What is Psychology? and its Measurments

MEASUREMENTS IN PSYCHOLOGY

procedures for determining the quantitative expression of psychological phenomena. They use a variety of scales containing a certain set of positions put in some correspondence with psychological elements. According to the classification of scales proposed in 1946 by the American psychologist and psychophysicist S. S. Stevens, the following scales are distinguished: the ratio scale, the interval scale, the ordinal scale, and the nominal scale.

PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology formation. Comes from the Greek. psyche – soul + logos – teaching. Category. Scientific discipline. Specificity. He studies the patterns of functioning and development of the psyche. It is based on the representation in self-observation of special experiences that are not related to the outside world. From the 2nd half of the nineteenth century. there was a separation of psychology from philosophy, which became possible due to the development of objective experimental methods that replaced introspection, and the formation of a special subject of human psychology, the main features of which were activity and the appropriation of socio-historical experience.

The philosophical problem of psychology

The main philosophical problem of psychology is whether psychology should be considered as objective. Explanatory, hypothetical-constructive natural science or as a dialogue, understanding, interpreting, and reconstructing humanities.

A science that studies the psyche and consciousness of a person, as well as his behavior. Psychology operates with such basic concepts as memory, rational and irrational thinking, intelligence, learning, personality, perception, and emotions. And also studies their relationship with human behavior. Existing psychological schools differ in their philosophical concepts. They adhere to and what methods they use in their work. These include such schools of introspection as the school of Freud. Jung, and Adler, as well as Gestalt psychology, and behavioral and cognitive schools. Modern psychology is especially attracted by the schools of the latter trend.

Many practicing psychologists do not belong to any of these schools; some take eclectic positions. The various currents in psychology, on the other hand, are functional or occupational subdivisions of psychology that are based on practical considerations. These include: anomalous, analytical, applied, clinical, comparative, evolutionary, educational, experimental, geriatric, industrial, child, physiological and social psychology.

Psychology in organism and  environment

Psychological considers behavior as a process of interaction between the organism and the environment. And its explanatory principle becomes the principle of the biological utility of the psyche. However, human behavior takes place in the complex framework of the social environment. A person enters into communication with nature only through the environment. And depending on this, the environment becomes the most important factor that determines and establishes human behavior. Psychology studies the behavior of a social person and the laws of change in this behavior.

The physical and mental, spirit and matter, the structure of the body and character, in essence, are deeply identical processes. Closely intertwined, and the separation of both cannot be justified by any real considerations. On the contrary, the main premise in psychology is the assumption of the unity of all processes occurring in the body. Of the identity of the mental and the bodily and falsity, and the impossibility of distinguishing between them.

In recent decades

In recent decades, a tendency has been revealed in psychology to break up into two separate independent areas of knowledge. Natural science, materialistic psychology, and descriptive, idealistic psychology of the spirit. At present, psychology is experiencing a most serious crisis. This is expressed in the fact that psychology has disintegrated into many different areas of scientific thought. That do not form a single generally accepted scientific system.

In essence, this is a crisis of its methodological foundations of it. which can be resolved only in the process of a long historical development of psychology. which is built based on dialectical materialism.
the science of the psyche and mental phenomena. As an independent director, it was formed in the second half of the 19th century. Until that time, it developed within the framework of philosophy.
history is characterized by a change in the subject matter.

In ancient times

So, in ancient times it was the “soul”. From the second half of the 17th century. “consciousness”, and since the beginning of the 20th century. “behavior”. At present, the subject of mental health combines a whole range of diverse mental phenomena. Including mental processes, mental states, and mental properties. In addition, within its framework, consciousness and unconscious mental processes (see the Unconscious). The psychological foundations of human activity, behavioral motives, and much more are studied.

In the process of P.’s development, its methods were determined. With the help of this the problems of scientific research were solved. From philosophical reasoning to experiment – such is their historical range.
Modern P. is actively developing. At present, there are a very large number of branches: aviation psychology, military psychology, age psychology, differential psychology, zoopsychology, and comparative psychology, engineering psychology, history of psychology, space psychology, medical psychology, neuropsychology, and general psychology. P., pathophysiology, pedagogical P., psychogenetics, psychohygiene, psychodiagnostic, psycholinguistics, psychosomatics, P. arts, P. sports, P. of labor and management (see Psychology of management), political P., psychotherapy, psychophysics, psychophysiology, special P., social P. (see Social psychology of personality), economic P., ethnic P. (see Ethnopsychology ), legal P., etc.

There is, however, another interpretation of P., which is used in everyday life (see. Ordinary consciousness): everything that is connected with the inner world of a person, as a result, the concepts of P. and “psyche” are involuntarily identified.

It is simply impossible to define; indeed, it is not easy to characterize. Even if someone does it today, tomorrow it will be seen as an inadequate effort. It is what scientists and philosophers of various persuasions have created to try to understand the consciousness and behavior of various organisms from the most primitive to the more complex. Consequently, the reality is not an object at all, it is about an object or about many objects.

Boundaries of Psychology

There are few boundaries here, and apart from the canons of science and the ethical norms of a free society, there should be no limits either on the part of its representatives or on the part of its critics. It is an attempt to understand what has so far largely eluded understanding. Any attempt to limit or frame it implies that something is known about the limits of our knowledge, which is not true. As a discipline in its own right, it only emerged a century or so ago in the medical and philosophical faculties.

From medicine she took the orientation that the explanation of what is done, thought, and felt must ultimately lie in biology and physiology; from philosophy, she took a class on deep problems concerning the consciousness of will and knowledge. Since then, it has been variously defined as “the science of the psyche”, “the science of mental life”, “the science of behavior”, etc. All such definitions, of course, reflect the prejudices of those who give them rather than the actual nature of the field. In the course of writing this dictionary, a rather odd metaphor has emerged that seems to reflect, to some extent, an essential quality of our discipline.

She is like an amoeba, relatively unstructured, but well identifiable as a separate entity with a particular mode of action in which she projects herself onto some new techniques. Some new problem areas, some theoretical models, or even some other separate scientific fields, incorporating them and slowly and clumsily transforming into another form. Not very flattering, maybe for sure. For lexicographic problems, see a psychologist.

The term P.

seems to be ambiguous and widely used at the present time in its most diverse meanings both in science and in practice (in everyday life). It is difficult to give an exact scientific definition, and there are several reasons for this:

1. There are both scientific and practical P., and each of them can be defined in different ways.

2. There are many areas of scientific and practical psychology, and among some of them, for example, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive and humanistic psychology, there is very little in common.