SUBFIELDS:Extended Edition

Prepared by John Melville Harris

See also SUBFIELDS, BRIEF edition.

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Definition of Psychology

Approaches in Psychology

Careers

A DEFINITION OF PSYCHOLOGY

To Definition, Brief Edition

William James, an American philosopher and psychologist, introduced Psychology to North America in the late nineteenth century. In his Psychology: The Briefer Course, James uses the more limiting word 'consciousness' instead of 'psyche' and accordingly defines psychology "as the description and explanation of states of consciousness as such." By ‘consciousness’ James understands a list of descriptive psychological attributes, some of which point very much to a few of the prominent topics in modern Psychology: sensation, emotion, and cognition. He also includes "desires," and "volitions," attributes of consciousness having their place in the current topic areas of emotion and motivation respectively.

James' definition also suggests the study of more than one conscious state; today, one refers to 'altered states of consciousness,' implied by our experience of different moods, psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, meditation and a "variety of religious experience" (the title of James' last book). But if there is consciousness, perhaps there is also its opposite, an unconscious psyche. Imagine being capable of "meaning," having memories, and playing out fantasies without the slightest awareness; or again, to will something without even knowing it! What effect would such a subliminal, autonomous, dynamic part of the mind have on one's conscious experience? The concept of the unconscious psyche has led to theories which explain a whole variety of phenomena, all the way from being attracted to someone without knowing it to extrasensory perception and precognition; that is, knowledge about future events.

In his definition, William James refers to "description" and "explanation," suggesting that the psyche can be observed and then subjected to the law of cause and effect. There are many ways to use cause and effect. For example, how might the visible part of us, the body, cause changes in our psyche and how might the psyche cause changes in the body? More particularly, how do hormones, natural brain chemicals, drugs and brain damage cause changes in the way we think, feel and behave? On the other hand, how does the psyche cause stomach ulcers, high blood pressure and even some types of cancer? And for the philosophically inclined, how real is this distinction between psyche and body? Is this opposition merely an artificial product of grammar or is it a function of gross sensory perception?

THE STUDY OF PSYCHOLOGY

H ow do external observers investigate someone else's psyche systematically if they cannot apprehend it with their senses? Behaviourism, a movement in psychology, maintains we cannot study the psyche at all because its immateriality renders it inaccessible to measurement. So behaviourists, using cause-effect methodology, measure only the directly observable: the environment and behaviour. For example, once behaviourists know that a child likes Smarties (environment), they can get the child to do anything they want (behaviour) by giving and withholding (manipulating) a measurable number of environmental Smarties. This example is a simplification of course, but with the eventual isolation of all the causes of behaviour, and all rewards like Smarties, behaviourists have faith that behaviour might eventually be completely predicted and controlled; hence, psychology is sometimes defined as the scientific study of the behaviour of humans and animals.

Many psychologists object to this exclusively behavioural definition saying that a complete denial of the psyche prevents them from making inferences about the phenomena behind behaviour. If psychologists can explain behaviour by referring to consciousness, cognition, thought or emotion, then they can risk a much richer range of predictions about behaviour. Thus many psychologists regularly construct theories about the psyche, but they may still choose to base them on the experimental observation of behaviour played out in measurable environmental circumstances.

SUBFIELDS OF PSYCHOLOGY

See also the BRIEF version of SUBFIELDS

B roadly speaking, psychologists do research, act in a service capacity with people, or both. If they do research, they often attach themselves to the university as professors who combine instruction with laboratory work; otherwise they carry out research for private companies. Psychologists who do service oriented work with people are usually in either private practice or are on the staff of hospitals or mental health clinics.

Clinical Psychology
To Clinical Psychology, Brief Edition

is the largest single sub-field in psychology which assesses and treats children or adults in groups or as individuals. Clinical psychologists assess and treat learning disabilities, serious mental disorders and substance use disorders as well as other important problems people encounter in trying to come to terms with life's difficulties, such as depression, anxiety, divorce or job loss. These psychologists assess problems using a variety of tests for assessment of intelligence, aptitude and personality, and they treat people using methods from one or another of the approaches to psychology, say, psychodynamically oriented therapy, behaviour therapy, cognitive therapy or one of the many orientations found in humanistic psychology. Clinical psychologists often work with medical doctors, psychiatrists, social workers and mental health nurses, so their training must be broad enough to permit them to understand some of the concepts used by other disciplines.

Clinical psychologists usually confine their practice to specific sub-groups, such as children, or to particular problem areas such as mental retardation or anxiety disorders.

Cognitive Psychology To Cognitive Psychology, Brief Edition

'Cognitive' comes from the Latin word cognoscere meaning to get to know, or to learn. It is the modern psychological equivalent of a much older discipline in philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of how knowledge is acquired. Accordingly, cognitive psychologists study how people recognize patterns of stimuli and assess how existing knowledge affects new learning. They study people's ability to select certain stimuli for the focus of attention while simultaneously ignoring others, how subliminal material can influence conscious attention and how people can perform more than one task at once. They look at various classes of memory, such as short- and long-term memory systems and examine their duration, capacities, their mechanisms of storage and their failures in retrieval. Language, reasoning, problem solving and even unconscious mental functioning are specialized preoccupations within cognitive psychology. Most cognitive psychologists are research oriented, although they also usually instruct in colleges and universities.

Neuroscience
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studies the neural correlates of psychic functioning and behaviour. The fundamental subject matter includes the nervous system's structure and function. The neuron, with its supporting cells, are the ground level units making up the brain, the spinal cord and the nerves leading to and from organs, glands and muscles. Research on the neuron's genetics, its neurochemistry and on its remarkable ability to carry electrochemical signals within itself, and from one neurone to another, is basic to understanding the function of different parts of the brain. Built on this microscopic research is the study of the sensory and motor systems, and the relationship of the nervous system to memory, language and attention. Some of the specialties connected with study of the human nervous system are neurology, psychiatry, neurosurgery and neuropathology. Clinical psychologists who work with brain damaged patients are often interested in the mental and physical effects of brain damage and conduct tests to assess the benefits and risks of various treatments.

Developmental Psychology
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is mainly concerned with the slow mental and physical changes in children and adolescents over time, but it also embraces the entire life span from conception to the mental and physical changes of old age. It is typical of theory in developmental psychology to reckon time in terms of stages, where a stage has its own qualitative characteristics, and it cannot be skipped. Stages are a kind of 'evolution' applied to the individual, and may indeed have their origins in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. No matter what aspect of development is under investigation, physical, learning, emotion, cognition, personality or social, stages are usually at least implied. Sigmund Freud proposed the first formal stage theory of character development. Given there are so many aspects to development, it is not surprising that the field breaks down into sub-specialties. In addition, within the area of child psychology, psychologists are interested in special problem areas such as mental retardation and autism. Child psychologists sometimes work as school psychologists, which can be considered a sub-field in its own right and is also related to clinical psychology. They deal with the behavioural problems which may affect the learning of students in the school system. At the other end of the age scale are those who study disorders of old age, such as Alzheimer's disease.

Personality Psychology
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studies abstract, qualitative characteristics; for example, it looks at emotional colouring, degree of introversion or extroversion, the extent to which people's experiences are connected or dissociated, and the degree to which people are conscious of their own motives. As a field in its own right, personality is very much a theoretical and research discipline of the university. However, clinical and developmental psychologists also require it extensively for their work. 'Personality' derives from the Greek word persona meaning mask, referring to the expressive facial coverings the ancient Greeks used in their plays to depict character types. While personality psychologists are interested in characterizing how people present themselves to others and to themselves, they also strive to understand what is behind the mask, or behind behaviour. Thus, there arises a difficulty in understanding what exactly personality is if it cannot be seen. Most people agree that personality exists however, but a concept of it often evaporates as soon as one attempts an objective definition. The first comprehensive personality theory was Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis mentioned above. Since then, there have been many other personality theories, including those from the humanistic approach. As well, there are a multitude of tests for personality assessment. Among them is the famous Rorschach inkblot test used by clinical psychologists. Subjects are asked to express what they see in ten different nondescript ink blots; since the blots are almost completely unstructured, the personality psychologist assumes the patient's responses are self-revelatory and not descriptive of the blot itself.

Abnormal Psychology or Deviance
To Abnormal Psychology, Brief Edition

is of interest primarily to the clinical psychologist. Generally speaking, just as bodily systems are considered pathological if their functioning should transgress vary narrow, and usually measurable physiological limits, so do psychologists of the abnormal often assume that the psyche or behaviour can be judged similarly. However, abnormality in psychology is much more difficult to define than bodily diseases, because the limits to psychic and behavioural normalcy are indefinite and unstable due to their qualitative aspects and to the application of social norms not shared by the much more inelastic body systems. Notwithstanding diagnostic problems, there is a growing attempt to use the methods of biological materialism to find genetic and biochemical bases for diagnoses, especially the more severe among them. On the treatment end, there is little doubt that drugs are the major means of 'symptom' control today; one does not normally speak of cure in this field. However, the other major approaches to psychology discussed above have their own perspective as well; their treatments are called psychotherapy, and some of them look forward to a complete restoration of health. A few of the major diagnostic categories in this field are mental retardation, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (manic-depression), major depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, personality disorders and psychopathy. A complete list of diagnoses, categorized and described, is found in the easily available Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (D.S.M.) used by Psychiatrists.

Social Psychology
To Social Psychology, Brief Edition

studies the effects of individual and group influences on the person. The discipline employs the experimental method and to some extent it abides the inferential causality approach as does cognitive psychology. Typical of their sometimes strikingly bold experiments , social psychologists place subjects into different groups, each representing two or more contrived social situations, such as the degree of social pressure on the subjects to commit an aggressive act. (Experimenters often misinform subjects as to the true nature of the experiment as one of their experimental controls.) The experimenters then observe any behavioural differences among the subject groups, and may then explain the results with reference to a theory, essentially an inference as to what takes place in the minds of the subjects. Alternatively, the behaviour may be more directly classified as to its type; say, conforming, obedient, or prejudiced, depending on the nature of the social situation manipulated. Social psychologists study such typical social phenomena as attitudes and opinions. Experiments on persuasion, for example, study the types of argument which are most effective in changing people's attitudes in a propaganda appeal. Are perceived authorities more persuasive than peers? In the study of obedience, will subjects deliver an electric shock to other subjects simply because they are told to do so by an experimenter? If so, how far will they go in causing pain to others, and how many refuse to obey?

Organizational Psychology
To Organizational Psychology, Brief Edition

finds most of its psychologists carrying out research in the industrial setting to enhance company efficiency, productivity and safety. For example, organizational psychologists may use their knowledge of perception to design instrument panels which improve the reaction time of the operator and increase the margin of safety.

Organizational psychologists also may be involved in the design of plants and offices, attempting to better the way employees interact with each other. Sometimes psychologists are called upon to help solve problems of poor employee morale. Often they do personnel work, designing tests which are supposed to predict the suitability of employees for specialized training programmes; resources are saved if a company trains only those employees who are thought in advance to have the best aptitude, personality and interest for a position.

Organizational psychology, and psychological testing generally, are perhaps among the best examples of the sometimes controversial extension of technology from manipulating things to manipulating people. Psychological group tests were first used in the American military during the Great War and were made available to the private sector at the war's end for the assessment of large numbers of people in a single sitting. Since then, the psychological testing field in psychology has mushroomed into an industry and presently includes tests for measurement a very large number aptitudes, personality variables, and interests.

APPROACHES TO PSYCHOLOGY

See also APPROACHES, the BRIEF Edition

E very approach to psychology represents at least one main philosophical orientation; that is, an assumption as to just exactly what in humans should be studied, and what the methodology should be. In what follows, we list the philosophical orientation, and then point to examples of approaches to psychology represented therein. People with different temperaments may be attracted to one orientation or approach over another, suggesting that no single orientation can lay claim to more than a partial truth about human nature.

Environmentalism
To Environmentalism, Brief Edition

There is nothing in the psyche which does not first come to us through our senses. St. Thomas Aquinas expressed this philosophy as early as the thirteenth century. It is a theory of how we 'know' the world, and it opposes the concepts of heredity and innate ideas as explanations for how knowledge is acquired. Environmentalism is an important working assumption underlying much of the empirical methodology in psychology, and a large subset of theory and research in most sub-fields of psychology. Thus, environmentalism is very much allied with experimentalism: Environmentalism manipulates conditions external to the organism with the view of observing reactions; organisms do not act of their own accord. The above mentioned behavioural approach , in its radical form, exemplifies environmentalism because it eliminates a self-acting psyche almost altogether in favour of the observation of measurable stimuli and consequent actions.

Experimentalism
To Experimentalism, Brief Edition

This orientation is an empirical methodology, a procedure for learning from sense experience by testing hypotheses derived from theory. Often called experimental psychology, experimentalism derives from nineteenth century Newtonian physics. Investigators systematically change a concrete environmental variable of interest (the 'cause') and record any resulting change in human or animal behaviour (the "effect"). At the same time, the researcher uses various elements of design in the experiment to make sure that no irrelevant factors compete for causal status with the environmental variable he systematically changes. Thus the use of controls is said to eliminate alternative explanations to the variable of interest, a procedure which is fundamental to the demonstration of cause and effect. Experimentalism is a general orientation which overlaps with most specific approaches to psychology.

Inferential Causality
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In the cognitive approach to psychology and in some subfields such as personality and social psychology experimental investigators cannot be satisfied with environmental control of stimuli as the only source for causation of behaviour unless they wish to limit themselves to facts which are entirely rudimentary; rather, some researchers infer the existence of a psychic causal structure behind the behaviour, if the behaviour is to be understood at all when it occurs under specific stimulus conditions. For example, cognitive psychologists might compare the responses of Alzheimer's patients and normal subjects to memorized lists of words under different observable conditions and then render, by inference, a structural account of the memory (psychic) impairment of Alzheimer's disease. Do Alzheimer's patients have trouble transferring words from short-term memory to long-term memory, or do they make the transfer, but fail to retrieve the words from long-term memory when required? Even though the causes for behaviour are said to be among psychic structures we normally associate with consciousness, such as memory, free will is by no means suggested by most of these investigators. The relationships among the inferred psychic structures tend to be mechanistic; that is, their operations are automatic and without purpose. For this reason, inferential causality still appeals to the current scientific spirit.

Psychic Determinism
To Psychic Determinism, Brief Edition

One might ask, how much knowledge of the psyche can be exhausted by the use of quantitative methods? Some investigators prefer the philosophical assumption that the causes (determinism) of all conscious phenomena are to be found, not in the external environment or the body, but in the unconscious psyche. In its broadest outline, this view is called the psychodynamic approach, the assumption being, that there are important aspects of the psyche that cannot be accessed, even indirectly, through limiting investigation to measurement of the environment and behaviour. These investigators often study only a few individuals, but in depth, and then develop an elaborate, comprehensive theory to explain the psyche as a whole; in other words, the case study methodology is intensive rather than extensive. Sigmund Freud's work is an example. His is a psychology of the irrational, which has its roots in Friedrich Nietzsche's explorations of unconscious motivation in the late nineteenth century. Although Freud's case study methods are criticized from the point of view of the experimental approach, his theory's profound relation to art, literature and philosophy in the twentieth century suggests the importance of Freud's ideas for human psychology in a broad cultural sense.

Biological Materialism
To Biological Materialism, Brief Edition

Other psychologists prefer the biological approach with its assumption that mainly neurophysiological factors, not the environment, are primary causes; that is, what is most related to bodily processes is also the most salient factor in shaping what we are psychically and behaviourally. For example, there may be an initial assumption that people who are severely despondent suffer from a biochemical imbalance; hence, the search for a species of neurotransmitter in the brain which 'causes' mood changes. Such an approach would contrast with the environmentalist's view that poor family upbringing causes severe melancholia.

Reductionism:
To Reductionism, Brief Edition

All of the aforementioned approaches share one appeal: their thinking abides by the law of cause and effect or reductionism; the cause of psychic behaviour is either in the environment, the body or a specific element of the psyche itself. But there are psychologists who consider cause-effect itself too incomplete to encompass the diversity of the human psyche. They argue that cause-effect methods reduce, or narrow down, complex phenomena to general factors (in the sense they apply to everyone) which are at the same time too elementary: an environmental reward as with behaviourists, a neurotransmitter as in Neuroscience, or unconscious wishes as with psychoanalysis. As part of its reductionism, these approaches are also ultimately historical rather than prospective; they trace complex phenomena back to the first rewards (behaviourism), genetics (Neuroscience) or to instincts of an ultimately infantile nature (psychoanalysis).

Teleology
To Teleology, Brief Edition

Psychologists of the humanistic approach, while not necessarily rejecting the value of reductionism entirely, are inclined to underscore where people are going, rather than how they got where they are; thus, they assume the opposite of reduction; namely, synthesis, combining separate elements to form a coherent whole. This forward movement in thinking is called teleology, from the Greek telos meaning 'end,' 'completion' 'goal' or 'finality.' Humanists argue in various ways that the psyche is inherently anticipatory; people are not complete as they are, but have yet to overcome themselves as Nietzsche said. Modern humanists therefore emphasize purpose or aim, which orients to the future rather than to origins; in other words, there is 'meaning' for people to uncover in their lives, a becoming rather than an elementary, general, historical atomism. Thus humanistic psychology tends to emphasize the individual, for only the whole person, they say, can be the carrier of a purpose, aim or meaning. Reductionists often point to the vague and untestable character of humanist thought, but by analogy with human reproduction, a prospective psyche is as yet unformed and cannot be concretely outlined in advance. At best, the psyche's possibilities can only be intuited or attested to symbolically; that is, by an approximate formulation which represents only a presentiment of a state not yet known. There is also a substantial library of European psychology in the background of humanistic psychology, much of it expressed in the work of existentialist writers. The orientation might be expressive for highly intuitive temperaments.