What is Psychology?

why do you act the way you do have you ever wondered why some people are the life of the party and others prefer to curl up with a good book or why you remember certain events but not others people have studied the mind and how it works since the time of the ancient Greeks but the scientific study of psychology only dates back to a little over a hundred years ago since will and want opened the first psychology lab in 1879 psychologists have studied various aspects of human behavior such as personality brain functions and social cultural influences as psychology progressed it began to tackle the question of why we do what we do from different angles including biological psychodynamic behavioral cognitive and humanistic perspectives let's look at each of these five main approaches that guide modern psychological research biopsychologists look at how your nervous system hormones and genetic makeup affect your your behavior biological psychologists explore the connection between your mental States and your brain nerves and hormones to explore how your thoughts moods and actions are shaped so what does that mean it means that for the biological approach you are the sum of your parts you think the way you do because of the way your brain is built and because of your body's needs all of your choices are based on your physical body the biological approach is attempts to understand the healthy brain but also examines the mind and body to figure out how disorders like schizophrenia develop from genetic Roots the psychodynamic approach was promoted by Sigman Freud who believed that many of our impulses are driven by sex psychologists in this school of thought believe that unconscious drives and experiences from Early Childhood are at the root of your behaviors and that conflict arises when societal restrictions are placed on those urges now there are a lot of jokes about Freud and his now mostly outdated theories but have you ever thought that something about who you are today comes from your experiences as a child say you blame your smoking habit on an oral fixation that stems from being weaned from breastfeeding too early as a baby well that also comes from Freud's theories and it was an idea that revolutionized how we see ourselves behavioral psychologists believe that external environmental stimuli influence your behavior and that you can be trained to act a certain way behaviorists like BF Skinner don't believe in free will

Channel: Study.com

Views: 230,684

Keywords: Psychology (Medical Specialty)

Id: 1Os1C000qxY

Length: 2min 35sec (155 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2013