What is psychology?????

Question

could you also explain the classical condition and operant condition i find it confusing???

Answer 1

psychology is the systematic study of thoughts, feeling and behaviour and the factors that influence them. behaviour is any observable action made by a living person or animal. Psychology is a fascinating topic. I completed the subject while at school and found it really in-depth. It basically gives you reasons for why we feel this way. why we react in this way... why we behaved like that... its main focus in on the brain and which areas affect what. I have heaps more info if you need it just let me know. hope this answers your question!

Answer 2

Psychology is the study of behaviour, cognition, emotion, personality etc through scientific and phenomenological means.  It has many different approaches, such as behaviourist, humanist, psychoanalytic, cognitivism...  It's a huge topic that couldn't be accurately answered on here without HUGE amounts of time...  Maybe you should look it up on wikipedia.

As for classical and operant conditioning...  It's not "a condition", it refers to associative learning and behaviour modifications.  Classical conditioning is most famously described through Pavlov's experiments with dogs.  He showed that a response could be "conditioned" (ie created), which has no usual link with the stimulus.  He noticed that dogs would salivate when they saw the person who fed them, regardless of if they had food with them or not.  He sought to create an experiment which would demonstrate that innate physiological responses could be created in other situations.  He took the dogs, who salivated when food was brought to them (food being the Unconditioned Stimulus - US), and measured their salivation (the Unconditioned Response - UR).  He began to ring a bell (Conditioned Stimulus - CS) at the same time as the food was presented (US), and continued to measure the dogs' salivation.  After a period of time, he tested to see if the conditioned stimulus of the bell alone would elicit salivation from the dogs, which it did, thereby proving that physiological responses can be created to unnatural stimuli.  The salivation of the dogs was a Conditioned Response to the Conditioned Stimulus of the bell, a learnt behaviour which would not otherwise occur naturally.

There are lots of other examples of classical conditioning, but my favourite is probably Watson's ridiculously unscientific and unethical study of Little Albert, a 9 month old boy.  Essentially, Watson observed Little Albert playing with a white lab rat, in a room, without fear.  He then began to condition a fear response in Albert, by waiting for Albert to reach for the rat and making a loud banging noise behind him.  Eventually Albert became so frightened of the banging noise that he refused to touch the rat and became upset when he saw it.  If I recall correctly, Little Albert went on to transfer this fear of white rats onto any small white furry creatures, and beards.  Watson felt that as the fear had been learnt, it could be unlearnt, although I'm not sure if he did ever help Little Albert to unlearn his fear.

To make it simpler (hopefully):

Bang (unconditioned stimulus) -> Fear (unconditioned/natural response)

Bang (US) + Rat (conditioned stimulus) -> fear (unconditioned response to bang)

Rat (conditioned stimulus) -> fear (conditioned response.  learning has occurred).

Operant conditioning is most famously demonstrated by Thorndike and Skinner etc with their "lovely" experiments with rats, pigeons, cats, whatever they pleased to shove in a box and give rewards and punishments for certain behaviours.  Thorndike started off with cats in a puzzle box, who found their way out, learning more successful ways to get out (ie, remembering the way out, and displaying evidence of learning).  Skinner took things further with animals and even his own child, reportedly, with positive and negative reinforcements, such as having to press buttons in a certain order to receive food pellets, or whatever.  It just showed that behaviours which elicited a desired (desired by the animal in the box) result, ie food pellets, would lead to an increase in the behaviour which caused it (ie pressing the buttons in the right order) - known as positive reinforcement -, and behaviours which elicited undesired responses (ie a shock) would reduce the behaviour which caused it (ie pressing the wrong button) - negative reinforcement -, as would behaviours which elicited no response at all.

It also demonstrated how superstitions are formed.  It's all rather interesting.

p.s. I will not "correct" my spelling of "behaviour" as yahoo answers is requesting because I have spelled it correctly.

Answer 3

the study of psychoes.. haha...  

Answer 4

Strangely enough describing psychology is not that easy. We all have natural fears to safe guard us from danger, and in many cases these can become totally irrational,  Psychology is the art of convincing people that some things are normal when they think otherwise. It is striking a balance within people to see reallty, and not the irrational thoughts.

Similarly it is used to take away the attitude of "i cant" and show that one can with direction, and a positive attitude. That is used a lot in sports these days to enhance a players` ability when they think that they have reached their optimum success level.