Psychology and Its Many Subdisciplines

Psychology is a diverse discipline encompassing a number of different subject areas. These areas are tied together by the common idea of understanding the psychological processes that drive our behavior. This gives rise to a number of different disciplines, such as motivation, behaviorism and cognitive psychology. These disciplines can then be divided into an even greater variety of sub-disciplines (Tougas, 2010). These different disciplines have some relation, but there is no one unifying thread throughout this.

They are related because of their psychological nature -- they arise in the brain and can be explained by the brain. But ultimately, these are elements of what it means to be human. In that sense, there are similarities but only in a general sense. For the most part, the different psychological disciplines only have these loose ties. This diversity of study can help however. People who study psychology are exposed to a number of different ideas that come from these different fields.

Further, some studies, especially in cognitive psychology, can be quite revealing with respect to how the brain works. So researchers can learn something by studying one discipline that may be applied to other disciplines. One discipline within psychology is behaviorism. Behaviorism looks at the causes of human behavior, in particular things that are deemed to be problem behaviors. Binge drinking and addiction fall into this category, as does stealing or infidelity.

This particular discipline examines why people behave in certain ways, especially in ways that are contrary to societal norms, and ways that are damaging to one's own health. Self-destructive behaviors are often a theme in the study of behaviorism. One of the objectives of behaviorism is to help people who are engaged in these behaviors to break their habits. Managing such behaviors is of concern, and that involves having a better understanding of the underlying causes of such behaviors. Another discipline of psychology is cognition.

Cognition reflects a lot on how the brain works, with special attention to its imperfections. Things like memory are a major field of study within cognition. This means understanding how memories are formed, stored and recalled. In particular, the study of memory looks like things like false memories, or memory difficulties like absent-mindedness. Understanding memory is important because of how much we rely on memory in our daily lives, and what the consequences might be for things like false memories and other memory "sins" (Schacter, 1999).

Another issue in cognition is cognitive dissonance, accepting two things that ought to be contrary positions. People willingly believe things that contradict themselves, but manage to find ways to overcome this, and the study of this subject aims to understand how this happens, and why it happens (McLeod, 2014). The study of different subdisciplines can be interrelated. Often, the relationship between these subdisciplines is hard to understand, but ultimately they all relate to the processes of the brain, and how the brain works.

There are liklely to be unintended things learned -- you find out something while studying memory that teaches you something about cognitive dissonance, for example. Like why someone with vivid memories of a parent dying of lung cancer can be a smoker -- or how a doctor can be a smoker. That blends memories with cognitive dissonance. All of these subdisciplines are relevant to contemporary society, because our society still has people in it.

Psychology may be concerned with individual issues, but society is comprised of individuals, and each individual has interactions with society. As such, better understanding these individual traits and behaivors can shed light on socoilogial issues, but can also help people who are having trouble with their interactions with society.