This first video provides a brief overview of what psychology is and describes a few of psychology’s many subfields.

Viewers in China can watch this video here: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTgzNjkxNDUzMg

Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d like to see covered in a future video? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email!

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review, where I answer common questions and explain the key concepts in psychology. This is the first video, so I’ll start with a basic question, that is, what is psychology? Now if you’ve ever told someone that you’re taking psychology class, you probably already know that there’s a lot of misconceptions about what psychology is. And despite what people think, it’s not about analyzing someone’s every move or trying to read people’s minds or anything like that. So we can say psychology is the scientific study of thought and behavior

This means that psychologists want to know why people think the things that they think and why they do the things that they do and answering these questions can help us to better understand the world. We can understand the causes of events and behaviors and we can understand how and why people differ from one another.

Now this is a pretty broad field saying that we’re going to study thought and behavior and this means that psychology is really connected to everything that people do. Anything that you’re interested in, psychology can help you to understand it. But because it’s so broad, we have to break psychology up into a number of subfields. So let’s see a few examples of these.

We have cognitive psychology, and cognitive psychology focuses on cognition, or thought. So how do our thoughts influence us? How do they influence our emotional state or our decision-making or our behavior?

We also have evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary psychologists want to know how our thinking and our behavior has been shaped over millions of years of evolution. So how certain patterns been selected for over time?

We also have developmental psychology and developmental psychologists also want to know how we change over time, but they look at a much shorter time period; the course of a lifespan. So how do people change from infancy to adolescence or from adolescence to adulthood.

Then we have neuroscience, and neuroscience is focused on studying the brain and brain activity. Now this might be connected to our thinking, we might look for patterns of brain activity and how they connect to thought, and that would fall under cognitive neuroscience or we might focus on the relationship between brain activity and behavior, and that would be considered behavioral neuroscience.

Now, many of these approaches focus on an individual. But we can also think about how being in a group influences thought and behavior. So how do you change when you’re around other people and that would fall under social psychology.

And lastly, we have abnormal psychology and this is the area that most people think of when they think of psychology and this is studying thoughts and behaviors that are deemed to be abnormal and included within this would be clinical psychology and that is examining the diagnosis and also the treatment of psychological disorders.

Now these are just a few of the subfields of psychology, there are others but it’s important to remember that each of these approaches uses slightly different methods and has different ways of studying thought and behavior. But none of these represents the best. There’s not one right way to study thought and behavior. Instead we should think of all these different approaches as each being a piece of the puzzle that we’re trying to solve.

That’s a general overview of the field of psychology and if you found this helpful, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!