Introduction to Psychology, Chapter 1: The Science of Psychology

                                                                

              Hi there! Shout out everyone!                    

First, before starting, we would like to introduce ourselves to give you guys a brief idea of what are we going to post on this blog :)

We have 6 members that will be posting on this blog, who are Aqbar, Amin, Ikmal, Shafiqah, Faidah, and me myself, Den.

Okay, from the title I think you would know about the brief idea of this blog page isn't it? Yes, you are right! Our team will be posting about psychology subject and we will post the entries every week according to the chapters that we learned in class....

So, to get started, I would like to begin with chapter 1 of this subject which is "The Science of Psychology". This chapter is mainly about the introduction of psychology which tells us the brief idea about the origins of psychology and the terms that we needed to have before learning further later on.

Firstly, after i learned that chapter, I know that psychology is just another branch of science because it is a scientific study of behavior and mental processes. Apart from that, psychology is a science because it can improve our observation as it can prevent unwanted biases during experimental study. Besides that, psychology comes with four different goals that can be applied in our daily lives which is observation, explanation, prediction, and control.

The basics of early psychology was divided into 5 parts: Structuralism, Functionalism, Gestalt Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and behaviorism. Structuralism, which was introduced by Wilhelm Wundt is about objective introspection about thinking, and further popularized by Edward Titchener, who studied about the mind including emotions and sensations. Functionalism, on the other hand, was proposed by William James and it is the branch of psychology that studies about how the mind allows people to function in the real world. Gestalt psychology is about a study of learning, memory thought processes and problem solving. Psychoanalysis is about the study of the inner force drive behavior, that was proposed by Sigmund Freud. He claimed that every human has an unconscious level of self which repress our own desires. Lastly, behaviorism is the science of behavior that focuses on observable behavior only, that was proposed by John B. Watson.

After that, we learned about the seven modern perspectives of psychology. At this part of the chapter, we learned that psychodynamics perspective is the modern version of psychoanalysis where it is more focused on unconscious mind and development of a sense of self. Behavioral perspective, on the other hand, is the study of operant conditioning of voluntary behavior which was popularized by B.F. Skinner. Next, humanistic perspective which says that humans have their own will to choose their own destiny. Biopsychological perspective is mostly related to biology studies and uses biological terms in it. Cognitive perspective is about how people remember something, solve a problem, and think something. The last two of the modern perspective is the sociocultural perspective and the evolutionary perspective where sociocultural more focuses on social behavior while evolutionary is more towards the study of evolution of human based on the biological bases that every human share.

The next part of the chapter was about the methods used to study in psychology. I will not specify everything here but what I can tell is there are two types of method which is the scientific method and the descriptive method. Scientific method is like normal method used in science experiments whereas the descriptive method is more on practical because it includes naturalistic observation, laboratory observation, case studies, and surveys. When doing descriptive method, there are several precautions that needed to be taken so that the result will not be bias and it can be verified.

The next two sub-chapters after that is about how to find the relationship between two things, which is very simple because it is very similar to what we have learnt in elementary sciences. For the experiment, we learned new things like how to find the experimental group, and control group, and not to forget the random assignment. These new terms is surely new for us and it was very interesting to know about that.

The last part of the chapter is about the ethics of doing psychological research. In this part, we learned about several guidelines in conducting psychological research including the ethics in animal research.

Overall, this chapter is very interesting because we learnt a lot of new things and we cannot wait to learn more psychology after this so that we can judge a person's behavior accurately to the extent that we can actually read them and their minds! interesting, isn't it? Yeah so if you guys want to know more about psychology make sure to stay tuned to our blog, because we will be updating this blog from time to time.

I think that's all for now, see you again later. Thanks for the time, and Goodbye!