psychology

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For more information on psychology, visit Britannica.com.

The study of human behavior and mental processes. Psychology is sharply divided into applied and experimental areas. However, many fields are represented in both research and applied psychology.

Researchers in psychology study a wide range of areas. Cognitive research is often included as part of subdiscipline called cognitive science. This area examines central issues such as how mental process work, the relation between mind and brain, and the way in which biological transducing systems can convert physical regularities into perceptions of the world. Cognitive science is carved from the common ground shared by computer science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, linguistics, neuropsychology, and cognitive anthropology. The study of human attention is a cognitive area that is central in the field. See also Cognition.

The study of consciousness involves such basic questions as the physiological basis of mental activity, the freedom of will, and the conscious and unconscious uses of memory. The latter topic can be classified under the rubric of implicit memory. See also Instinctive behavior; Memory; Psycholinguistics; Sensation.

Social psychology includes the study of interactions between individuals and groups, as well as the effects of groups on the attitudes, opinions, and behavior of individuals. The field covers such topics as persuasion, conformity, obedience to authority, stereotyping, prejudice, and decision making in social contexts. See also Motivation; Personality theory.

Developmental psychology has three subfields: life-span development, child development, and aging. Most research in the area concentrates on child development, which examines the development of abilities, personality, social relations, and, essentially, every attribute and ability seen in adults. See also Aging; Intelligence.

A clinical psychologist is usually known by the term psychologist, which in some states is a term that can be used only by a registered practitioner. A psychiatrist is a physician with a specialty in psychiatric treatment and, in most states, with certification as a psychiatrist by a board of medical examiners. A psychoanalyst is typically trained by a psychoanalytic institute in a version of the Freudian method of psychoanalysis. A large number of practitioners qualify both as psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. See also Psychoanalysis.

Neuropsychologists are usually psychologists, who may come from an experimental or a clinical background but who must go through certification as psychologists. They treat individuals who have psychological disorders with a clear neurological etiology, such as stroke.

Clinical practice includes individual consultation with clients, group therapy, and work in clinics or with teams of health professionals. Psychological therapists work in many settings and on problems ranging from short-term crises and substance abuse, to psychosis and major disorders. While there are definite biases within each field, it is possible for a practitioner with any background to prefer behavior therapy, a humanistic approach, a Freudian (dynamic) approach, or an eclectic approach derived from these and other areas.

Nonclinical professional work in psychology includes the human-factors element, which traditionally is applied to the design of the interface between a machine and its human operator. Cognitive engineering is a branch of applied psychology that deals mainly with software and hardware computer design. Industrial psychology also includes personnel selection and management and organizational planning and consulting.

The use of psychology in forensic matters is a natural result of the fact that much of law is based on psychology. Psychologists have been involved in jury selection, organization of evidence, evaluation of eyewitness testimony, and presentation of material in court cases. Psychiatrists and psychologists are also called on to diagnose potential defendants for mental disorders and the ability to stand trial.

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The word ‘psychology’, from the Greek psyche, meaning mind or soul, describes an academic and clinical subject concerned with reason and emotion, conscious and unconscious mental processes. It has become an umbrella term for such a wide variety of ‘disciplines’, paradigms, and cults that it is not clearly definable. The caring professions, especially for mental problems, are important activities under this rubric. Perhaps most intellectually respectable is experimental psychology, concerned especially with learning, memory, perception, attention, and emotions — with explicit links to physiological processes of the brain and body. These are of practical importance for understanding the consequences of brain damage and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Although the scientific aspects of psychology are increasingly seen as falling within the broad remit of neuroscience, the conceptual association of physical brain to mental mind raises philosophical questions which remain controversial after thousands of years of debate. Current accounts of the mind, created by brain processes, generally refer to an analogy to the hardware-software distinction for computers. Computers, though physical, are ‘cognitive’ in that they carry symbols and meaning. But, so far as we know, computers are not conscious: the explanation of consciousness remains a great challenge for both psychology and brain sciene.

— Richard L. Gregory

noun

The thought processes characteristic of an individual or group: ethos, mentality, mind, mindset, psyche. Idioms: what makes someone tick. See thoughts.

The field of psychology plays an integral role in public health, providing treatment and education in the areas of substance abuse, addiction, and other health-related behaviors. Individuals suffering from addiction and other psychological disorders have a major impact on a community, and on the nation, causing financial loss, accidents, decreased business productivity, and numerous social and psychological effects. Therapeutic techniques for these individuals focus on development of coping skills, ego strength, improved self-esteem, and other traits needed to lead a healthy life. Assessment, community profiling, and creating and conducting prevention and treatment programs for the public also fall within the realm of psychology. In addition, psychologists conduct research in public health problems and serve as consultants in the development of solutions to these problems.

(SEE ALSO: Behavior, Health-Related; Behavioral Change; Community Psychology; Psychology, Health; Substance Abuse, Definition of)

— SANDRA K. CLARKE

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A branch of science that studies the mind, mental activities, and behaviour.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus remarked that "psychology has a long past, but only a short history." He was referring to recent scientific interest in the experimental study of the mind and behavior that was characteristic of the "new" psychology. Beginning with a few laboratories in Germany and the America in the late nineteenth century, the field of psychology grew significantly throughout the twentieth century, especially in the United States. Psychological terms have infiltrated everyday language, a huge mental health industry has arisen, and psychological tests have become ubiquitous. Psychology is embedded in modern life. How are we to define this protean field and to explain its rise?

Interest in understanding and explaining human nature and actions is as old as the first stirrings of self-consciousness among humans. Western philosophy has a long tradition of thinking about causes and consequences of human action, both individual and social. Within that general field, psychology has drawn particularly from scholarship on ethics (i.e., moral rules of conduct) and epistemology (theory of the method or grounds of knowledge).

The advent of modern scientific inquiry and methodology in the seventeenth century transformed European culture as it spread to philosophical comprehension and technological practice during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, science had become a legitimate and growing profession; the physical world, biology, and society became subject to scientific scrutiny.

Modern psychology as a discipline formed during this period. Psychology's conceptual roots can be found in the experimental laboratories of physiologists, in the medical practices of asylums and clinics, and in the statistical manipulations of mathematicians.

After 1870, college students in the United States gradually became aware of the "new" psychology: William James, a professor at Harvard University, introduced theories of mind and demonstrated empirical findings with a collection of so-called "brass instruments," borrowed from laboratories of physics and physiology. James wrote the classic Principles of Psychology in 1890.

James was associated with the functionalist school, which studied the mind's adaptation to its environment. Habits, consciousness, and the self were understood as adaptive functions, not as structural elements of the mind. The influence of Charles Darwin was evident in the functionalists' interest in evolutionary processes; they investigated the development of mind and behavior in other species as well as humans. Between 1870 and 1910, many students from the United States traveled to Germany to study. Attracted by low travel costs and inexpensive accommodations as well as the reputation of German universities, students were exposed to the ideas and practices of scholars such as Wilhelm Wundt, professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. A founder of modern psychology, Wundt wrote voluminously on psychology as an independent academic discipline and, in 1879, established the first psychological laboratory.

Conceptually, Wundt espoused a broad view of scientific psychology, ranging from individual psychophysiology and mental chronometry to human language and culture. Different topics needed different research methods. For instance, when measuring the speed of the nervous impulse, accurate mechanical timers gave readings of 1/1,000 of a second; when a colored light was used as a stimulus for a psychophysics experiment, precise introspection provided qualitative judgments about the light's color, intensity, and other characteristics; when religious practices were being investigated, historical and comparative methods of textual analysis were employed.

Wundt and James, both nonpracticing medical doctors, were recognized leaders of the new psychology; in Vienna, another physician, Sigmund Freud, was developing his own system of psychology and psychotherapy, which he called psychoanalysis. His system was spread through an apprentice method of "training analysis" before the psychotherapist began a private practice. Psychoanalysis in America became associated with the medical profession, developing separately from academic psychology.

An American Science

Fresh from their exposure to the new psychology, graduates adapted laboratory techniques and intellectual agendas to the rapidly changing landscape of higher education in the United States. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the research ideal was fused with values of social utility and liberal culture to give rise to the modern university. In 1876, only one university, Johns Hopkins, offered graduate instruction leading to the Ph.D.; by 1900, scores of institutions offered doctoral level studies and degrees.

More than forty psychological laboratories had been established in U.S. colleges and universities by 1900. Experimental work concentrated on sensation and perception, using the reaction-time method where a stimulus was presented to a subject and the speed of response was accurately measured. Professors published their research findings in the American Journal of Psychology beginning in 1887, the Psychological Review beginning in 1894, or other scientific periodicals. The field grew rapidly in American universities and colleges. The American Psychological Association (APA), a professional body dedicated to the advancement of psychology as a science, was formed in 1892, with 26 charter members. Psychologists were also active in the child-study movement and in trying to advance the art and science of pedagogy, newly significant with the rise of universal education. Differences in theory and methods gave rise to schools of thought (structuralism, functionalism, Behaviorism, Gestalt, etc.) that were more apparent to insiders than to the public.

Applications of psychology and psychological theory to education expanded significantly with the spread of mental tests. Starting in 1905, French psychologist Alfred Binet published scales on testing for intelligence in children. Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman subsequently revised the tests and included the ratio of mental and chronological ages, resulting in the "Intelligence Quotient" (IQ). In 1916 the "Stanford-Binet" debuted. Mental tests were widely used in World War I to classify soldiers for general intelligence and occupational specialties. After the war, personnel psychology, particularly in business and industry, became a recognized specialty.

By 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, psychology was firmly institutionalized in higher education. Although the APA reached 1,000 members that year, during the 1930s its dominance diminished as psychologists founded new organizations to pursue their scientific and professional interests. Occupational trends led to a split between academic and applied psychologists, and to marked gender differences, with the majority of females confined to low-status jobs in nonacademic settings.

The "age of Learning"

By the start of the 1930s, psychology had matured to the point that the discipline generated internally a system of scientific priorities, preferred methods of investigation, and complex reward arrangements. Experimental research was dominated by the use of behavioristic methods in the service of a general theory of learning. In a seminal article in 1913 published in the Psychological Review, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," John B. Watson strongly urged psychologists not to look within at unseen mental processes, but to concentrate on observable behavior. Watson had earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1903 with a thesis on rat psychology. Later investigators made the white rat a standard laboratory subject, and Watson's ideas were reformulated into a variety of neo-behavioristic perspectives.

Among the prominent neo-behaviorists was B. F. Skinner (who earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1931), who developed a theory of behavior known as "operant conditioning." In contrast to the "classical conditioning" associated with the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in which a stimulus is substituted for an already existing response, operant conditioning focuses on a class of emitted responses that are followed by reinforcement. For example, a rat in a "Skinner box" (an apparatus with a lever to obtain food and/or water) presses the lever (the operant) and eats (reinforcement). With each trial, the rat is more likely to repeat the action (response strength). Through a series of ingenious experiments, Skinner demonstrated the scientific utility of his approach in the laboratory before later extending it to the realm of teaching machines, social engineering (with the 1948 utopian novel Walden Two), and an air-conditioned baby crib, all of which engendered controversy.

The Aftermath of World War II

World War II was a watershed for psychology in many ways. The war gave rise to the practice of clinical psychology that was strongly supported by the federal government. New techniques and tools borrowed from other disciplines transformed the intellectual life of psychology. Increased funds were available for scientific research; the number of psychologists grew dramatically; and the APA reorganized to include all areas of psychological activity under a federated governing system.

The academic psychology department remained the basic unit for research, education, and training. The G.I. Bill, a robust economy, and a widespread consensus on the positive value of a college degree helped usher in a "golden age." Psychology grew on the broadening foundation of undergraduate education.

The introductory course exhibited the diversity of psychology while presenting the prevailing orthodoxy of scientific professionalism. A new wave of undergraduate textbooks was written. For instance, Ernest R. Hilgard published Introduction to Psychology in 1953. Firmly based in the research literature, the book attempted comprehensive coverage of topics ranging from the nervous system to personal adjustment. One innovation in format was the use of sidebars to break up the main mass of text and provide additional details on selected topics. Successful textbooks often went through multiple revisions over the course of 30 or more years.

By the early 1960s, employment trends had shifted decisively to nonacademic settings, thus the majority of psychologists found work in hospitals, schools, clinics, corporations, and private practice. That led to increased concern over the professional aspects of psychology, including interprofessional relations with psychiatrists and social workers who were a part of the expanding mental health industry. Some psychologists took their message directly to the general public, contributing to the literature of lay psychology or to the robust market in self-help books. For instance, B. F. Skinner explained his system of operant conditioning to the general public, beginning in 1953 with Science and Human Behavior, and Carl R. Rogers introduced his approach to psychotherapy with the mass-market textbook On Becoming a Person in 1961.

The Rise of Cognitive Psychology

Perhaps the most striking intellectual development of the post–World War II period was the rise of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology covers the whole range of human mental activity, from sense perception to memory and thought. With deep roots in nineteenth-century research on attention, memory, and language, cognitive psychology developed an institutional focus at Harvard University's Center for Cognitive Studies starting in 1962. In an influential survey of the field, psychologist Ulric Neisser explained in Cognitive Psychology (1967) that the physical stimuli that an object produces "bear little resemblance to either the real object that gave rise to them or to the object of experience that the perceiver will construct as a result." It is this constructive activity that provided the foundation for cognitive psychology.

Closely allied with the study of cognition is mathematical psychology. Curve-fitting, mathematical modeling, and inferential statistics are used to explain experimental results as well as a source for theory construction. By the early 1950s coursework in the analysis of variance became a common feature of graduate training in the United States. Its routine use, standardized and codified in textbooks, meant that psychologists did not have to understand the complexities of statistics to apply them to their work.

Statistics were useful in addressing quantitatively the inconsistencies of individual human behavior. People behaved differently at different times, and what they did in one experimental setting might have little relation to what they did in another. Statistical treatment of group data combined data from many individuals, enabling certain patterns to emerge that were characteristic of the statistical group, even though the actual behavior of any particular member of the group might not conform to the statistical "average."

Mainstream psychology was not without its critics. Some urged turning away from apparent "methodolatry," while others descried the "physics envy" that grew out of attempts to emulate the physical (and precisely measurable) sciences. A movement toward humanistic psychology was prompted by dissatisfaction with behaviorism's narrow methods and the psychoanalytic focus on childhood pathology. This so-called "third force" represented an attempt to place human values at the core of psychological theory and practice rather than mechanical virtues or developmental doctrine.

At the close of the twentieth century, psychology remains a protean discipline dedicated to the pursuit of scientific knowledge as well as a potent profession serving the mental health needs of Americans. Neither a single set of assumptions nor a common methodology unites the work of psychologists. How psychologists prospered by exploiting this diversity is an intriguing area for historical investigation.

History of Psychology

Psychologists and others have exhibited a sustained interest in the history of the field since the rise of the "new" psychology. In his three-volume A History of Psychology (1912–1921), George Sidney Brett traced the philosophical background of modern psychological thought, from the ancient Greeks to his day. Edwin G. Boring, considering Brett's work too philosophical, was motivated to write A History of Experimental Psychology in 1929; Boring argued for the primacy of scientific research, saying "The application of the experimental method to the problem of mind is the great outstanding event in the history of the study of mind" (p. 659). Boring's book became the veritable Bible for courses in the history and systems of psychology. History was also used as a resource for asserting the unity of psychology despite the proliferation of diverse viewpoints.

After World War II, the history of psychology was pursued for two decades mostly as a teaching subject within psychology departments. In the mid-1960s the field became increasingly professionalized with new university programs starting and the APA founding a history division. A specialized journal, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Science (1965), and a society, Chiron: The International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences (1969), provided support for scholars. In addition, professional historians, notably historians of science and medicine, grew more interested in and paid more attention to the history of psychology.

In 1966, Robert M. Young published a scathing review of the literature in the history of psychology and related fields in the journal History of Science. Since that time, scholarship in the history of psychology has steadily deepened. Developments in the late twentieth century included the establishment of the Forum for History of Human Science, a special-interest group of the History of Science Society formed in 1988, and an APA-sponsored journal, History of Psychology established in 1998.

In the pages of an 1893 McClure's magazine, Herbert Nichols, one of the first students awarded a doctorate in psychology from an American university, boldly predicted that "the twentieth century will be to mental science what the sixteenth century was to physical science, and the central field of its development is likely to be America." In broad outline, Nichols's prediction came true. But the road leading from the era of brass instruments and introspection to the age of computers and cognitive science proved to be both long and with many byways. World wars, economic depression as well as prosperity, and the rise of American higher education provided the setting and context for the growth of psychological thought and practice. Psychology today is intellectually multiparadigmatic, professionally pluralistic, and ideologically diverse. Psychologists, more than a quarter million strong in the United States, have had and continue to have a tremendous impact on the culture of modern science.

Bibliography

Boring, Edwin G. A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950. An influential account by a prominent psychologist-historian.

Burnham, John C. "On the Origins of Behaviorism." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 4 (1968): 143–151. The classic statement of the historical problem of behaviorism.

Capshew, James H. Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in American Psychology, 1929–1969. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. A study of the impact of World War II on the profession of psychology.

Danziger, Kurt. Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. A penetrating account of the standardization of methodology and the resultant conceptual and professional power it generated.

Hale, Nathan G., Jr. Freud in America. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971–1995. A judicious and balanced historical narrative.

Heidbreder, Edna. Seven Psychologies. New York: Century, 1933. A sensitive contemporary account of the major schools of psychology.

Herman, Ellen. The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. A nuanced examination of the role of psychology in public affairs and policy from 1940 to 1975.

Hilgard, Ernest H. Psychology in America: A Historical Survey. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. An authoritative encyclopedic survey.

O'Donnell, John M. The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870–1920. New York: New York University Press, 1985. An analytic narrative focused on the transition from philosophy to psychology.

Smith, Roger. The Norton History of the Human Sciences. New York: Norton, 1997. Psychology is the backbone of this massive and informative synthesis that ranges from sixteenth-century thought to twentieth-century American institutions.

Sokal, Michael M., ed. Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890–1930. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Essays that explore the construction, use, and impact of mental testing.

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The term psychology first appears in the sixteenth century, denoting the study of the human soul (Greek psyche, 'soul'), a part of what was then called anthropology: the term is used thus in the first work to use it as a title, Rudolf Goclenius's Psychologia of 1594 (the title uses the Greek word). The term continued to be used in this way through the seventeenth century. Only in the early eighteenth century, with the publication of Christian Wolff's Psychologia Empirica (1732) and Psychologia Rationalis (1734), does it take on its modern sense, supplanting earlier terms like scientia de anima ('science of the soul'). The study of the soul, or the mind, did not, of course, begin in the eighteenth century. But it may, with some reason, be said to have begun again in the seventeenth.

Aristotelianism

From the mid-thirteenth century, when Aristotle's works became the basis of the baccalaureate curriculum in European universities, until the middle of the sixteenth, the starting point for the study of the soul was Aristotle's De anima. Hundreds of commentaries on it were published in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Often they included lengthy disputations on controversial topics, like the immortality of the soul and the nature of the rational soul. In the latter part of the sixteenth century the commentary form began to be abandoned in favor of the systematic textbook, of which Francisco Suárez's De Anima (1621; On the soul) is a noteworthy example. A reader of these works would have encountered the major ancient, Arab, and medieval interpretations of Aristotle and a fair helping of empirical observations, mostly from ancient authorities like Pliny and Galen, but also occasionally from such recent authors as Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), whose De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) superseded the ancients on anatomical questions.

The subject matter of De Anima is life and the functions of life. Aristotle treats not only sensation, memory, imagination, and the intellect, but also what would now be thought of as purely physiological functions like digestion and reproduction. The task of the science of the soul is to define the soul itself and the functions proper to living things, to describe the organs and mixtures of elements that subserve them, and finally to establish the principles on which a classification of plants and animals is to be based.

The soul is what Aristotle calls a "form": it confers on matter the characteristics proper to a certain species of thing—the human, say. Medieval authors called the soul a "substantial form," substantial because like the body it is the bearer of properties. It is not the eye, Aristotle says, but the soul that sees. Every material substance, living or not, has a form; the soul is defined among material forms as that of "an organic body potentially having life." Certain functions are found only in the things we call living; the soul is the form proper to them. Although the soul requires a particular composition and configuration of matter to perform its functions, and some materials like blood and bile are found only in living things, neither the soul nor its functions can be reduced to mere mixtures or concatenations of nonliving stuffs.

The functions of living things were divided into three groups: vegetative, sensitive, and rational. All living things nourish themselves, grow, and reproduce. Animals, but not plants, have senses and can move about. Humans can do all that animals do; moreover, they can reason and exercise free will. The soul is accordingly divided into three parts. Only for the rational part, peculiar to humans, can it be argued that its operations do not require a material organ, and that therefore it can survive the dissolution of the body.

The predominant theory of sensation among Aristotelians was "species theory." Sensing consists in the reception of species (Latin species, 'aspect' or 'appearance') in the sense organ. Each sense has its own "proper sensibles"—there are species of color, sound, odor, and so forth. Species from the various senses are combined in the "common sense" (sensus communis) and then stored in memory (located in the ventricles of the brain), to be reactivated by recollection, imagination, or the "estimative power" (vis æstimativa), which performs such tasks as recognizing that a predator is dangerous, or that grass is food. In humans, sensible species undergo further refinement (the "abstraction from matter," for example, that Aristotle regards as characteristic of mathematics) and become "intelligible species," the raw materials used by reason.

Cartesianism

The consensus, never total, established around Aristotle broke down in the early seventeenth century. The stoutest blow was dealt to it by René Descartes (1596–1650). With his work the science of the soul begins to divide into two disciplines: a psychology of ideas and a physiology of the nervous system.

The notion of "idea" and the beginnings of an analysis of ideas are put forward in the Meditations (1640). In the Treatise of Man (written 1631–1633, published in Latin translation 1662), on the other hand, Descartes, following closely the plan of the relevant parts of De Anima, attempts to demonstrate that all the functions hitherto attributed to the souls of animals and plants could be exhaustively accounted for in purely mechanistic terms. The Description of the Human Body (1640s, first published in Latin translation 1662) extends that account to reproduction.

The body is for Descartes a hydraulic machine—a connected assemblage of organs whose actions are coordinated by the "animal spirits" (a fluid composed of subtle, fast-moving particles or "corpuscles") that course through the nerves and muscles. Seeing, for a cat, is a sequence of collisions of corpuscles, first of light particles on the nerve-endings in the retina and eventually of the animal spirits with the pineal gland, where they produce "impressions" that in a human body affect the mind to produce sensations of light and color. In human beings alone something more happens. The sight of a rose gives rise to a "mode" or modification of the soul, which for Descartes is a separate, immaterial substance "tightly joined" with the body. If by "seeing" one means 'having a visual sensation', then the cat does not see, only human beings do. Similarly, if "feeling pain" means 'having one's soul modified in the manner we call pain', then animals do not feel pain, only humans do. That consequence of Descartes's dualism excited much controversy from 1650 to 1750, as did the denial of souls to animals.

The human mind is unique. Insofar as psychology is the study of the soul, "animal psychology" is an oxymoron. Psychology comes to devote itself to the study of the operations of the human mind—its faculties and the ideas with which they operate. The essence of mind, according to Descartes, is to think. Occurrent thoughts are modes of res cogitans, the "thinking thing," and the "form" of such a mode is what Descartes calls an idea (see Hamilton, Dissertation G). That form can be described in terms of what the idea presents or represents to the mind. Ideas came to be thought of as akin to signs, "representing" concepts or things; whether Descartes and other early users of the term in its new sense regarded them thus is open to question (Yolton, 1984).

Cartesian psychology was not the only option in the seventeenth century. Pierre Gassendi's revival of Epicurean atomism contrasted both with the philosophy of the Schools and with that of his friend and rival Descartes. He retained the notion of an animal soul and considered the human soul to consist effectively of a material soul, similar to those of animals, and an immaterial rational soul (Bloch, p. 368), a view more closely resembling the Aristotelian than the Cartesian, in which the cognitive functions of the sensitive soul are elevated to become part of the single, immaterial human soul.

"Locke and the Way of Ideas"

The Port-Royal Logic (1662) of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole placed ideas at the center of the study of thought. An idea is simply that which is "in our mind" when we conceive something. To the logical notions of term, proposition, syllogism, and method, there correspond the mental operations of conceiving (an idea), judging, reasoning, and putting arguments in order. Thus the study of language and thought were united into a new discipline at once concerned with the validity of arguments and the nature of the mind.

Cartesian physiology had failed conspicuously to live up to the promises made on its behalf by Descartes. Nicolaus Steno (Observations Anatomiae, 1662) and Thomas Willis (Cerebri Anatomae, 1664) had shown that Descartes's anatomy was grossly mistaken, and in particular that the pineal gland could not possibly have the functions he ascribed to it. Although anatomists in the early eighteenth century continued to map the brain and nervous system, and to make some headway in localizing functions, it is not surprising that philosophers should have taken to a method that did not require detailed knowledge of the "springs" of thought.

In Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1626–1628, first published 1684), the "things" with which the philosopher deals are said to be simple or complex. That distinction, not entirely new, was applied to ideas: Arnauld and Nicole, and Leibniz shortly thereafter—both of them having access to the as yet unpublished rules—applied that distinction to ideas. Leibniz in particular is, in the 1670s, proposing the analysis of ideas into what he calls "primitive" ideas, not further analyzable. Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) deals with the analysis of ideas, or the uncovering of the "original" ideas "from whence all the rest are derived" (p. 286). Those original ideas, few in number, Locke divides into ideas of sense, received from the body, and ideas of reflection, received from the mind.

The analysis and classification of ideas according to their composition from originals provided what could be called their "statics." The "dynamics" was based on the notion of the association of ideas. That one idea might call up another was not at all a new observation. Descartes had taken note of it, and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) adverted to it quite often. Locke's contribution was to make it fundamental to a theory of error. Not all connections among ideas arise from association. Some connections are natural (for example, between the idea of red and that of color). Some are artificial, forged by chance or custom, which can bind together any two ideas, however distant. Association became an important tool. George Berkeley (1685–1753), for example, explains depth perception by reference to a "habitual or customary" connection between the muscular sensations caused by positioning the eyes so as to maintain a single image of an object and the idea of the distance of that object from the viewer (Essay toward a New Theory of Vision, 1709).

Locke's Essay and the way of ideas were enormously influential through the eighteenth century. Condillac (Étienne Bonnot) in particular devoted his 1754 Traité des sensations (Treatise on sensations) to the study of a "statue" having only one of the five senses, and to the proposition that touch teaches vision how to recognize shapes and distances, the conclusion being that all the various faculties of the soul—judgment, reflection, the passions—are nothing other than "transformations" of sensation. (Destutt de Tracy, mentioned below, would later hold that all thought is feeling.) Condillac's claim that touch teaches vision was based in part on descriptions of the experiences of persons blind from birth who recovered their vision, including a famous case described by the London surgeon William Cheselden in 1728. That case seemed to provide an answer to William Molyneux's query to Locke, on whether a person blind from birth would recognize the objects previously known only by touch (see Degenaar).

David Hume (1711–1776) begins his Treatise (1739) with a distinction between "impressions" (unlike the impressions made by animal spirits on the pineal gland, these are in the mind) and "ideas," the difference being that impressions are, like Locke's "originals," not derived from other ideas. Ideas of substance and (most famously) cause are analyzed in terms of relations among ideas initiated by association (between resembling ideas) and confirmed into habit. The last concerted attempt to follow the way of ideas was the "ideology" of A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, presented in his Idéologie of 1804. The political importance of Lockeanism is hinted at by noting that Destutt de Tracy was a deputy in the Estates General of 1789, who was arrested under the Terror but survived, and had his commentary on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws censored by the government of Napoleon in 1806.

Materialism and Panpsychism

Eighteenth-century materialism was quite distinct from what is now called "physicalism." The physicalist holds that the only properties possessed by concrete substances are those imputed to them by established physical theory. The eighteenth-century materialist, in agreement with the physicalist, denies that the mind is immaterial, but typically sensibility (the basic mental property, as in Condillac and Destutt de Tracy) is treated as a property additional to the basic physical properties of matter, and not reducible to them.

Many eighteenth-century philosophers, among them Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, attributed a primitive sensibility to small particles of matter, "organic molecules" as Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon called them, from which the more complex capacities of animals and humans are derived. Julien Offroy de La Mettrie is another instance. The title of his best-known work, first published in 1747 (with a false date of 1748), is L'homme machine (Man a machine), but in the machine every fiber is endowed with a natural oscillation, proved by, among many other experiments, the continued beating of the hearts of animals after they are removed (1751/1987, 1:104–105; see also L'homme plus que machine, 2:159). In the Rêve d'Alembert (1769; Dream of d'Alembert), Diderot, following the physician Théophile de Bordeu, likens the organism to a swarm of bees—the "organic molecules." Consciousness and will become "statistical" phenomena, like the changing sentiments of a crowd, a view reminiscent of certain much more recent theories of mental activity.

The end of the early modern period witnessed the discovery by Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) and Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) that nerves conduct electricity. That and the comparative studies of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anatomists, which established, among other things, the independent role of the spinal cord in reflex actions, laid the basis for a neuroscience recognizably like that of today.

Willis, in his "Anatomy," writes that he "addicted my self to the opening of Heads especially, and of every kind" not only in order to found a "more certain Physiologie," but also a "Pathologie of the brain and nervous Stock" ("Anatomy," p. 53; quoted in Frank, p. 108). He went so far as to regard every disease as neural in origin; the resulting "neural pathology" had adherents even in the mid-nineteenth century. At the very end of the period, Philippe Pinel, famous for supposedly setting free the inmates of the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris during the Terror (Weiner, p. 333), published his Traitémédico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale (1801; Medico-philosophical treatise on mental alienation), one of the founding documents of the new discipline of psychiatry.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bayle, Pierre. Dictionnaire historique et critique. 3rd ed. Rotterdam, 1720. 1st ed. Rotterdam, 1697.

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de. Oeuvres philosophiques. 2 vol. Paris, 1987. 1st ed. London, 1751; L'homme machine and L'homme plus que machine were first published in 1748.

Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford, 1975. 1st ed. 1690.

Secondary Sources

Bloch, Olivier René. La philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique. The Hague, 1971.

Clarke, Edwin, and L. S. Jacyna. Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley, 1987.

Degenaar, Marjolein. Molyneux's Problem: Three Centuries of Discussion on the Perception of Forms. Translated by Michael J. Collins. The Hague, 1996.

Hamilton, Sir William. "Editor's supplementary dissertations." In The Works of Thomas Reid, D. D., edited by Sir William Hamilton. 7th ed. Glasgow, 1872.

Porter, Roy. "Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment." In Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, edited by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, Robert Wokler, pp. 53–87. Berkeley, 1995.

Roger, Jacques. The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought. Translated by Robert Ellrich. Stanford, 1998.

Rousseau, G. S., ed. The Languages of Psyche. Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought: Clark Library Lectures, 1985–1986. Berkeley, 1990. See, in particular, Frank, Robert G., Jr. "Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth-Century Medicine" and Weiner, Dora B. "Mind and Body in the Clinic: Philippe Pinel, Alexander Crichton, Dominique Esquirol, and the Birth of Psychiatry."

Wellman, Kathleen Anne. La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment. Durham, 1992.

Yolton, John W. Perceptual Acquaintance: From Descartes to Reid. Minneapolis, 1984.

——. Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Minneapolis, 1983.

—DENNIS DES CHENE

Originally the name given to the branch of philosophy dealing with the soul (from the Greek psyche, or soul), then to the science of the mind, and now generally understood to be the science of behavior, both human and animal, and of human thought processes. Early psychical research, in contrast, concerned itself with the demonstration and investigation of paranormal faculties and the concept of the soul, with the question of survival after bodily death as a legitimate inference.

According to the criterion of Charles Richet, everything that the human intelligence can do, even when it is most profound and penetrating, is psychological. Everything of which such intelligence is incapable belongs to metapsychics.

The crux of the matter is that the greatest difficulty is experienced in drawing the line between what the human intelligence can and cannot do, because many paranormal faculties appear to originate in the subconscious mind and manifest along the same channels as the phenomena of abnormal psychology. Their difference from abnormal phenomena seems to be primarily their social functionality.

Abnormal Psychology and the Paranormal

Some would contend that an abnormal bodily condition may facilitate the function of a paranormal faculty without being the reason and cause of it. Hereward Carrington, in The Story of Psychic Science (1930), relates the story of a female acquaintance who fell into Lake Minnetonka, sank three times, and was rescued unconscious. A severe illness complicated with pneumonia followed her misadventure. During her convalescence she became clairvoyant and could tell what letters were in the mailbox in the morning and often their approximate contents. When she was completely restored her clairvoyant faculty disappeared.

Neither pneumonia nor near-drowning can be supposed the cause of such clairvoyance. Similarly it is reasonable to infer that in the clairvoyance of hysteric subjects, the abnormal bodily condition is simply a coincidental phenomenon but not the cause and explanation of the clairvoyance. An abnormal condition may open up a channel of function for paranormal faculties. If the abnormal condition becomes permanent, mediumship may develop in organisms that constitutionally were not adapted for paranormal manifestations.

The study of abnormal psychology may also have relevance to the emotional and temperamental problems of some mediums, particularly those who are disposed to fraudulent tricks, even if gifted with some genuine psychic faculties.

Parapsychology adopted much from modern behavioral studies and does not assume any particular psychological structure, as did psychical research. Its name implies that it is a branch of psychology that specializes in the study of paranormal behavior. Parapsychologists seek to use appropriate psychological methodologies and integrate their findings into the larger body of psychological knowledge.

Sources:

Beloff, John. The Existence of Mind. London: MacGibbon, 1962. Reprint, New York: Citadel, 1965.

Brown, William. Science and Personality. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1929. Reprint, College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1972.

Burt, Cyril. Psychology and Psychical Research. London: Society for Psychical Research, 1968.

Ehrenwald, Jan. Telepathy and Medical Psychology. New York:W. W. Norton, 1948.

Eysenck, H. J. Sense and Nonsense in Psychology. London: Penguin, 1957.

Hudson, Thomas J. The Law of Psychic Phenomena: A Working Hypothesis for the Systematic Study of the Vast Potential of Man's Mind. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1894. Reprint, Chicago: Hudson-Cohan, 1970. Reprint, New York: Weiser, 1972.

LeShan, Lawrence. The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist: Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal. New York: Viking Press; London: Turnstone Books, 1974.

McCreery, Charles. Science, Philosophy, and ESP. London: Faber & Faber, 1967. Reprint, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books,1968.

Mitchell, T. W. Medical Psychology and Psychical Research. London: Methuen, 1922.

Myers, F. W. H. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1903. Reprint, New York: Longmans, Green, 1954. Abr. ed. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961.

Osty, Eugene. Supernormal Faculties in Man. London: Methuen, 1923.

Rhine, J. B., and Robert Brier. Parapsychology Today. New York: Citadel, 1968.

Rosenthal, Robert. Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966.

Schmeidler, Gertrude R. ESP in Relation to Rorschach Test Evaluation. New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1960.

Wolman, Benjamin B., ed. Handbook of Parapsychology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977. Reprint, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1986.

Psyche, personified by the ancient Greeks as the goddess loved by Eros, means breath and hence soul or mind. Psychology, when introduced as a term in the 18th century, described the branch of philosophy covering the study of the phenomena of mental life, i.e. what is perceived, through introspection, as taking place in the mind, and of such activities as perceiving (see perception), remembering, thinking, and reasoning.

'The science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions' was William James's definition. The strength of his classic The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, lies in its descriptions, as the result of 'looking into our minds and reporting what we there discover', of 'feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions and the like'. For half a century The Principles provided much of the material for textbooks such as R. S. Woodworth's Psychology: The Study of Mental Life, which went on into the 1950s as a standard text. The main chapters of contemporary texts are still about perceiving, remembering, thinking and language, and concepts and reasoning, as well as emotions, needs, and motives, learning, coping behaviour, and conflicts, skills, and attitudes and beliefs in relation to social and cultural factors.

Herbert Spencer had given in 1874 a wider definition of 'objective psychology', which he said forms with physiology the two subdivisions of zoology, this and botany being the two divisions of biology. Objective psychology 'deals with those functions of the neuromuscular apparatus by which organisms are enabled to adjust inner to outer relations' and includes 'the study of the same functions as externally manifested in conduct'. 'Subjective' psychology 'deals with the sensations, perceptions, ideas, emotions, and volitions that are the direct or indirect concomitants of this visible adjustment of inner to outer relations'.

Spencer and James both struggled with the ancient problem of the relation between mind and body. James accepted dualism as a stratagem, not as a conviction. Certain mental processes cannot be reduced to physical processes, he insisted, otherwise there would be no science of psychology. 'When the brain acts a thought occurs.' 'Mental phenomena lead to bodily processes.' 'No mental modification ever occurs that is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.' Contemporary explanations in psychology sometimes reduce the phenomenon or the behaviour to what is regarded as the essential physiological or biochemical process; more often they relate it to the conditions or the contexts in which it occurs or to the system of which it is a part.

In James's time there were turning points in the development of several branches of psychology. Wilhelm Wundt had founded in 1875 the first laboratory devoted to the experimental study of sensation, memory, and learning. Francis Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty, first published in 1883, had opened up the study of individual differences in mental functions. Lloyd Morgan's Animal Life and Intelligence, published in 1890, and E. L. Thorndike's Animal Intelligence, published in 1911, pioneered comparative studies of learning. Studies of the effects of lesions of the brain on mental functions were being pioneered by David Ferrier, Herman Munk, and Hughlings Jackson. Psychoanalysis with its concept of the unconscious was just over the horizon.

Soon after James's death in 1910, attention was drawn away from his work by the emergence of several confident schools, particularly behaviourism, physiological psychology, Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, purposivism (see Mcdougall, William; purpose), factor analysis (see Spearman, Charles Edward), and ethology. Behaviourism especially narrowed the definition of psychology so as to exclude subjective psychology, on the grounds, based on a narrow definition of science, that the phenomena of mental life are not susceptible to scientific study — that is, psychology should restrict itself to the study of those aspects of behaviour that can be directly observed and measured or graded.

For nearly half a century few scholars, except in the older universities in Britain, engaged with the formidable problems of method in psychology, which James had admitted could be no more than the hope of a science. Interest in mental phenomena revived again in the 1960s, partly as a result of the emergence of schools of phenomenology, such as Husserl's.

The meaning given to the term psychology changed gradually, first to insist that the study should be systematic, observations being made under prearranged conditions that allow reliable conclusions to be drawn, and, secondly, to include the responses of the subject to external events or stimuli, whether these occur naturally or are manipulated by an experimenter. Interest grew, under the influence of Kenneth Craik, in an interactional approach, in which behaviour is seen as exchanges between man and machine or man and man (see cybernetics, history of). The dividing line between objective and subjective psychology became blurred.

In most universities there is now a department of psychology, in which an assortment of research methods is applied in the study of the behaviour, including the mental activity, of intact organisms, humankind especially. Comparative studies of the behaviour of animals (see ethology) are shared with the department of zoology. The psychology department is likely to have a place in the faculty of science, with links with other departments of biology, with which it shares work on the physiological mechanisms of behaviour, in the faculty of social sciences, in which it shares work on the behaviour of individuals in social groups, in the faculty of education, in which it shares work on mental development and learning processes in childhood, and in the faculty of medicine, in which its work lies in applications in the diagnosis and care and treatment of the sick.

It is one of several branches of science applied in psychiatry to the care and treatment of the mentally disordered. Psychopathology is the branch of psychology that seeks to explain disorders of mental activity and behaviour in terms of psychological processes, whereas neurology and neuropsychology relate them to the site, extent, and character of faults in the structure or function of the central nervous system. Psychology contributes to many other branches of knowledge, among them, in the faculty of engineering, to ergonomics, and especially AI (artificial intelligence). Also, in the faculty of law, criminology. Since the 1920s, students of the humanities, such as literary critics and historians, have increasingly turned for their interpretations to psychological and, especially, psychoanalytic theories.

(Published 1987)

— Derek Russell Davis

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IN BRIEF: The science that studies the mind and the reasons for the ways that people think and act.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. — Albert Camus (1913-1960)

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sign description: The hands form the shape of the Greek symbol for psi which is used to represent the word psychology.

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Quotes:

"The best cure for hypochondria is to forget about your own body and get interested in someone else s." - Goodman Ace

"Who knows, the mind has the key to all things besides." - Amos Bronson Alcott

"The mind is ever ingenious in making its own distress." - Oliver Goldsmith

"The intellect is always fooled by the heart." - Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead." - D. H. Lawrence

"Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology." - D. H. Lawrence

See more famous quotes about Psychology

The science dealing with mental phenomena and processes. Psychologists study emotions, perception, intelligence, consciousness, and the relationship between these phenomena and processes and the work of the glands and muscles. Psychologists are also interested in diseased or disordered mental states, and some psychologists provide therapy for individuals. In the United States, however, psychologists, unlike psychiatrists, are not medical doctors. (See psychiatry.)

The two main divisions of psychology are individual or personality psychology and social psychology; social psychology deals with the mental processes of groups.

n

1. the study of behavior and the functions and processes of the mind, especially as related to the social and physical environment. n 2. a profession that involves the practical applications of knowledge, skills, and techniques in the understanding of, prevention of, or solution to individual or social problems, especially in regard to the interaction between the individual and the physical and social environment.

For a list of words related to psychology, see:

• Disciplines and Specialties - psychology: study of behavior and related mental processes and disorders
• Schools and Doctrines - psychology: scientific study of the mind, mental states and processes, and human behavior

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See words rhyming with "psychology."

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Common misspelling(s) of psychology

• psycology

Dansk (Danish)
n. - psykologi

Nederlands (Dutch)
psychologie, zielkunde

Français (French)
n. - psychologie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Psychologie

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ψυχολογία

Italiano (Italian)
psicologia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - psicologia (f)

Русский (Russian)
психология

Español (Spanish)
n. - psicología

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - psykologi

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
心理学, 心理状态

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 心理學, 心理狀態

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 심리학, 심리

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 心理学, 心理

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) علم النفس‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮פסיכולוגיה, תורת הנפש, מנטליות, אופי, חקר הרוח האנושית ותפקודה, בייחוד במשפעתה על התנהגות, מאפיינים נפשיים של אדם או קבוצה, גורמים נפשיים הנוגעים למצב או לעיסוק מסוים‬

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