how to treat people with a mental illness. This is why many people that are called early Psychologists such as Freud and Jung are not considered to be modern Psychologists.
Different branches of psychology use different types of experiments because they are interested in different things. You can't use the same experiment on an adult and a baby because it would not make sense. Some types of experiments can not be done on people because they would be unethical. Sometimes we are allowed to do these experiments on animals, but other times we are not allowed to do even that. When that happens, we have to think of a different way to test our theory.
Psychologists use a lot of different tools as part of their work, and to carry out their experiments. Psychologists use surveys to ask people how feel and what they think. They may use special medical devices to have a look at the brain and to see what it's doing; psychologists also use a lot of statistics to help them analyze the data that they get from their experiments.
[change] History
[change] Psychologists
Psychologists are people who practice or work in the field of Psychology. A psychologist may work in either basic research or applied research, or if he or she is a clinical psychologist or counseling psychologist may be a therapist. Basic research is the scientific study of the psychology of people or animals simply because he or she wants to know more about it. Applied research is using knowledge from basic research to solve real-world problems.
[change] Education
To become a psychologist, a person must first get a degree at a university. Then the person goes to graduate school. A Master's degree takes a shorter time, but then the graduate can use the letters M.S. (Master of Science) or M.A. (Master of Arts) after his or her name. A Doctorate degree takes a longer time and the graduate can use the initials Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) after his or her name. Psychology works in differents ways. Some clinical psychologists earn a Doctor of Psychology degree and can use the initials Psy.D. after their name. The American Psychological Association says that a person needs a Ph.D. or Psy.D. to call himself or herself a psychologist.
[change] See also
- Psychiatry
- Neurology
- Major Theories of Psychology
- Neuroscience
[change] Other websites
- Encyclopedia of Psychology A web site with all kinds of information about psychology.
- In-Mind, Quarterly Magazine for Social Psychology
- Citizen's Commission on Human Rights
