Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review, where I answer common questions and explain the key concepts in psychology
This is the first video, so I'll start with a basic question, that is, what is psychology? Now if
you've ever told someone that you're taking psychology class
you probably already know that there's a lot of misconceptions about what psychology is. And despite what people think
it's not about analyzing someone's every move or trying to read people's minds or anything like that.
So we can say psychology is the scientific study
of thought
and behavior
This means that psychologists want to know why people think the things that they think and why they do the things that they do
and answering these questions can help us to better understand the world. We can understand the causes of events and behaviors
and we can understand how and why people differ from one another.
Now this is a pretty broad field saying that we're going to study thought and behavior
and this means that psychology is really connected to everything that people do.
Anything that you're interested in, psychology can help you to understand it.
But because it's so broad, we have to break psychology up into a number of subfields. So let's see a few examples of these.
We have cognitive psychology
and cognitive psychology focuses on cognition, or thought. So how do our thoughts influence us? How do they influence our emotional state
or our decision-making or our behavior?
We also have evolutionary psychology
And evolutionary psychologists want to know how our thinking and our behavior has been shaped
over millions of years of evolution. So how certain patterns been
selected for over time?
We also have developmental psychology
and developmental psychologists also want to know how we change over time, but they look at a much shorter time period
the course of a lifespan. So how do people change from infancy to adolescence or from adolescence to adulthood
Then we have neuroscience
and neuroscience is focused on studying the brain and brain activity. Now this might be connected to our thinking
we might look for patterns of brain activity and how they connect to thought, and that would fall under cognitive neuroscience
or we might focus on the relationship between
brain activity and behavior, and that would be considered behavioral neuroscience
Now, many of these approaches focus on an individual
But we can also think about how being in a group influences thought and behavior. So how do you change when you're around other people
and that would fall under social psychology.
And lastly, we have abnormal psychology
and this is the area that most people think of when they think of psychology
and this is studying thoughts and behaviors that are deemed to be
abnormal
and included within this would be clinical psychology and that is examining the diagnosis and also the treatment of psychological disorders
Now these are just a few of the subfields of psychology, there are others
but it's important to remember that each of these approaches uses slightly different methods and has different ways of studying
thought and behavior. But none of these represents the best
There's not one right way to study thought and behavior. Instead we should think of all these different approaches
as each being a piece of the puzzle that we're trying to solve.
That's a general overview of the field of psychology and if you found this helpful
please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more.
Thanks for watching!