Human Mind and Psychology Assignment
Added on 2020-04-15
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Running head: PSYCHOLOGYPsychologyName of the student:Name of the University:Author’s note
1PSYCHOLOGYTask 1: 1.Psychology is the field of study that deals with examining human mind and thebehavioral characteristics of a person in relation to any activity. Mental processes such asthoughts, memories and behaviors cannot be physical observed, however the field ofpsychology enables understanding people’s internal mental process and rational forspecific behavior of individuals (Gerrig et al. 2015). 2.The field of psychology has three distinct eras whose timeline are as follows:Antiquity to late 1800s- This period is defined as the pre-modern era when psychology wasregarded as philosophy and not science. Several intellectual elites like Plato, Aristotle, HeinrichWeber, Democritus, Hippocrates and many others contributed to the development of keypsychological theories. In this period, psychology was defined from the ideas of philosophy anda lot of discussion existed on the role and function of human thinking (Cohen 2017). Based ondifference discussions by philosophers, the human thought was defined as dual thought whichhad both physiological as well as spiritual links. Starting from 1870s, the view regarding humanmind shifted from psychology to the current theories in conscious and unconscious level offunctioning (Strack and Deutsch 2015). In 387 BC, Plato regarded brain as the mechanism formental processes, whereas the heart was defined as the mechanism of the mental process byAristotle (Robinson 2014).Late 1800s to 1980s- This period is defined as the modern era of psychology where the field ofpsychology was fully regarded as a scientific concept instead of philosophical concept. Thedevelopments in the field of psychology in this period resulted in addressing sufferings of peoplewith mental illness. The radical ideas regarding the psychological theories started in this period
2PSYCHOLOGY(Cohen 2017). For example, in 1886, Sigmund Freud laid the foundation for personality theory.Many important psychology theory and modern frameworks was also given in this period byB.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and Carl Jung. I903, Ivan Pavlov explained classicalconditioning through a dog, whereas the Carl Jung explained about analytical psychologytheories. In 1983, B.F. Skinner defined the behavioral therapy, whereas by 1980, the DSM IIIcriteria for mental illness were defined by American Psychiatric Association (Brennan andHoude 2017). Hence, the concept of duality vanished in this period and the task associated withconscious and unconscious level of functioning was given much importance. Pre-modern psychology: The pre modern era is the period of 1980s till existing date. In thisperiod, more clarity was seen in each of the psychological theories. More research also came upand are coming to give more integrative understanding of the human mind than those given byFreud. Many modern treatment options have now come in the field of psychology such asbehavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, integrative psychology and thecollaboration with inter-disciplinary teams (Cohen 2017). 3. Yes, psychology can be considered a scientific discipline because apart from philosophy, italso contains some elements of modern science. Science is referred as a systematic process toacquire knowledge and learn about new things. Here the focus is on gaining and understandingabout cause and effect relationship through identification of the problem, formulating ahypothesis, preparing strategy, data collection and interpretation of findings. Hence, psychologycan also be defined as science because it examines cause and effect relationship related to humanbehavior and its findings can be verified too. However, it does not totally conform to the laws ofnatural science and certain psychological issues cannot be directly studied in the laboratory.
3PSYCHOLOGYHence, it is more of social science as it is related to scientific study of behaviors, experiences andmental processes. The disadvantage of psychology as a scientific discipline is that there is replicability crisis inthe field because several published results are not true and cannot be investigated in laboratorysetting. For example, several theories explain the effect of a condition on human behavior.However, it is difficult to replicate them. Hence, in the field of psychology, replication crisis is awell-known term because results of many psychology studies are difficult to replicate on furtherinvestigation (Stroebe and Strack 2014). Review of several studies in the field of psychologyalso highlights about the replicability issues in psychology research. There is a need to addressthis methodological issues in psychology research because reproducibility is the cornerstone ofscience and the effect is considered reliable only if another research can also get the same resultswith the same procedure in another setting (Simons 2014). To define psychology as a scientific discipline, it is also necessary that it includes controlin the research process. Control and replication are essential for true experiment and it isreflective of the validity of the research study. Just like other scientific fields, the psychologyresearch also includes control condition in research to understand whether interventions likepsychotherapies can work on people with psychological disorders or not (Barker and Pistrang2015). Hence, randomized controlled trial is a common research method in the field ofpsychology. For example, a control condition was created in a clinical psychology research donefor evaluating the efficacy of mindfulness based cognitive therapy for chronically depressedpatients (Michalak et al. 2015).
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