Psychology and the Major Subfields1

Psychology and the Major Subfields

Introduction

The study and practice of psychology covers a wide range of topics and a large number of sub-fields and areas of expertise that have developed as a result. Because human behavior is so varied, the number of sub-fields of psychology is constantly growing and evolving. Because psychology is linked in with other subjects such as biology, philosophy, anthropology and sociology, the new areas of research and practice are continually being formed.

Most contemporary psychologists would agree that "psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes", but is more broad, deep and exciting than that simple definition. Psychologists have attempted to explain how they perceive, remember, communicate, learn, solve problems, feel and interact with other people, at all stages of life, in intimate relationships and community.

Discussion

Modern psychology has been responsible for gathering facts about the behavior and experiences of living things, organizing them in a systematic and theories developed for understanding. These studies help explain their behavior and in some cases, predict their future actions. To those people who develop the study of psychology are called psychologists. This means, those who analyze the behavior of living things from a scientific approach. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jean Piaget are considered some of the pioneering psychologists.

Psychologists can focus on the mental and emotional disturbances, social and personal problems, psychotherapy, or improve morale and relationships of the group. "Psychology is continually redefines" (Evans, 1999), since the late twentieth century, psychology was greatly expanded research new technologies emerge, new fields of inquiry and new approaches to the study of behavior and mental processes. These advances led to greater specialization in psychology, a growing collaboration with other sciences and the academic equivalent of an identity crisis.

The methodology of the study of psychology is divided into two branches: one that understands this as a basic science discipline (also called experimental) and employs a scientific methodology and quantitative (contrast hypotheses variables that can be quantified as part of an environment experimentation), and another that seeks to understand the psychological phenomenon using qualitative methods to enrich the description and help understand the processes.

There are many psychological tendencies, but surely the school of psychology best known is the cognitive, which studies the act of knowledge (the way you understand, organize and use information received through the senses). Thus, studying cognitive psychology functions such as attention, perception, memory and language.

Psychologists, for their part, have historically largely assumed that, despite cultural superficialities, the psychological structures and processes of all humanity are universal. This assumption, coupled with that of naturalism, has led to an epistemology quite distinct from anthropology's hallmark of qualitative fieldwork. Instead, psychologists have historically favored the testing of psychological phenomena across populations in order to derive generalizations about psychological processes that are assumed to permeate those populations. Methods developed toward this end have been largely quantitative in nature, such that assertions made about samples could theoretically be generalized to embrace entire populations from which samples are ...