General Psychology Learning about behaviors, mood and emotions of people.
What is psychology? Psychology is the study of the mind, occurring partly via the study of behavior. Psychology has the immediate goal of understanding individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases, and for many it ultimately aims to benefit society. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist, and can be classified as a social scientist, behavioral scientist, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie certain cognitive functions and behaviors. It evolved out of both philosophy and biology. Discussions of these two subjects date as far back as the early Greek thinkers including Aristotle and Socrates. The word psychology is derived from the Greek word psyche, meaning 'soul' or 'mind. Psychologists explore such concepts as perception, cognition, attention, emotion, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Psychologists of diverse stripes also consider the unconscious mind. Psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. In addition, or in opposition, to employingempirical and deductive methods, some especially clinical and counseling psychologists—at times rely upon symbolic interpretation and other inductive techniques. Psychology incorporates research from thesocial and natural sciences, and from the humanities, such as philosophy.
What are the schools of thought of psychology?
Structuralism Functionalism Behaviorism Humanistic Psychology Gestalt Psychology Cognitive Psychology
Structuralism was the first school of psychology and focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components. Researchers tried to understand the basic elements of consciousness using a method known as introspection. Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the first psychology lab, was an advocate of this position and is often considered the founder of structuralism, despite the fact that it was his student, Edward B. Titchener who first coined the term to describe this school of thought. While Wundt's work helped to establish psychology as a separate science and contributed methods to experimental psychology and Titchener development of structuralism helped establish the very first "school" of psychology, the structuralism did not last long beyond Titchener's death.
Functionalism formed as a reaction to the theories of the structuralist school of thought and was heavily influenced by the work of William James. Major functionalist thinkers included John Dewey and Harvey Carr. Instead of focusing on the mental processes themselves, functionalist thinkers were instead interested in the role that these processes play. Other 19th-century contributors to the field include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in the experimental study of memory, who developed quantitative models of learning and forgetting at the University of Berlin, and the RussianSoviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered in dogs a learning process that was later termed "classical conditioning" and applied to human beings. Starting in the 1950s, the experimental techniques set forth by Wundt, James, Ebbinghaus, and others would be reiterated as experimental psychology became increasingly cognitive— concerned with information and its processing—and, eventually, constituted a part of the wider cognitive science. In its early years, this development was seen as a "revolution", as it both responded to and reacted against strains of thought— including psychodynamics and behaviorism—that had developed in the meantime.
Behaviorism became a dominant school of thought during the 1950s. It was based upon the work of thinkers such as, John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner. Behaviorism suggests that all behavior can be explained by environmental causes rather than by internal forces. Behaviorism is focused on observable behavior. Theories of learning including classical conditioning and operant conditioning were the focus of a great deal of research.
Psychoanalysis is a school of psychology founded by Sigmund Freud. This school of thought emphasizes the influence of the unconscious mind on behavior. Freud believed that the human mind was composed of three elements: the id, the ego and the superego. The id is composed of primal urges, while the ego is the component of personality charged with dealing with reality. The superego is the part of personality that holds all of the ideals and values we internalize from our parents and culture. Freud believed that the interaction of these three elements was what led to all of the complex human behaviors. Freud's school of thought was enormously influential, but also generated a great deal of controversy. This controversy existed not only in his time, but also in modern discussions of Freud's theories. Other major psychoanalytic thinkers include: Anna Freud, Carl Jung and Erik Erikson.
Humanistic psychology developed as a response to psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Humanistic psychology instead focused on individual free will, personal growth and the concept of self-actualization. While early schools of thought were largely centered on abnormal human behavior, humanistic psychology differed considerably in its emphasis on helping people achieve and fulfill their potential.
Major humanist thinkers include:  Abraham Maslow  Carl Rogers. Humanistic psychology remains quite popular today and has had a major influence on other areas of psychology including positive psychology. This particular branch of psychology is centered on helping people living happier, more fulfilling lives.
Gestalt psychology is a school of psychology based upon the idea that we experience things as unified wholes. This approach to psychology began in Germany and Austria during the late 19th century in response to the molecular approach of structuralism. Instead of breaking down thoughts and behavior to their smallest elements, the gestalt psychologists believed that you must look at the whole of experience. According to the gestalt thinkers, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Cognitive psychology is the school of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy and linguistics. Cognitive psychology began to emerge during the 1950s, partly as a response to behaviorism. Critics of behaviorism noted that it failed to account for how internal processes impacted behavior. This period of time is sometimes referred to as the "cognitive revolution" as a wealth of research on topics such as information processing, language, memory and perception began to emerge. One of the most influential theories from this school of thought was the stages of cognitive development theory proposed by Jean Piaget.
What is the importance of psychology? Psychology is important because it gives us the idea or understanding of behavior of a certain person. It also makes us why people change mood and emotions about certain thing or situation. Psychology is important as it helps in understanding myself better, it helps me to perceive things positively and it assists me in determining the things that I enjoy doing the most and the kind of stuff I like to write about. It also contribute a lot of great help in the way I handle things in life, the way I face challenges and problems that occurs at an unexpected time and of course the way I make decisions in my everyday living. Psychology is important as it is concerned with the study of behavior and mental processes and at the same time, it is also applied to many different things in human life. Everything we perform is very much related to or with psychology. Psychology, primarily studies who and what we are, why we are like that, why we act and think like that and what we could be as a person.