Psychology is the study of mind and behavior in humans and non-humans. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Psychological testing refers to the administration of psychological tests. Psychological tests are administered or scored by trained evaluators. A person's responses are evaluated according to carefully prescribed guidelines. Scores are thought to reflect individual or group differences in the construct the test purports to measure. The science behind psychological testing is psychometrics.
Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.
Clinical psychology is an integration of human science, behavioral science, theory, and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development. Central to its practice are psychological assessment, clinical formulation, and psychotherapy, although clinical psychologists also engage in research, teaching, consultation, forensic testimony, and program development and administration. In many countries, clinical psychology is a regulated mental health profession.
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events.
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments are in fact introspective self-report questionnaire measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though Raymond Cattell with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ranging all the way from lack of adequate self-insight to downright dissimulation depending on the reason/motivation for the assessment being undertaken.
Psychological trauma is an emotional response caused by severe distressing events that are outside the normal range of human experiences, such as violence, rape, or terrorist attack. The event must be understood by the affected person as directly threatening the affected person or their loved ones with death, severe bodily injury, or sexual violence; indirect exposure, such as from watching television news, may be extremely distressing and can produce an involuntary and possibly overwhelming physiological stress response, but does not produce trauma per se.
In psychology, a projective test is a personality test designed to let a person respond to ambiguous stimuli, presumably revealing hidden emotions and internal conflicts projected by the person into the test. This is sometimes contrasted with a so-called "objective test" / "self-report test", which adopt a "structured" approach as responses are analyzed according to a presumed universal standard, and are limited to the content of the test. The responses to projective tests are content analyzed for meaning rather than being based on presuppositions about meaning, as is the case with objective tests. Projective tests have their origins in psychoanalysis, which argues that humans have conscious and unconscious attitudes and motivations that are beyond or hidden from conscious awareness.
Behaviour therapy or behavioural psychotherapy is a broad term referring to clinical psychotherapy that uses techniques derived from behaviourism and/or cognitive psychology. It looks at specific, learned behaviours and how the environment, or other people's mental states, influences those behaviours, and consists of techniques based on behaviorism's theory of learning: respondent or operant conditioning. Behaviourists who practice these techniques are either behaviour analysts or cognitive-behavioural therapists. They tend to look for treatment outcomes that are objectively measurable. Behaviour therapy does not involve one specific method, but it has a wide range of techniques that can be used to treat a person's psychological problems.
Acceptance and commitment therapy is a form of psychotherapy, as well as a branch of clinical behavior analysis. It is an empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies along with commitment and behavior-change strategies to increase psychological flexibility.
DISC assessments are behavioral self-assessment tools based on psychologist William Moulton Marston's DISC emotional and behavioral theory, first published in 1928. These assessments aim to predict job performance by categorizing individuals into four personality traits: dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance.
Self-categorization theory is a theory in social psychology that describes the circumstances under which a person will perceive collections of people as a group, as well as the consequences of perceiving people in group terms. Although the theory is often introduced as an explanation of psychological group formation, it is more accurately thought of as general analysis of the functioning of categorization processes in social perception and interaction that speaks to issues of individual identity as much as group phenomena. It was developed by John Turner and colleagues, and along with social identity theory it is a constituent part of the social identity approach. It was in part developed to address questions that arose in response to social identity theory about the mechanistic underpinnings of social identification.
A clinical formulation, also known as case formulation and problem formulation, is a theoretically-based explanation or conceptualisation of the information obtained from a clinical assessment. It offers a hypothesis about the cause and nature of the presenting problems and is considered an adjunct or alternative approach to the more categorical approach of psychiatric diagnosis. In clinical practice, formulations are used to communicate a hypothesis and provide framework for developing the most suitable treatment approach. It is most commonly used by clinical psychologists and is deemed to be a core component of that profession. Mental health nurses, social workers, and some psychiatrists may also use formulations.
The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) is a widely used caregiver report form identifying problem behavior in children. It is widely used in both research and clinical practice with youths. It has been translated into more than 90 languages, and normative data are available integrating information from multiple societies. Because a core set of the items have been included in every version of the CBCL since the 1980s, it provides a meter stick for measuring whether amounts of behavior problems have changed over time or across societies. This is a helpful complement to other approaches for looking at rates of mental-health issues, as the definitions of disorders have changed repeatedly over the same time frame.
Psychology encompasses a vast domain, and includes many different approaches to the study of mental processes and behavior. Below are the major areas of inquiry that taken together constitute psychology. A comprehensive list of the sub-fields and areas within psychology can be found at the list of psychology topics and list of psychology disciplines.
Albert J. Levis is a Greek psychiatrist and author of the Formal Theory of Behavior. He is also the founder and director of the Museum of the Creative Process in Manchester, Vermont. He along with his late wife, Georgette Wasserstein Levis, is the innkeeper of the Wilburton Inn, also in Manchester.
The Museum of the Creative Process is a museum and learning center dedicated to understanding the role of creativity as a conflict resolving mechanism. Founded and directed by Albert Levis, M.D., the museum brings together a global collection of contemporary and historical pieces of artwork. The museum is located on the grounds of the Wilburton Inn in Manchester, Vermont. The museum also holds traveling exhibits throughout New England.
The NIH Toolbox®, for the assessment of neurological and behavioral function, is a multidimensional set of brief royalty-free measures that researchers and clinicians can use to assess cognitive, sensory, motor and emotional function in people ages 3–85. This suite of measures can be administered to study participants in two hours or less, in a variety of settings, with a particular emphasis on measuring outcomes in longitudinal epidemiologic studies and prevention or intervention trials. The battery has been normed and validated across the lifespan in subjects age 3-85 and its use ensures that assessment methods and results can be used for comparisons across existing and future studies. The NIH Toolbox is capable of monitoring neurological and behavioral function over time, and measuring key constructs across developmental stages.
In psychology, the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) is a system of movement observation and analysis that therapists use to appraise individuals include fetuses.
In psychology, the self-confrontation method (SCM), developed by Hubert Hermans, is a technique for examining people's behavior modification. It relies on people's inconsistent knowledge and dissatisfaction with their own values, motivation, behaviors, or with their personal meaning systems and those of significant others. Self-confrontation psychology is based on two theories which are valuation theory and dialogical-self theory.
