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Industrial and organizational psychology "focuses the lens of psychological science on a key aspect of human life, namely, their work lives. In general, the goals of I-O psychology are to better understand and optimize the effectiveness, health, and well-being of both individuals and organizations." It is an applied discipline within psychology and is an international profession. I-O psychology is also known as occupational psychology in the United Kingdom, organisational psychology in Australia and New Zealand, and work and organizational (WO) psychology throughout Europe and Brazil. Industrial, work, and organizational (IWO) psychology is the broader, more global term for the science and profession.
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.
Albert Bandura was a Canadian-American psychologist. He was a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University.
Ecological psychology is the scientific study of perception-action from a direct realist approach. Ecological psychology is a school of psychology that follows much of the writings of Roger Barker and James J. Gibson. Those in the field of Ecological Psychology reject the mainstream explanations of perception laid out by cognitive psychology. The ecological psychology can be broken into a few sub categories: perception, action, and dynamical systems. As a clarification, many in this field would reject the separation of perception and action, stating that perception and action are inseparable. These perceptions are shaped by an individual's ability to engage with their emotional experiences in relation to the environment and reflect on and process these. This capacity for emotional engagement leads to action, collective processing, social capital, and pro environmental behaviour.
Political psychology is an interdisciplinary academic field, dedicated to understanding politics, politicians and political behavior from a psychological perspective, and psychological processes using socio-political perspectives. The relationship between politics and psychology is considered bidirectional, with psychology being used as a lens for understanding politics and politics being used as a lens for understanding psychology. As an interdisciplinary field, political psychology borrows from a wide range of disciplines, including: anthropology, economics, history, international relations, journalism, media, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology.
Environmental psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the relationship between humans and the external world. It examines the way in which the natural environment and our built environments shape us as individuals. Environmental psychology emphasizes how humans change the environment and how the environment changes humans' experiences and behaviors. The field defines the term environment broadly, encompassing natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. According to an article on APA Psychnet, environmental psychology is when a person thinks of a plan, travels to a certain place, and follows through with the plan throughout their behavior.
Relational psychoanalysis is a school of psychoanalysis in the United States that emphasizes the role of real and imagined relationships with others in mental disorder and psychotherapy. 'Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new and evolving school of psychoanalytic thought considered by its founders to represent a "paradigm shift" in psychoanalysis'.
Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development. This framework, broadly referred to as 'ecological systems theory', was formalized in an article published in American Psychologist, articulated in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developed in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. He argued that natural experiments and applied developmental interventions provide valuable scientific opportunities. These beliefs were exemplified in his involvement in developing the US Head Start program in 1965. Bronfenbrenner's writings about the limitations of understanding child development solely from experimental laboratory research and the potential for using contextual variability to provide insight into developmental processes was important in changing the focus of developmental psychology.
Harold Kelley was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His major contributions have been the development of interdependence theory, the early work of attribution theory, and a lifelong interest in understanding close relationships processes. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Kelley as the 43rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
Personality development encompasses the dynamic construction and deconstruction of integrative characteristics that distinguish an individual in terms of interpersonal behavioral traits. Personality development is ever-changing and subject to contextual factors and life-altering experiences. Personality development is also dimensional in description and subjective in nature. That is, personality development can be seen as a continuum varying in degrees of intensity and change. It is subjective in nature because its conceptualization is rooted in social norms of expected behavior, self-expression, and personal growth. The dominant viewpoint in personality psychology indicates that personality emerges early and continues to develop across one's lifespan. Adult personality traits are believed to have a basis in infant temperament, meaning that individual differences in disposition and behavior appear early in life, potentially before language of conscious self-representation develop. The Five Factor Model of personality maps onto the dimensions of childhood temperament. This suggests that individual differences in levels of the corresponding personality traits are present from young ages.
Roy Frederick Baumeister is an American social psychologist who is known for his work on the self, social rejection, belongingness, sexuality and sex differences, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, aggression, consciousness, and free will.
The social penetration theory (SPT) proposes that as relationships develop, interpersonal communication moves from relatively shallow, non-intimate levels to deeper, more intimate ones. The theory was formulated by psychologists Irwin Altman of the University of Utah and Dalmas Taylor of the University of Delaware in 1973 to understand relationship development between individuals. Altman and Taylor noted that relationships "involve different levels of intimacy of exchange or degree of social penetration". SPT is known as an objective theory as opposed to an interpretive theory, meaning it is based on data drawn from actual experiments and not simply from conclusions based on individuals' specific experiences.
Privacy regulation theory was developed by social psychologist Irwin Altman in 1975. This theory aims to explain why people sometimes prefer staying alone but at other times like get involved in social interactions, discussing privacy as "a selective control of access to the self or to one's group".
Self-esteem can be defined as how favorably individuals evaluate themselves. According to Leary, self-esteem is the relationship between one's real self and one's ideal self, feeding off of favorable behaviors. It refers to an individual's sense of their value or worth, or the extent to which a person values, approves of, appreciates, prizes, or likes themselves. Self-esteem is generally considered the evaluative component of the self-concept, a broader representation of the self that includes cognitive and behavioral aspects as well as evaluative or affective ones. There are several different proposals as to the functions of self-esteem. One proposal is that it satisfies the inherent need to feel good about oneself. Another is that it serves to minimize social rejection. Self-esteem is also known as a way for a person to remain dominant in relationships. Self-esteem is known to protect people from potential fear that arises from the prospect of death. Motivating individuals towards their goals, high self-esteem fosters effective coping, while low self-esteem tends to result in avoidance.
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.
Interpersonal communication is an exchange of information between two or more people. It is also an area of research that seeks to understand how humans use verbal and nonverbal cues to accomplish several personal and relational goals. Communication includes utilizing communication skills within one's surroundings, including physical and psychological spaces. It is essential to see the visual/nonverbal and verbal cues regarding the physical spaces. In the psychological spaces, self-awareness and awareness of the emotions, cultures, and things that are not seen are also significant when communicating.
Allan W. Wicker studied with the founders of ecological psychology, Roger G. Barker and Herbert Wright, in the social psychology program at the University of Kansas, where he earned the Ph.D. in 1967. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana before taking a position at Claremont Graduate School in 1971, where he was a professor of psychology until early retirement in 1999. He is currently an emeritus professor.
Relational mobility is a sociological variable that represents how much freedom individuals have to choose which persons to have relationships with, including friendships, working relationships, and romantic partnerships in a given society. Societies with low relational mobility have less flexible interpersonal networks. People form relationships based on circumstance rather than active choice. In these societies, relationships are more stable and guaranteed, while there are fewer opportunities to leave unsatisfying relationships and find new ones. Group memberships tend to be fixed, and individuals have less freedom to select or change these relationships even if they wished to.
References
- Altman, Irwin; Taylor, Dalmas A. (1973). Social penetration: The development of interpersonal relationships . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
- Altman, Irwin (1973). "Reciprocity of interpersonal exchange". Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 3 (2): 249–261. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.1973.tb00325.x.
