Portal:Psychology
The Psychology Portal
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Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as behavioral or cognitive scientists. Some psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior. Others explore the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors.
Psychologists are involved in research on perception, cognition, attention, emotion, intelligence, subjective experiences, motivation, brain functioning, and personality. Psychologists' interests extend to interpersonal relationships, psychological resilience, family resilience, and other areas within social psychology. They also consider the unconscious mind. Research psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. Some, but not all, clinical and counseling psychologists rely on symbolic interpretation. (Full article...)
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Delayed gratification, or deferred gratification, is the ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in favor of a more valuable and long-lasting reward later. It involves forgoing a smaller, immediate pleasure to achieve a larger or more enduring benefit in the future. A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence.
A person's ability to delay gratification relates to other similar skills such as patience, impulse control, self-control and willpower, all of which are involved in self-regulation. Broadly, self-regulation encompasses a person's capacity to adapt the self as necessary to meet demands of the environment. Delaying gratification is the reverse of delay discounting, which is "the preference for smaller immediate rewards over larger but delayed rewards" and refers to the "fact that the subjective value of reward decreases with increasing delay to its receipt". It is theorized that the ability to choose delayed rewards is under the control of the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS). (Full article...)
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Baron Munchausen in a fabulated environment, by Gottfried Franz (circa 1896). The character after which Munchausen syndrome is named.
image credit: public domain
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- "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me." — Sigmund Freud
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Selected biography -
Mary Whiton Calkins (/ˈkɔːlkɪnz, ˈkæl-/; 30 March 1863 – 26 February 1930) was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender.
Calkins is a key figure in the history of women psychologists. At Wellesley College, Calkins established the first psychological laboratory for women. She was the first woman to complete the requirements for a doctoral degree in psychology with the unanimous support of the Harvard University psychology faculty, although the university refused to bestow it on the grounds that Harvard did not accept women. She later became president of the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association, and was the first woman to be president of both. (Full article...)
Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that fashion psychology is an interdisciplinary field that studies the interaction between human behavior, psychology, and fashion?
- ... that food psychology research has found that the COVID-19 pandemic led to both reduced and increased consumption of junk food among different geographical populations and educational backgrounds?
- ... that Cara De Silva described a cookbook compiled by a woman in Terezin concentration camp as a record of "psychological resistance”?
- ... that a study of people who reported experiences of alien abduction found that many exhibited characteristics consistent with fantasy-prone personality?
- ... that Fortnite's Tilted Towers was described by critics as the equivalent of "psychological torture" and being "dropped into a meat grinder"?
- ... that the reactions to food depicted in the manga series Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma were decided on through free association games?
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More did you know -
- ...that Walter Bowart (pictured) was a proponent of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the writer of a seminal book on mind control, as well as a prolific publisher and editor of both newspapers and magazines?
- ...that Richard C. McCarty helped launch the "Decade of Behavior" campaign to bring attention to the importance of behavioral and social research?
- ...that one of the most important advances in medieval Muslim psychology was the establishment of the first psychiatric hospitals?
- ...that race car journalist and former race car driver Dr. Dick Berggren decided to stop teaching college psychology after he was called into the college president's office because he parked his racecar in the faculty parking lot?
Psychology topics
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