Psychology? The Term Psychology Comes From Two

¶ … Psychology?

The term psychology comes from two Greek words: psyche, which means "soul," and logos, "the study of." These root words were first combined in the 16th century, at a time when theorists were just beginning to see that there might be a connection between the mind and body, even though they were unable to actually understand and capture the essence of "thought." Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and the mind. The actual definition is comprised of three major elements:

Psychology is a scientific method. It obtains knowledge through the use of systematic and objective methods for empirical (observable) research and experimentation to validate ideas and hypothesis.

Psychology is concerned with behavior -- behavior is any action that can be observed and measured in some empirical manner.

Psychology is also concerned with the way the mind works, not necessarily focusing on the brain as a biological organism, but the conscious and unconscious mental states. These states of consciousness cannot actual be seen or quantified, but only inferred from observable behavior (Hothersall, 2004).

Psychology is quite broad, and investigates a large range of issues: animal behavior, learning and memory, perception and sensation, motivation, the range of emotions, language and meaning, social/cultural behavior, mental illness, human development, and a number of environmental and cultural factors that affect the way humans interact with one another (deviant behavior, for example). Some psychologists focus on evolutionary trends, others on cultural modifiers, still other on more quantitative and measurable outcomes between biology of the brain and actual cognition (Kohler, 1992).

Essentially, the study of psychology seeks to ask a number of important questions about human behavior, individual issues as well as group and cultural issues. For instance: are humans more genetically programmed from birth to develop traits or personality abilities or is the environment a driving factor? How do people recognize and react to others -- faces, body language, remarks? How does memory work -- how accurate is it, what is the difference between short- and long-term, can this be improved? What is deviance and how does it relate to culture, society, or genetics? How do we learn? What are effective ways of learning? What kinds of motivations occur during friendship, love, sexual infatuation? Why are humans different in sexual preferences? How do humans express violence and why? Why do environmental factors influence violent or passive behavior? What causes prejudice and why? Are standardized test scores accurate predictors? Why is depression on the rise and what are the cultural causes? As we can see, all these questions, and more, help us understand the manner in which humans act and react towards each other and solve the problems that living in a social environment engender (Papini, 2008).

One of the major questions that philosophers and then psychologists attempt to understand is the process of thinking - or cognition. Cognition is the way that we apply knowledge and process information that can be natural, artificial, conscious or unconscious. The complexity of this one question has caused psychologists to try to analyze the problem from varying contexts: of linguistics, anesthesia, neurology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and even computer science. Within psychology or philosophy, the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind, reasoning, perception, intelligence, learning, and many others that describe capabilities of the mind and expected properties of an artificial or synthetic "mind." Cognition is considered an abstract property of advanced living organisms and is studied as a direct property of a brain (or of an abstract mind) on at the factual and symbolic levels (Lycan, 1999).