PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology

Psychology

Introduction

The word psychology originated from the two Greek words: "psyche" and "logos". The word "psyche" means "mind, soul or spirit" and "logos" means "to study".

Historically, psychology has been divided into many sub fields of study. Some of which overlap each other with theories and are interrelated. Sub fields (also referred to as "areas of application') of psychology include: Physiological psychologists study the functioning of the brain and the nervous system, experimental psychologists devise tests and conduct research in order to discover how people learn and remember. Industrial psychologists study the behaviour of people at work and what effect the work environment has upon them. School psychologists help students make career decisions as well as educational decisions. Social psychologists are interested in the ways people influence each other and how they act within a group and clinical psychologists help people who are mentally ill or who have problems in everyday life.

Modern psychology collects facts based on behaviour and experience. It can lead to an explanation to certain behaviour, predicting future behaviour patterns of individuals or influencing the future behaviour of an individual. Although some practitioners still insist that psychology should be more concerned only with behaviour “and may even deny the meaningfulness of inner, mental life" more and more psychologists would now agree that mental life or experience is a valid psychological concern.

On the other hand, however, all the three approaches face certain critical difficulties in their development: the structuralism approach encounters the difficulty in the issue of structural complexity including the number of neurons of a system and the connectivity among neurons, and yet the functionalism approach suffers from a serious bottleneck of knowledge acquisition, representation and reasoning in the designing of expert systems while the behaviorism approach is limited by being only able to deal with the relatively shallow level of intelligence. Moreover, historically, the three approaches did not appear to work harmoniously with each other; rather, controversy has existed amongst them. This is still the case today.

Discussion

The study of psychology in philosophical context dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia. Historians point to the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, such Thales, Plato, and Aristotle (esp. De Anima), as the first significant work to be rich in psychology-related thought. Predating the prototypical clinics of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung by nearly 1000 years, psychotherapy was performed by Islamic physicians on those with mental illness in lunatic asylums built as early as the 8th century in Fez, Morocco.

Due to his formulation of a modern quantitative and empirical approach, Ibn al-Haytham is considered by some authors to have pioneered the modern scientific method, as well as psychophysics and experimental psychology. In 1802, French physiologist Pierre Cabanis sketched out the beginnings of physiological psychology with his essay, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (On the relations between the physical and moral aspects of man). Cabanis interpreted the mind in light of his previous studies of biology, arguing that sensibility and soul are properties of ...