What Is Psychology

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WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY

How does the word psychology sound to you when you first heard the word?

Well to me it sounded like something that’s related to world of the MAD,  that is living in a whole new world. By now, you now have a glimpse of what it feel like on my first experience of the word psychology.

Like me, many of you guys out there also would have had a time ruminating on the word psychology when you first encounter it or probably you were feed with some misconception of what the word psychology actually means.

In the view of this i will take the time to enlighten you guys on what psychology is, and how it manifest in our day to day activities clearing you of your doubt.

This article is also of benefit to the fresh man in the universities and to the general public in enlightening the world especially the part of the world yet to have the knowledge of psychology.

Psychology, a discipline defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, it is an interesting field that commits itself to finding answer to questions that has been lingering in the humane domain for ages.  Such questions curtail what differentiate human from every other species found on planet earth? What is common to every human being? And how each human differs from another?.

Psychology is a field that submerges itself in the investigation of philosophical issues such as the nature of consciousness, the nature of our attribution etc. Also it deals with practical issues such as those in the core of development- how to nurture of our young ones. Likewise in the social core– how to make people happy.

In general psychology is discipline that concerns itself with understanding the WHY of behavior; why we do what we do, why we say what we say, why we feel the way we feel, why we react in a particular way to a particular event the same way if the event is presented over and over again.

Psychology seeks to acquire the knowledge of who each and every one of us is and how we came to be who we are. In concise psychology seek to have in-depth understanding of me and you as an individual and how being individual affect our action in a group including how we treat each other and feel about each other.

In understanding the human domain, psychology engage an approach that I call binocular approach  but my great ground father in the field called holistic approach. This approach tends to study human behavior and mental processes from a wide range of perspective. This perspectives include:

Learning perspective

Social perspective

Biological perspective

Physiological perspective

Cognitive perspective

Humanistic perspective

Psychodynamic perspective

Developmental perspective

Psychopathological perspective.

Let’s take a look at the way all this perspective are being integrated in the investigation of a phenomenon as adapted from Gleitman Psychology eigth edition by Henry Gleitman, James Gross and Daniel Reisberg.

Across much of the 20th century, psychology was dominated by a small number of well-defined theoretical perspectives; we will look more closely at these perspectives in later chapters, defining each approach and exploring its strengths and limitations. For now, though, we simply note that no single approach dominates modern psychology. Instead, a defining element of this field is its diverse perspectives. In other words, there is not only variety in what psychologists study, there is also great diversity in how psychologists investigate the various phenomena of interest to them.

The need for a diverse set of perspectives makes sense when we consider that psychology approaches topics as different from each other as the social influences on confession and the cognitive control of eating. But the need for diverse approaches is evident even when we consider how psychologists approach a single phenomenon. Even for a single topic, psychologists draw on a range of different methods and different types of analysis, and then seek some means of unifying what they have learned from all of their efforts. To illustrate this point, let’s look at some of the ways psychologists approach just one topic: how people remember the important, sometimes life-changing, emotional events they experience.

The Neural Basis of Emotional Memory

High-school graduation. The death of a beloved pet. A particularly romantic evening. For most people, events like these—events that were emotional when they occurred— can be recalled in vivid detail even years later. Why is this? Why are these emotional events so well remembered? The answer to these questions has several elements, one of them involving specific brain mechanisms (Figure P.7): One structure within the brain—the amygdala—seems to function more or less as an alarm system, evaluating the content of various inputs (or ideas or memories), and detecting whether that content is emotionally significant. If emotional content is detected, then various processes inside the amygdala activate other brain sites, including sites within the hippocampus that are crucial for establishing long-term memories. Thus, emotional arousal leads—via the amygdala, modulating the activity of the hippocampus—to more complete and longer-lasting memories (McGaugh, 2003; Reisberg & Hertel, 2004).

Evidence for these claims comes from several types of research. In some cases, we can use brain scans to assess the moment-by-moment activity levels in the amygdala while someone is witnessing an emotional event. These scans show that the more activated the amygdala is during the event, the more likely the person is to have strong memories of the experience later on (Cahill, Babinsky, Markowitsch, & McGaugh, 1996).

Conversely, we can study the memories of people who have suffered damage to the amygdala—damage that causes a disorder known as Klüver-Bucy syndrome. These individuals seem overall to be less emotional—less likely to show fear, less likely to be aggressive, and so on—thus confirming the role of the amygdala in shaping our emotional lives. But, in addition, these individuals do not show the enhancement of memory for emotional events that we can so easily observe in most other people.

Without the amygdala, the processes that produce this enhancement cannot function; individuals with Klüver-Bucy syndrome thus show little difference between how they remember significant emotional episodes and how they remember much more mundane events (Buchanan & Adolphs, 2004).

The Evolutionary Basis for Emotional Remembering

It seems, then, that the structure of the brain provides one reason that people remember emotional events so well—our memory for these events is directly shaped by a specific interaction among the brain’s parts. This aspect of the brain’s “wiring” is part of our biological heritage and is well established at birth—and so, apparently, it’s specified largely by the blueprint laid out in our genes. But where does this blueprint come from? The answer, in brief, is evolution: Our ancient ancestors varied Somewhat in their biological traits; and, thanks to this variation, some of our ancestors were better suited to their environment than others. These better-suited ancestors were therefore more likely to survive than their less well-adapted neighbors, and so they were more likely to reproduce and so more likely to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. As this process then repeated itself, generation after generation, the genetic pattern passed onward by these better-adapted ancestors became more and more common in our species. Consequently, modern humans are likely to have inherited this genetic pattern as well as the traits that it produces.

Why might evolution have shaped our memory for emotional events? One answer to this question starts with the sorts of emotional events our ancient ancestors were likely to experience. Encounters with dangerous predators would probably have filled our ancestors with fear, and they would surely have considered these encounters worth remembering so they could avoid facing the predator again. Likewise, the discovery of asite with especially plentiful berries might have been exciting—and this discovery, too,  would be worth remembering, so that these ancient humans would be able to find the

berries again. Examples like these remind us that it’s often useful to remember emotional events, because they typically involve experiences and information that truly matter for us. It seems plausible, therefore, that those of our ancestors who were especially able to remember emotional events might have gained a survival advantage—a key element in evolution by natural selection.

In fact, evolution might have tuned our capacity to remember in fairly specific ways. To understand this point, consider a procedure known as fear conditioning: An organism is given a warning stimulus (a bright light, perhaps, or a tone) and then, a few seconds later, is presented with some noxious stimulus (e.g., the sight of a predator, or a painfully loud noise). With this setup, the organism quickly learns the significance of the warning stimulus, and becomes fearful the moment it begins. This is a good thing, because the signal—and the organism’s understanding of the signal—gives the animal time to prepare (or to flee) before the noxious stimulus arrives.

Not surprisingly, fear conditioning is slower if the organism has suffered damage to the amygdala—confirming the importance of this brain structure in supporting emotional memory. For present purposes, though, the crucial thing is that the speed of fear conditioning depends on the nature of the warning stimulus. A range of organisms, including humans, show faster learning if the warning stimulus is a picture of a snake than if it’s a picture of, say, a mushroom (Figure P.8). In other words, the pairing of “see picture of snake, then receive electric shock” produces more rapid learning than a pairing

of “see a picture of a mushroom, then receive shock.” This pattern holds even if theindividual organism has never in its life seen a snake. It seems, then, that some organisms are prepared, in advance of any learning, to associate bad consequences with the sight of a snake. This response is almost surely a result of our evolutionary past, in which rapid learning about snakes mattered for survival.

Amazingly, this pattern of faster learning in response to snake pictures remains in place even if the snake picture, as the warning stimulus, is flashed so quickly on a computer screen that it’s virtually unrecognizable. This finding suggests that it’s not just learning that prepares us for these stimuli, but perception—which allows us to detect these (apparently threatening) creatures even from a split-second view.

Cognitive Influences on Emotional Memory

It is clear, then, that our understanding of emotional memory must include its biological basis—the neural mechanisms that promote emotional memory, and the evolutionary heritage that makes it easier for us to form some memories than others. But our theorizing also needs to include the ways that people think about the emotional events they experience: What do they pay attention to during the experience? How do they make sense of the emotional event, and how does this interpretation shape their memory? The role of attention is evident, for example, in the fact that emotional memory tends to be uneven—some aspects of the event are well remembered, other aspects are neglected. Thus, during a robbery, witnesses might focus on the robbers themselves— what they did, what they said (Figure P.9). As a result, the witnesses might remember these “central” aspects of the event later on but might have little memory for other aspects of the event—such as what the other witnesses were doing. In this regard, memory is very different from, say, the sort of record created by a videocamera. If the

camera is turned on and functioning properly, it records everything in front of the lens. Memory, in contrast, is selective; it records the bits that someone was paying attention to, but nothing more. As a result, memory—for emotional events and in general—is invariably incomplete. It can sometimes omit information that is crucial for some purposes (e.g., information the police might need when investigating the robbery).

Memory is also different from a videorecord in another way. A videocamera is a passive device, simply recording what is in front of the lens. In contrast, when you “record” information into memory, you actively interpret the event, integrating information gleaned from the event with other knowledge. Most of the time, this is a good thing because it creates a rich and sophisticated memory trace that preserves the event in combination with your impressions of the event as well as links to

other related episodes. However, this active interpretation of an event also has a downside: People often lose track of the source of particular bits of information in memory. Specifically, they lose track of which bits are drawn from the original episode they experienced and which bits they supplied through their understanding of the episode.

In one study, for example, people spent a few minutes in a professor’s office; then, immediately afterward, they were taken out of the office and asked to describe the room they had just been in. Roughly a third of these people clearly remembered seeing shelves full of books, even though no books were visible in the office (Brewer & Treyens, 1981). In this case, the participants had “supplemented” their memory of the office, relying on the common knowledge that professors’ offices usually do hold a lot of books. They then lost track of the source of this “supplement”— and so lost track of the fact that the books came from their own beliefs and not from this particular experience.

How does this pattern apply to emotional memories? We have already said that emotional events tend to be remembered vividly: Often, we feel like we can “relive” the distant event, claiming that we recall the event “as though it were yesterday.” But as compelling as they are, these memories—like any memories—are open to error. In one study, researchers surveyed college students a few days after the tragic explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Where were the students when they heard about the explosion? Who brought them the news? Three years later, the researchers questioned the same students again. The students confidently reported that, of course, they clearly remembered this horrible event. Many students reported that the memory was still painful, and they could recall their sense of shock and sadness upon hearing the news. Even so, their recollections of this event were, in many cases, mistaken.

One student was certain she was sitting in her dorm room watching TV when the news was announced; she recalled being deeply upset and telephoning her parents. It turns out, though, that she had heard the news in a religion class when some people walked into the classroom and started talking about the explosion (Neisser & Harsh, 1992).

Social Influences on Emotional Memory

Memories are also different from videorecords in another way: Once a videorecord is established (on tape, or on a DVD), it remains in storage, ready for playback. The videorecord may fade, or get erased, but it is unlikely to change in any way. Not so for memories. There are several reasons for this, including the ways that people share their memories with others—a sharing that happens particularly often with memories of emotional events.

Each person’s memory is, of course, their own, and they can keep their recollection private if they wish. But memory also has a social function:We exchange memories to instruct or amuse each other. We exchange memories as a means of creating a social bond—“That’s amazing, because the same thing happened to me!” We report on our past to help other people understand our actions, and perhaps to lead them to like us more, or to gain their trust or respect. It turns out, though, that this exchange of memories is not just a matter of reporting. Instead, we often reshape a memory so that it will better serve our social goals. The event as we’ve now described it then becomes woven into (or replaces) the memory we began with. In this way, sharing a memory with others can, in fact, change how we remember the past.

In one study, for example, people viewed a movie clip and then, two days later, were interviewed by the experimenter about the movie. During the interview, the experimenter led participants to describe entire episodes that hadn’t appeared inthe movie at all (e.g., a practical joke, played on one of the movie’s main characters).  The participants knew they were “describing” nonexistent episodes, reporting on things they hadn’t seen at all. Several weeks later, though, when participants were asked to recall what they had seen in the movie, almost half of them included in their recall the episodes that they had themselves fabricated (Chrobak & Zaragoza, 2008; also see Coman, Manier, & Hirst, 2009;Weldon, 2001). Apparently, the participants’ conversation with the experimenter about the movie changed how they remembered the film’s plot—to the point of adding entire fictitious events.

The Cultural Setting of Emotional Memory

Thus we’ve seen that emotional memories—like all memories—can be shaped by the process of telling and retelling, and this process depends in important ways on the social situation. We’re likely to recall a memory differently if talking with a friend as opposed to a police officer; we’re likely to recall a memory differently if talking with a child as opposed to an adult. And, in each situation, the style of telling we adopt is likely to influence how we remember the original event later on. Similarly, the way an emotional event is recalled, and the way the event is remembered, can be shaped by the culture a person lives in. For example, in some Asian cultures, it is considered inappropriate for people to display strong emotion in public (Figure P.11). This social convention shapes how people relate their emotional experiences to others, which in turn shapes the way they remember these experiences. In most Western cultures, on the other hand, displays of emotion are common; women in particular are often encouraged to “share their feelings.” This convention, too, shapes how events are described—and thus how they are remembered. These differences from one culture to the next can have a powerful effect on how people think about the past. For example, we’ve already mentioned the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the vivid memories that most Americans (and many outside of the United States) have of these events. As we discussed, some aspects of these memories may be mistaken—including the details that individuals recall about when and how they heard the news and how they reacted. Even so, these memories powerfully influence the way Americans think about the threat of terrorism and the politics of the Middle East. In these ways, the memories help shape the culture.

The reverse, however, is also true: Our shared culture shapes what we remember. In America, daily news reports often contain reminders of September 11—specific mentions of the attacks, comments about the threat of terrorism, and so on. Television shows and movies often contain references to the attacks. These (and other) reminders—all part of our cultural surrounding—virtually guarantee that the attacks will be frequent in people’s thoughts and remain prominent in their memories.

Other examples are easy to find, and shared memories of important episodes are transmitted from generation to generation in many countries. For example, the violence in the Balkans, the Middle East, or Somalia is fueled by deeply rooted hostility between different ethnic or religious groups. The hostilities in turn are often justified on the basis of long-past events that one side of the conflict perceives as horrific offenses or deep injustices and the other side views as benign or legitimate. In each case, the cultural surround contains frequent references to these events, guaranteeing that the events—no matter how long ago they occurred—remain fresh in each person’s memory and continue to guide their thinking about these horrible conflicts.

A Developmental Perspective on Emotional Memory

Clearly, then, if we are going to understand how people remember emotional events, we need to consider many factors and take several different perspectives.Some of these perspectives are biological, including a microscopic view of specific  changes taking place in the brain when memories are formed and a macroscopic view emphasizing the influence of evolution on brain function. A cognitive perspective focuses on which aspects of a situation people pay attention to and what kinds of knowledge they merge with their memories of an experience. A social perspective leads us to ask how and why people share their memories, and how such interactions affect what is remembered.We also need to think about the ways that the cultural context influences the sharing of memories and shapes how someone reacts to (and recalls) the target event. Yet another perspective is developmental: How do children learn to recall emotional events? How do they learn the appropriate way, in their culture, to report on events? How accurate or complete is their recollection? These questions have significant scientific interest as well as considerable practical importance. It’s increasingly common for children to provide evidence for legal disputes, including divorce proceedings or trials involving allegations of child abuse. In these settings, it is crucial to have some guidelines about how best to draw accurate information from children—and how to evaluate the information children provide.

Fortunately for the courts, children’s memories of events are often quite accurate and relatively complete. But children are also highly suggestible—so, when asking them about past events, it is crucial not to convey expectations that could influence their answers. In many cases, children also do not understand which aspects of an event are likely to be relevant to their audience, so they often need guidance in choosing what to report. One line of research, for example, has examined how children remember events that are not just emotional, but traumatic. Obviously, we cannot create these events in the laboratory—that would be ethically repugnant. But outside of the lab, children sometimes need medical procedures that can be deeply upsetting or uncomfortable—including procedures that involve medical professionals closely examining and manipulating the young child’s genitals. How will they remember these procedures later? Evidence suggests that children generally remember these medical procedures quite well. If questioned carefully and neutrally, they can report many aspects of the event.

The one group of children least likely to recall the event is, not surprisingly, those who are very young—for example, children under three years old. These children probably lack the intellectual and neural capacities to establish clear and explicit memories of any sort; and so, inevitably, they cannot recall medical trauma.

However, these painful memories are susceptible to the same influences as other memories. With time, even traumatic memories fade and, as a result, are more and more open to errors. The child may even recall elements of the event that never happened at all. Likewise, if a child is questioned in a suggestive manner, her recollection can be substantially altered—aspects of the event may change, or new (fictional) experiences might be introduced into the episode.

Disorders of Emotional Memory

Each perspective on emotional memory contributes to our overall understanding, and each approach can be informed by the others. But there is still one more perspective we need to consider: Throughout psychology, we must understand the ways that people are alike, and also the ways they differ. Some of the differences among people can be understood as variations within the range considered healthy or “normal”; these include differences in personality, aptitudes, beliefs, and more. But some differences among people—including their responses to emotional events—take us outside of the range that we can call “healthy.”

Consider, for example, people who have witnessed a violent car crash. As we have discussed, various mechanisms promote memory for this sort of emotional episode. But, for some people, these mechanisms seem too effective. They seem to end up with “too much memory” of the crash, and they cannot get the disturbing scene out of their heads. Similar descriptions apply to a soldier who has been through a horrible battle, or a woman who has been raped. In these cases, it is important that there be some memory. The soldier often needs to report to his officer what happened, so that the next step in the battle can be planned (Figure P.12). The woman needs to remember her ordeal so that she can give evidence to the police that will lead to the prosecution of the rapist. Even so, the soldier and the rape victim eventually need to move on with their lives, and put the horrors of their experiences behind them. But this may not be possible, because the painful memory may stay with them more than

they would wish.

In such cases, the neural and cognitive mechanisms that support emotional remembering seem to produce a cruel enhancement of memory. This horrific memory can, in turn, contribute to the condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Be aware, though, that not all soldiers, and not all rape victims, develop PTSD—and we need to ask why this is. Part of the explanation lies in biology: Some people seem genetically at greater risk for this disorder, plausibly because their nervous systems are especially reactive to whatever stressful events they encounter.

Cognitive mechanisms are also relevant, because the emergence of PTSD depends to some extent on a person’s beliefs and expectations—in particular, what the person feared would happen at a moment of crisis, rather than what actually happened.

Social mechanisms are also pertinent; studies indicate that telling others about the trauma, or even just writing about the trauma in a diary, can help defuse the emotional response to the trauma and thus make PTSD less likely (e.g., Pennebaker, 2004).

Author: Awujoola Olaoluwa

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