Branches Of Psychology
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to psychology: Psychology refers to the study of subconscious and conscious activities, such as emotions and thoughts. It is a field of study that bridges the scientific and social sciences and has a huge reach. Its goal is to comprehend individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. Psychology is the study of people and the reasons for their behavior. It has grown in popularity in the last few decades and is now an undergraduate course at many universities. There are a variety of psychology branches that people specialize in, as outlined below. Fernald LD (2008)''Psychology: Six perspectives''(pp. 12–15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Hockenbury & Hockenbury. Psychology. Worth Publishers, 2010. Branches of psychology Basic psychological science * Abnormal psychology * Applied psychology * Asian psychology * Behavioral genetics * Biological psyc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cultural Psychology
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.Heine, S. J. (2011). ''Cultural Psychology. ''New York: W. W. Norton & Company. It is based on the premise that the mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The concept involves two propositions: firstly, that people are shaped by their culture, and secondly, that culture is shaped by its people.Fiske, A.; Kitayama, S.; Markus, H.R.; & Nisbett, R.E. (1998)The cultural matrix of social psychology In D. Gilbert & S. Fiske & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed., pp. 915–81). San Francisco: McGraw-Hill. Cultural psychology aims to define culture, its nature, and its function concerning psychological phenomena. Gerd Baumann argues: "Culture is not a real thing, but an abstract analytical notion. In itself, it does not cause behavior but abstracts from it. It is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaini ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Neuropsychology
Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brain affect cognitive and behavioral functions. It is both an experimental and clinical field of patient-focused psychology. Thus aiming to understand how behavior and cognition are influenced by brain function. It is also concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of behavioral and cognitive effects of neurological disorders. Whereas classical neurology focuses on the pathology of the nervous system and classical psychology is largely divorced from it, neuropsychology seeks to discover how the brain correlates with the mind through the study of neurological patients. It thus shares concepts and concerns with neuropsychiatry and with behavioral neurology in general. The term ''neuropsychology'' has been applied to lesion studies in huma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Music Psychology
The psychology of music, or music psychology, is a branch of psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and/or musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life. Modern work in the psychology of music is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to advance on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. In addition to its basic-science role in the cognitive sciences, the field has practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy; investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior; and links between music and health. The psychology of music can shed light on non-psychological aspects of musicology and musical practice. For example, it contrib ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Motivation
Motivation is an mental state, internal state that propels individuals to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often understood as a force that explains why people or animals initiate, continue, or terminate a certain behavior at a particular time. It is a complex phenomenon and its precise definition is disputed. It contrasts with #Amotivation and akrasia, amotivation, which is a state of apathy or listlessness. Motivation is studied in fields like psychology, neuroscience, motivation science, and philosophy. Motivational states are characterized by their direction, Motivational intensity, intensity, and persistence. The direction of a motivational state is shaped by the goal it aims to achieve. Intensity is the strength of the state and affects whether the state is translated into action and how much effort is employed. Persistence refers to how long an individual is willing to engage in an activity. Motivation is often divided into two phases: in the first phase, the indi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Medical Psychology
Medical psychology or Medicopsychology is the application of psychological principles to the practice of medicine, sometimes using drugs for both physical and mental disorders. A medical psychologist must obtain specific qualification in psychopharmacology to prescribe psychiatric medications and other pharmaceutical drugs. A trained medical psychologist or clinical psychopharmacologist with prescriptive authority is a mid-level provider who prescribes psychotropic medication such as antidepressants for mental health disorders.Moore, B. & Muse, M. (2012). Handbook of Clinical Psychopharmacology for Psychologists. Wiley. However, a medical psychologist does not automatically equate with a psychologist having authority to prescribe medication. In fact, most medical psychologists do not prescribe medication and do not have authority to do so. Medical psychologists apply psychological theories, scientific psychological findings, and techniques of psychotherapy, behavior modific ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mathematical Psychology
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychology, psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, Cognition, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior (in practice often constituted by task performance). The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving Hypothesis, hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and Thought, thinking, and measurement and Feature scaling, scaling. Although psychology, as an independent subject of science, is a more recent discipline than physics, the application of mathematics to psychology has been done in the hope of emulating the success of this approach in the Physical Sciences, physical sciences, which dat ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Indigenous Psychology
Indigenous psychology is defined by Kim and Berry as "the scientific study of human behavior or mind that is native, that is not transported from other regions, and that is designed for its people." There is a strong emphasis on how one's actions are influenced by the environment surrounding them as well as the aspects that make it up. This would include analyzing the context, in addition to the content that combine to make the domain that one is living in. The context would consist of the family, social, cultural, and ecological pieces and the content would consist of the meaning, values, and beliefs. Since the mid 1970s, there has been outcry about the traditional views from psychologists across the world, from Africa to Australia and many places in between about how the methods only reflect what would work in Europe and the Americas. There are several ways that separate indigenous psychology from the traditional general psychology. First, there is a strong emphasis on the examin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Health Psychology
Health psychology is the study of psychological and behavioral processes in health, illness, and healthcare. The discipline is concerned with understanding how psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and illness. Psychological factors can affect health directly. For example, chronically occurring environmental stressors affecting the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, cumulatively, can harm health. Behavioral factors can also affect a person's health. For example, certain behaviors can, over time, harm (smoking or consuming excessive amounts of alcohol) or enhance (engaging in exercise) health. Health psychologists take a biopsychosocial approach. In other words, health psychologists understand health to be the product not only of biological processes (e.g., a virus, tumor, etc.) but also of psychological (e.g., thoughts and beliefs), behavioral (e.g., habits), and social processes (e.g., socioeconomic status and ethnicity). By under ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Group Psychology
Group dynamics is a system of behaviors and psychological processes occurring within a social group (''intra''group dynamics), or between social groups ( ''inter''group dynamics). The study of group dynamics can be useful in understanding decision-making behaviour, tracking the spread of diseases in society, creating effective therapy techniques, and following the emergence and popularity of new ideas and technologies. These applications of the field are studied in psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, epidemiology, education, social work, leadership studies, business and managerial studies, as well as communication studies. History The history of group dynamics (or group processes) has a consistent, underlying premise: "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." A social group is an entity that has qualities which cannot be understood just by studying the individuals that make up the group. In 1924, Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer proposed "There are en ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Forensic Developmental Psychology
Forensic developmental psychology is a field of psychology that focuses on "children's actions and reactions in a forensic context" and "children's reports that they were victims or witnesses of a crime". Bruck and Poole (2002) first coined the term "forensic developmental psychology". Although forensic developmental psychology specifically focuses on a child's reliability, credibility, and competency in the courtroom setting, it also includes topics such as autobiographical memory, memory distortion, eyewitness identification, narrative construction, personality, and attachment. Distinction between forensic, developmental, and forensic developmental psychology Child testimony process Similar to adults, children who testify must undergo a testimony process in order to determine their relative competency, reliability, and credibility. This is important because trauma resulting from exposure to an open courtroom or confrontation with a defendant can ultimately lead to inaccura ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Experimental Psychology
Experimental psychology is the work done by those who apply Experiment, experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ Research participant, human participants and Animal testing, animal subjects to study a great many topics, including (among others) Sense, sensation, perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; Developmental psychology, developmental processes, social psychology, and the Neuroscience, neural substrates of all of these. History Early experimental psychology Wilhelm Wundt Experimental psychology emerged as a modern academic discipline in the 19th century when Wilhelm Wundt introduced a mathematical and experimental approach to the field. Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. Other experimental psychologists, including Hermann Ebbinghaus and Edward Titchener, included introspection in their experimental methods. Charles Bell Charles Bell was ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |