When you think of psychology, what comes to mind? The word psychology comes from Ancient Greek and means the study of the mind. As humans, we have been on an eternal quest to understand ourselves. We have used religious and spiritual practices, philosophical disputes, and, recently, scientific experiments to gain insight into our experiences. While psychology has always been around, it has evolved just as we have.
Psychology can help us understand how we influence each other in society and how we bond with others. It is also concerned with how we create narratives of our past, how we use our experiences to learn, or why we become distressed.
- First, we'll define basic psychology.
- Next, we'll outline a range of basic psychology theories.
- Then, we'll explore the examples of basic psychology theories in more detail.
- We'll throw in some interesting basic psychology facts that you can explore in greater detail.
- Finally, we'll outline the basic schools of psychology to showcase that range of theoretical approaches towards understanding the human mind.
Fig. 1 Psychology studies a broad range of topics from cognition through psychopathology to interpersonal relationships and social processes.
Defining Basic Psychology
Psychology as a whole can be defined as an area of science concerned with studying the mind and behaviour. Psychology includes areas of study such as cognitive, forensic, developmental psychology and biopsychology, to name a few. Many people associate psychology primarily with mental health, as psychology aids in developing mental health diagnoses and treatments.
Here, the mind includes all the different internal processes, such as cognition or emotional states, while behaviour can be understood as an outward manifestation of those processes.
There is a reason why this definition is so broad. Psychology is a diverse field in itself, but many of the issues it is concerned with are interdisciplinary, meaning they overlap with different areas of study, including biology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.
Basic Psychology Theories
Even though psychology is a broad area of study, some main themes or theories are important to understand; these include social influence, memory, attachment, and psychopathology.
Social Influence
The theories of social influence explain how our social conditions influence our minds and our behaviour as individuals. The main processes here are conformity, which occurs when we are influenced by the group we identify with and obedience, which refers to compliance with the orders of an authority.
Through the scientific study of this process, psychology has explored questions such as what makes some individuals resistant to social influence or why we are more likely to conform in certain situations but not others.
Memory
One of the most influential theories of memory was the multi-store memory model developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). They identified three separate but interconnected structures: sensory register, short-term memory store and long-term memory store. Later investigations revealed that memories are even more complex than that. For example, we can identify episodic, semantic and procedural memories within long-term memory alone.
In multi-store memory, each store has a different way of coding information, a different capacity amount and a duration for which it can store information. The information encoded in the short-term memory store gets forgotten within the first minute, while data stored in the long term can stay with us for years.
The multi-store memory model was then expanded on by Baddeley and Hitch (1974), who proposed the working memory model. This model sees short-term memory as much more than just a temporary store. It highlights how it also contributes to reasoning, comprehension and problem-solving processes.
Understanding how memory works are essential for collecting testimonies from people who have witnessed a crime or an accident. The study of memory has identified the interview practices that can distort the eyewitness's memory and techniques that ensure high accuracy.
Attachment
The study of attachment has shown us how our early emotional bond with the caregiver has the potential to shape the way we see ourselves, others and the world in adulthood.
Attachment develops through interactions and repeating interactions (or mirroring) between the infant and the primary caregiver. According to the stages of attachment identified by Schaffer and Emerson (1964), primary attachment develops in the first seven months of the infant’s life.
Based on the research conducted by Ainsworth, we can identify three types of attachment in children: secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant.
Much of the famous attachment research was conducted on animals.
- Lorenz’s (1935) geese study has found that attachment can only develop up to a certain point in early development. This is called the critical period.
- Harlow's (1958) research on rhesus monkeys highlighted that attachment is developed through the comfort that a caregiver provides and that the lack of comfort can lead to severe emotional dysregulation in animals.
What happens when attachment does not develop? John Bowlby's monotropic theory argues that a healthy bond between a child and a caregiver is necessary for the child's developmental and psychological outcomes. He argued that maternal deprivation, which prevents the formation of such a bond, can even lead to psychopathy.
Fig. 2 Attachment develops through reciprocity and interactional synchrony, freepik.com
Psychopathology
What do we consider as normal or healthy? How can we distinguish normal human experiences such as grief or sadness from depression? These are some of the questions that the research on psychopathology aims to answer. Psychopathology research also aims to identify the cognitive, emotional and behavioural components that characterise various psychological disorders like phobias, depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
There are several approaches to understanding psychopathology:
The behavioural approach looks at how our experience might strengthen or reduce psychopathology.
The cognitive approach identifies thoughts and beliefs as factors that contribute to psychopathology.
The biological approach explains disorders in terms of abnormalities in neural functioning or genetic predispositions.
Examples of Basic Psychology Theories
We’ve briefly mentioned a range of psychological theories; let’s now take a more detailed look at the example theory in basic psychology. In his famous experiment on obedience, Milgram found that most participants administered dangerous and potentially lethal electric shocks to another person when ordered to do so by an authority. Milgram’s Agency Theory explains how situational factors can lead to people following orders from an authority figure, even when the action is against their conscience.
Milgram identified two states in which we perform actions: the autonomous and the agentic state. In the autonomous state, we decide to act independently of external influence. Therefore, we feel personally responsible for what we do.
However, when we are given orders from an authority, who can punish us if we disobey, we switch to the agentic state. We no longer feel personally responsible for our actions; after all, the decision to act was made by someone else. This way, we can commit an immoral act that we otherwise wouldn't.
How does psychology affect our lives?
Psychology can provide us with insight into a broad range of issues.
Why do we form attachments to others?
Why are some memories stronger than others?
Why do we develop mental illnesses and how to treat them?
How can we study or work more efficiently?
Through the above examples and perhaps your own, it is easy to see the vast practical applications of psychology. Social policies, education systems, and legislation reflect psychological theories and findings.
In his Monotropic theory of attachment, psychologist John Bowlby found that if human infants are deprived of maternal attention and attachment in their early years, it could lead to negative consequences in adolescence and adulthood.
Basic psychology facts
Social influence | | In Asch's (1951) conformity experiment, 75% of participants conformed to a group that unanimously chose a clearly wrong answer in a visual judgement task at least once. This shows that we have a strong tendency to fit in even when we know that the majority is wrong. |
| In Milgram's (1963) experiment, 65% of participants obeyed orders from an experimenter to administer painful and potentially lethal electric shocks to another person. This study highlights how people often comply with unethical orders. |
| Long-term memory | Long-term memory has potentially an unlimited capacity for stored information. |
Eye witness testimony | Eye-witness testimony is not always the best evidence. Even if the witness is not lying, a lot of the time our memories can be inaccurate, e.g. the witness might remember the offender carrying a gun, even if they didn't. |
| Animal studies of attachment | When rhesus monkeys are given a choice between a wire model of a mother with food attached or a soft model of a mother without food, they choose to spend time with the model that provides comfort. |
Bowlby's internal working model | The attachment to our primary caregiver in childhood creates a blueprint for our future relationships. It shapes our expectations about how relationships should look like, how we should be treated and whether others can be trusted. It can also influence how we react to the threats of being abandoned. |
| Definition of abnormality | It's hard to tell what fits the constraints of normal and what we can label as abnormal. When defining abnormality in psychology we look at how common the symptom/behaviour is, whether it deviates from social norms, if it impairs the functioning of the individual and whether it deviates from the ideal mental health. |
| Ellis A-B-C model | According to Albert Ellis the emotional and behavioural consequences associated with depression are caused by our irrational beliefs and negative interpretations rather than the negative events in our life alone. This theory informs a cognitive approach to depression treatment, which focuses on challenging these irrational beliefs that reinforce depression. |
| Phobia treatment | People with phobias tend to avoid the stimulus that evokes the extreme fear response in them. However, it's been found that behavioural treatments that involve exposure to the stimulus can be effective in treating phobias. |
Basic schools of psychology
The basic schools of psychology include:
One of the first modern schools of thought in psychology is Freud's psychoanalysis. This school argues that mental health problems stem from unresolved conflicts, past traumatic experiences and repressed contents of the unconscious mind. By bringing the unconscious into the consciousness, it aims to alleviate people from psychological distress.
Behaviourism
Another school that emerged in the early twentieth century is behaviourism, pioneered by researchers such as Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner. This school focused only on studying behaviour rather than the hidden psychological processes. This approach argues that all human behaviour is learned, this learning either occurs through forming stimulus-response associations or through the feedback we receive from the environment (rewards and punishments).
In the mid-twentieth century, as a response to psychoanalysis and behaviourism, arose humanistic approaches. Humanistic psychology is often associated with Rogers or Maslow. It moves away from the deterministic view of human behaviour and focuses on the fact that humans are capable of free will, we can shape our destiny, we intuitively know how we can develop ourselves to achieve our full potential. Humanistic psychology aims to create an environment of unconditional positive regard, where people feel safe to develop true insight into their identity and needs.
Cognitivism
Around the same time, there was the development of cognitivism, an approach which in contrast to behaviourism studies the internal psychological processes that influence our experience. The focus of cognitive psychology is to understand how our thoughts, beliefs, and attention can influence how we respond to our environment.
Functionalism
Functionalism is an early approach which shifted the attention of researchers from breaking mental processes down and creating structures that would represent them and their basic elements, to developing an understanding of their function. For example, instead of breaking anxiety down to its causes and basic elements, functionalism proposes that we should focus on understanding the function of anxiety.
Fig 3 - Different approaches in psychology view well-being through different lenses.
Basic Psychology - Key takeaways
- Psychology as a whole can be defined as an area of science concerned with studying the mind and behaviour.
- Even though psychology is a broad area of study, there are main themes or theories that are important to understand, these include social influence, memory, attachment, and psychopathology.
- Psychological research in all these areas informs social policies, education systems, and legislation.
- There is a range of schools of thoughts in psychology. Examples include psychoanalysis, behaviourism, humanism, cognitivism, and functionalism.
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