In this video I provide a comprehensive overview of the many subfields of psychology and how these fit together to provide a deeper understanding of the complexity of human thought and behavior. These include units on history and early approaches, research methods, biological bases of behavior, sensation and perception, states of consciousness, learning theory and behaviorism, memory, language and cognition, intelligence, personality, emotion and motivation, developmental psychology, stress and health psychology, social psychology, and the study of psychological disorders and their treatments.
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video I want to provide an overview of psychology and I hope this will be helpful for anyone who’s curious to learn more about it or for psychology students who want to develop a more holistic understanding.
Psychology is the study of thought and behavior and this means that it encompasses a wide range of topics and subfields; each having their own unique insights and perspectives. While I won’t be able to explain all of these concepts in detail, I hope I can give you a sense of the full range of topics investigated in psychology, why all of these are necessary, and how they all fit together in order to help us to understand human behavior.
When attempting to understand the causes of behavior as well as differences between people, forces shaping behavior can be broadly categorized as nature and nurture. Rather than thinking of these in terms of either-or-distinctions or versus, we should consider how these two forces of heredity and experience interact with one another to influence thought and behavior. Rather than a dualist approach, which sees mind and body as separate entities, nearly all psychologists today adopt a monist approach; meaning all thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are assumed to have underlying physiological components, even if those aren’t yet fully understood.
Early approaches to psychology included structuralism, which attempted to identify the structural components of consciousness, functionalism, which emphasized the adaptive purpose of traits and behaviors, and a psychoanalytic approach, which focused on unconscious influences for understanding the mind. These early approaches often suffered from subjectivity and as psychology has tried to become more objective attention to research methods has become increasingly important.
Conducting research in psychology requires careful methods for collecting and analyzing data due to the complexity of human behavior, the reactivity of human participants to being measured, and the variability of responses across people. The complexity of human behavior means that whether conducting correlational studies, surveys, case studies, or experiments, psychologists must create clear operational definitions of the variables investigated and consider any potential biases that may influence results. Psychologists must also follow ethical guidelines including informed consent, protection from harm, and debriefing of subjects following data collection.
Data collected from studies is summarized by descriptive statistics such as measures of central tendency, and interpreted using inferential statistics which include hypothesis testing and the calculation of p values to attempt to draw conclusions, and psychologists must be well-trained in statistical methods in order to properly design studies and analyze the data collected.
The general adoption of a monist approach means that in order to understand thought and behavior we must also understand the physical body, and a biological approach to psychology looks at the structure and components of the nervous system in order to understand how information is processed in the body.
Neurons communicate in the form of electrical action potentials within neurons and chemical messages passed via the synapses between neurons by neurotransmitters. Along with other types of cells, neurons are the building blocks of the nervous system, which includes divisions for voluntary and involuntary responses and which communicates via neurotransmitters as well as the hormones released by the endocrine system.
The brain is composed of a number of subcortical structures including the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus, and is covered by the cerebral cortex which is divided into two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum. Each hemisphere contains four lobes which process different types of information. Brain imaging techniques allow researchers to study the structure of the brain via CAT scans and MRI, as well as its functioning via EEG, PET scans, and fMRI scans.
A biological approach also investigates the role of genes on behavior; with molecular genetics focusing on the role of individual genes, and behavioral genetics focusing on the overall influence of genes on traits and behaviors, using calculations of heritability to estimate the extent of genetic influence in explaining why people differ for particular traits and often making use of twin studies.
With an understanding of how the brain and body send messages and process information, we can think about where that information is coming from, and this brings us to consider our senses and how they collect information about the world around us.
Our senses have natural limitations on the information we can detect in the form of absolute and difference thresholds and sensory information in the environment such as light waves, sound waves, or chemical molecules must be converted from these physical signals into brain activity. This process of transduction involves unique structures for each sense. Once sensory information is converted into neural signals it is processed and interpreted by different areas of the cortex and while this process of perception does follow some general patterns, it is also shaped by our experience with the world and social and cultural factors.
Thinking about all this information coming in from our senses and being processed might make us wonder how aware we are of some of this processing. And this brings us to the study of states of consciousness.
Information from our senses can be processed at different levels of consciousness; conscious, preconscious, subconscious, unconscious, or non-conscious. Our level of awareness of sensory information may also vary depending on our alertness and our state of consciousness. This varies throughout the day, most noticeably during sleep, and sleep research focuses on identifying the functions of distinct stages of sleep as as well as sleep-related disorders such as insomnia or narcolepsy and their effects on thought and behavior.
Our state of consciousness can also be influenced by practices such as meditation or hypnosis or through the consumption of psychoactive drugs, which may be categorized as stimulants, depressants, or hallucinogens, depending on their influence on nervous system activity.
The behavioral approach to psychology arose in the early 20th century and this was an attempt to make psychology more objective; ignoring consciousness or internal mental states and focusing instead on observable behaviors that can be readily measured.
Classical conditioning focused on how we learn associations between stimuli and how these associations cause behavioral responses. Ivan Pavlov demonstrated how the repeated pairing of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus, which causes an unconditioned response, could cause the previously neutral stimulus to become a conditioned stimulus, which then evokes a conditioned response.
Operant conditioning investigated how positive and negative reinforcements or punishments become associated with behavior, and BF Skinner investigated how varying schedules of these consequences play a role in shaping our behavior over time. Together, classical and operant conditioning show how external factors create associations and patterns of behavior and, taken to its extreme, this focus on external factors would suggest we nothing more than mindless automatons acting out our environmentally-induced associations and responses.
But over several decades as the dominant approach, exceptions contradictions, and limitations of behaviorist explanations began to accumulate and gradually revealed the importance of biological predispositions and constraints on learning, the importance of cognitive components in latent learning and the formation of cognitive maps, as well as social components in observational learning and the influence of vicarious reinforcement on behavior, and these would play an important role in the cognitive revolution that followed.
While the behaviorist approach had focused on observable behavior, this cognitive revolution meant that many psychologists shifted their focus to studying internal mental processes like memory, language, and decision making, and they believed that these could be objectively measured and studied.
Memory researchers began systematically studying how we encode, store, and retrieve information and personal experiences; creating models such as the three box model and the working memory model to classify different types of memory. Recognition of the varying levels of conscious access to information means that we can also categorize memories depending on our level of conscious awareness; as explicit memories such as remembering facts or implicit memories such as the procedural memory for how to ride a bike.
Research has also led to greater understanding of the predictable flaws in human memory; from ordinary forgetting over time to suggestibility and false memories and how memories should be seen not as recordings of events but as reconstructions which are reassembled each time we recall them, making them subject to distortion and biases. This process of reassembly draws upon groups of related cognitions known as schema which help to fill in the gaps in our memory and are built up through our experience.
Memory researchers have also used case studies of patients like H.M., as well as lab studies to understand biological factors such as the role of the hippocampus on memory formation and chemical changes that occur between neurons during long-term potentiation. Biological factors have also helped us to understand links between emotion and memory and how emotional events can improve or distort recall.
Finally memory research has been applied to educational psychology for improved understanding of strategies for improving learning, such as the use of mnemonics, chunking, and spaced repetition.
Another key aspect of our internal cognitive processes is the development in use of language. Psychologists and linguists have studied how we develop the capacity for complex language use, how language development is influenced by biological factors and our genetic predisposition, cognitive factors like schema, and the social influences that make up our language environment. Language also has the potential to influence the ways that we perceive and think about the world and our cognitive schema may be activated by language in ways that would influence our thinking, problem-solving and decision-making.
Problem-solving and decision- making may also occur in different levels of conscious awareness and the dual process model suggests an automatic unconscious route referred to as system 1, and a more deliberate conscious process referred to as system 2. Our tendency to rely on system 1 and its faster heuristic judgments may lead to predictable cognitive biases when making decisions such as the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic, or the framing effect.
Thinking about the role of cognition on behavior might make us wonder about differences in cognition and how these could be measured, assessed, or used to make predictions. Research on intelligence looks at differences in cognitive abilities and how these relate to how individuals process information, solve problems, and make decisions. While a number of definitions for intelligence have been proposed including multiple intelligences, triarchic theory, and emotional intelligence, one of the most valid and reliable conceptions of intelligence has focused on the idea of g, for general intelligence, which is a single factor of cognitive ability that predicts performance on a broad range of skills, though researchers also consider the distinction between intelligence used when solving new problems, known as fluid intelligence, and intelligence that’s accumulated through past experience, known as crystallized intelligence.
The study of intelligence has led to the development of a number of assessments including several versions of Wechsler Intelligence Scales and the Raven Progressive Matrices, which have allowed us to assess individual intelligence as well as estimate the distribution of intelligence in the population; suggesting it is normally distributed with a mean of about 100 and a standard deviation of about 15, with scores below 70 referred to as intellectual disability and above 130 regarded as giftedness. Having valid and reliable estimates for intelligence has also allowed researchers to estimate its heritability, which ranges from about 0.5 in childhood to about 0.8 in later adulthood, suggesting a complex relationship in how genes and environment interact in cognitive ability over time.
Other changes over time can be seen in the general population, with the Flynn Effect showing rises in general intelligence over the course of the 20th century, likely due to environmental factors like improvements in nutrition and access to education.
Of course, people don’t just differ in their cognitive abilities and personality research looks at characteristic patterns of thinking and behaving that vary across individuals. Early approaches to thinking about personality were heavily influenced by Freud’s conception of the id, ego, and superego, his psychosexual stages of personality development, and his theory of defense mechanisms for managing anxiety.
Early personality assessments often used projective techniques such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test, though these have mostly been replaced by trait-based approaches which often use self-reports and focus on universal aspects of personality that are shared by all people, though they vary in degree, such as the Big Five or Five Factor model of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The causes of personality differences have been been conceptualized biologically by thinking about differences in genes or levels of hormones or neurotransmitters, while cognitive approaches focus on how we develop a self schema; how we think about our own traits and abilities in the form of self-efficacy, self-perception theory, locus of control, and through social comparison with those around us.
Existential psychology considers how we cope with the knowledge of our eventual death and find meaning in life, while humanist psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers focused on the individual ways that people strive for growth and self-improvement in their lives.
Trying to understand differences between people may also bring us to consider the role of emotions on thought and behavior and how these can communicate and express our internal mental states, both to ourselves and to others. The James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, and Schacter-Singer theories of emotion all attempted to describe how it is that emotional experiences arise. While Paul Ekman’s research looked at how we communicate these to others via universal expressions of joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.
In asking why we have emotions, one answer is to motivate behavior. Motivations may come in the form of drives like hunger or sex, which include biological factors like hormones, in addition to cognitive and social components. Rather than the behaviorist focus on external rewards or punishments, drive reduction theory focused on how departures from homeostasis could explain changes in behavior resulting from motivation to reduce unpleasant drives like hunger.
Motivations are complex and people often experience multiple motivations simultaneously. These can be classified as intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on whether they arise from an individual’s desires or from environmental rewards or punishments, and conflicts between these sources may explain counterintuitive effects of behaviorist rewards or punishments; such as the over-justification effect, in which extrinsic motivations replace and reduce intrinsic motivations.
As with cognition, our conscious awareness of motivations can vary and we can consider how conscious and unconscious motivations combine to influence what we pursue, enjoy, and find meaningful, and this can also be an important aspect of industrial-organizational psychology and studies of performance in the workplace.
Now that we have a better understanding of how individuals can differ in their abilities, traits, and motivations, we might wonder how these differences come about and how they may change over the lifespan. And this brings us to developmental psychology. Much of developmental psychology focuses on early life and this includes a biological understanding of how our nervous system and brain develop from conception, how we learn to perceive and differentiate sensory stimulation in infancy, or how we undergo physiological maturation during puberty. It investigates how thinking and problem-solving develop and whether these changes occur in stages such as Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, or through more continuous processes as experience accumulates.
It also considers how we develop the ability to understand others through theory of mind, and how we engage in moral reasoning when reflecting on behavior. Developmental psychologists also study how our personality traits, abilities, and motivations emerge over time and what role social factors and relationships like early attachment to our mother or parenting styles may play in shaping who we are and how we think about ourselves and the world.
Developmental psychology also looks at how we change and adapt in later life; as strengths and abilities grow or deteriorate, such as our crystallized intelligence accumulating while fluid intelligence declines, as the sensitivity of our senses decreases but our sense of identity may strengthen, or how our goals and motivations transform as the social roles we play change and we reflect on our life as we’ve lived it.
Thinking about changes over the lifespan may also make us consider the biological, cognitive, and environmental factors that could influence our short–term and long–term health. These factors may influence our risk of diseases like cardiovascular disease or mental illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.
Health psychologists see how acute and chronic stressors can both emerge from and affect the brain, the endocrine and immune systems, our thoughts, memories, and emotions, and our relationships and our position in the social hierarchy. They also look at how differences in biology, behavior, cognition, personality, and relationships relate to people’s hardiness in response to stress and the effect of appraisal, problem, or emotion-focused coping strategies in managing stress and improving well-being.
By this point we should have a fairly firm grasp on individual behavior, but we haven’t really considered the role that other people play in influencing an individual’s thoughts and behaviors. Humans are social animals and this means that the relationships that we form and the groups that we’re a part of are a fundamental aspect of who we are and how we see ourselves and others.
Social psychologists may study how the presence of others influences our thoughts and behavior and how different individuals respond to social pressures of conformity, persuasion or compliance, and obedience to authority. They consider how we attribute causes to the behaviors of others; based on what we know about them as individuals with unique dispositions, thoughts, and personalities, as members of groups, and as actors in a complex situational context and environment.
Biological, cognitive, and environmental factors influence the relationships and groups that we form; from our partners in intimate relationships to family and peer groups, to larger groups like communities and cultures. Social psychologists try to understand our in-groups and the out-groups of others and how the cognitive schema we develop for groups may lead us to stereotypes, prejudice, or discrimination; both positive and negative.
Belonging to a group influences its members and groups may begin to act differently; becoming insular or polarized or engaging in decision-making that increases risk, or in the case of groupthink, can have disastrous consequences.
Yet our natural tendency towards group affiliation also benefits us as we cooperate to work towards shared superordinate goals, achieving more than any one individual possibly could alone, and as we engage in altruistic behaviors that reveal our shared membership in this 8 billion member group we call human beings.
Finally we come to the topic that’s most associated with psychology in popular culture and this is investigating negative thoughts and behaviors that are deviant, dysfunctional, and distressful to sufferers in the form of psychological disorders. And understanding psychological disorders is going to necessitate drawing upon everything that we’ve learned about biological, behavioral, cognitive, and social factors.
One of the first challenges of studying mental illness is in defining what should be considered symptoms, and how we can use a medical model to classify patterns of symptoms into disorders which hopefully are valid and can be reliably diagnosed. This is particularly challenging with sufferers who may lack insight into the severity of their symptoms, or who, for a variety of reasons, may be unable to clearly communicate their mental states to others.
The diathesis stress model considers how different genetic risk factors combine with environmental factors in the onset and prevalence of different disorders and clinical psychologists and psychiatrists seek to understand the biological, cognitive, and environmental causes and consequences of disorders on sufferers.
The DSM-5 neatly classifies disorders into categories like anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, schizophrenic disorders, personality disorders, and so on, but further challenges can arise in clearly defining symptoms, prevalence, and diagnosis of these disorders when symptoms can vary across sufferers and overlap across disorders, or when multiple disorders are comorbid in the same individual.
In addition to classifying and diagnosing psychological disorders, we also want to understand the effectiveness of different interventions designed to treat those disorders. Interventions for psychological disorders include biological treatments like medications or psychosurgery, psychotherapeutic techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure therapy, as well as group-based interventions which focus on social factors like family dynamics and levels of social support.
Determining the effectiveness of treatments is difficult, not only because of variability between sufferers and their circumstances, but also due to non-specific treatment effects like the placebo effect or possible biases in interpretation and assessment of symptoms from both sufferers and clinicians. In addition to formal treatment approaches psychologists also investigate the role of lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, meditation, faith, and social support and these may have biological, cognitive, and interpersonal benefits which can reduce the risk or the severity of symptoms of psychological disorders.
I hope you didn’t find this overview overwhelming and I hope you did find some areas that you’re curious to learn more about. If so you can check out the hundreds of other detailed psychology tutorials that I have on this channel, which are also organized into playlists by each unit. I hope that I’ve encouraged you to think about the interrelationship of all these different subfields of psychology and I hope I’ve discouraged you from thinking about one approach being the best approach. None of these approaches will have all the answers and so it’s important for us to have a recognition of and appreciation for the many biological, behavioral, cognitive, social, and cultural differences that can exist between people. This will allow us to better understand others and better understand ourselves.
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