PERCEPTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Perceptions of Psychology

Perceptions of Psychology

Introduction

Academically, psychology is the scientific study of behaviour. This includes human and animal behaviour, but its particular concern is with mental events as revealed through behaviour, including introspection. While public perceptions of psychology are somehow different from the above mentioned definition. A major difference is that the word “psychology” is only used for humans while professionals use this word also for animals.

As a public word, it is in public usage for a long lime while as a separate academic discipline it has only existed since the late 19th-century, but in this time has encompassed several influential schools of thought, including psychoanalysis, behaviourism, the mental testing movement, and the humanistic movement, their differences resting on ideological as well as theoretical and methodological predilections. For all this, mainstream psychology is a more homogeneous, more professionalized discipline than sociology, with a relatively high degree of agreement on the importance of experimental and statistical methods reflecting its different subject matter. Nevertheless, in a discipline which straddles physical and social science, and which has relations with many other disciplines, there is an acceptance of the appropriateness of different approaches and methods for different areas of the subject. Major topic areas within the discipline include comparative psychology (comparisons of human and animal behaviour), developmental psychology, cognitive psychology (including a central concern with perception, memory, language, and problem-solving;, abnormal psychology, and social psychology. Numerous special applied psychologies exist (e.g. clinical psychology, educational psychology occupational psychology and more recently health psychology, counselling psychology and forensic psychology). (Shorter, 2007)

Overlaps with sociology occur in a number of areas, especially in social psychology, which exists as a sub-field of both disciplines. Overlaps are greatest in those areas where the focus is on actors' 'meanings', 'naturally occurring situations' and a concern with contextualising psychological phenomena. This paper discusses how the academic and professional discipline of Psychology differs from public perceptions of what “psychology” is.

Discussion

The growth of psychology in 20th century also has an impact on the two perceptions of psychology. Psychiatry is also the word used interchangeably with psychology by the general public. The modern history of psychology and psychiatry is bound up with the rise, beginning about 1880, of the professions in the human sciences, the creation of service occupations offering expertise in human affairs—economics, political science, the management sciences, planning, and so on. These professions, and the social, legal, and governmental arrangements that support them, function to offer rational guidance or control in all aspects of human affairs. This contrasts with earlier ages in which it was thought right for order to stem from the interests of rulers, tradition, fate, or God. Psychology and psychiatry are therefore part of what the German sociologist Max Weber analyzed as the rationalization of the modern world. (Ward, 2002)

Like so much European social history, the history of psychology and psychiatry varies considerably with local circumstance. As occupations participating in modernization, psychology and psychiatry fit the pattern in which modern social systems spread outward from Western Europe, in ...