What is Psychology?
Psychology is a discipline seeking to study and analyse the human mind. There are various disciplines in this field that try to explain why people feel, behave, and think as they do.
Various approaches to psychology exist ranging from studying the role of biology in psychological health to the effect of the environment on human behavior. Some psychologists may specialize in studying the development of human mind, while others provide counselling to patients in an attempt to help them improve their lives.
Psychology is not just about a patient on a couch conversing with his therapist. There are forensic psychologists that provide assistance to legal professionals in evaluating a competency of criminal suspect or investigating charges of child abuse. Meanwhile, there are legal psychologists that work as a trial consultant or as an adviser to a judge.
Industrial-organizational psychologists often work in a company to help improve the morale in a workplace or choose the best applicants for the company. There are sports psychologists who work with players either individually or as a team.
Psychology can be further classified into two major fields, which are research psychology and applied psychology. Research psychology deals with conducting experiments in order to establish facts about the human mind, while applied psychology is concerned with helping people cope with their problems. There are experiments showing that psychotherapy's success rate in providing solution to a person's problem is almost at the same level as in talking to a friend. It is for this reason that the usefulness of clinical psychology as a discipline can be very hard to quantify at times. On the other hand, there are also reports showing the high satisfaction level of patients who undergo therapy.
The field of neuropsychology studies the structure of the human brain and how it affects mental health. This is done by using neuroimaging technology. State-of-the art tools such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans have significantly helped psychologists in establishing connections between psychological problems and biological conditions.