Monday, July 11, 2011

Branches of Psychology


Since I have a psychology quiz tomorrow, I am going to briefly list the branches of psychology and give a very simple definition for each of them. Also, as a warning to anyone who might have come across this page accidentally via a search engine, the information on this page is probably all wrong because I doubt that my teacher actually understands what she teaches (and the definitions all came from her). So if you are looking at this page because of some assignment for school, do not use the information!

So here we go:
Behaviourism: The study of how humans react to the environment
Cognitive Psychology: The study of the mental processes that are involved in memory, learning and thinking
Structuralism: The study of how humans change their behaviours to adapt to changes in their surroundings
Humanism: The belief that human beings are capable of making choices, and that most behaviors are not determined by environmental factors or human drives.
Psychoanalysis: The process of a patient describing their feelings or experiences to a trained professional in the hopes of discovering unconscious thoughts that the patient has.
Functionalism: Observation of the inner-workings of human beings by conducting various experiments to see how humans experience perception and sensation.