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Psychology Is Psychology

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Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. In order to understand psychology as it today, we have to know something about its history. Additionally, we are going to see that the field of psychology is conceivable to adopt several different approaches, including the biological, behaviorist, cognitive, psychodynamic, and humanistic perspectives.

What psychology is?

The term psychology derives from the Greek word ''psyche'' that it means ''soul'' or ''mind'' and ''logos'' which it means ''word''. Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Most psychologists would not aknowledge ''the study of the mind'' an issue of psychology today (Meg Barker, 2003). They accept the …show more content…

At about the same time, William James was setting up his laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusets. The aim, when Wundt set up his laboratory in 1879, was to study the building blocks of the mind. He considered psychology to be the study of conscious experience. His view point, which came to be known as structuralism, concentrated on uncovering the fundamental mental parts of perception, consciousness, thinking, emotions and other kinds of mental states and activities. Wundt and other structuralists used a procedure called introspection, in which they presented people with a stimulus and asked them to describe, in their own words and in as much detail as they could, what they were experiencing, to decide how the basic sensory processes shape our understanding of the world. Wundt argued that by analyzing their answers, psychologists could come to a better understanding of the structure of the mind. Over time, Wundt's approach was challenged by psychologists. They became increasingly dissatisfied with the assumption that introspection could reveal the structure of the mind. They argued, because there were few ways an outside observer could confirm the accuracy of others’ introspections, introspection was not a truly scientific technique. Moreover, people had difficulty describing some kinds of inner experiences, such as emotional responses. Those drawbacks led to the development of new methodologies that largely replaced

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