Von Wright G.H. In defence of psychology. In: Friedman M., May L., Parsons K., Stiff J. (eds) Rights and Reason. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht; 2000. doi:10.1007/978-94-015-9403-5_14 I think that everybody is interested in people, their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. People are fascinating, and that includes you! Humans often defy explanation and evade prediction. Figuring people out can be pretty hard. Just when you think that you’ve figured someone out, bang, he surprises you. Now I know that some of you may be thinking, Actually, I’m a pretty good judge of people. I’ve got a handle on things. If that’s the case, that’s great! Some folks do seem to have a more intuitive understanding of people than others. For the rest of us though, there’s psychology. About This Book The foundations of this function approach are built on a philosophy know as functionalism, which is the notion that the mind, mental processes, and behavior are tools for adaptive functioning that lead to a human functioning most effectively in his or her environment (survival and perpetuation of the species). remember.eps Let me be perfectly clear: Not everything that psychologists do, talk about, and believe is based on scientific research. A lot of stuff is based on the authority of well-known personalities in the field. Other knowledge is based on clinical experience without any systematic investigation. A good-sized chunk of information that’s out there is also purely theoretical, but it makes sense on rational or logical grounds. A quote by John Watson, considered by some historians as the founder of behaviorism, epitomizes this perspective:

Get to know the ethical guidelines that psychologists are expected to follow during treatment and in applied psychology. Chapter 1 The Purpose of Psychology IN THIS CHAPTER freeassociation.eps Before I provide a definition of psychology, I want you to take a few minutes to jot down some of your ideas on what psychology is. When you conduct your statistical analyses on this data, you need to know what role each variable played in your research design. Generally speaking, you classify variables in psychology statistics as independent variables, dependent variables or covariates. Independent variables Humanistic psychology is a perspective that emphasizes looking at the the whole person, and the uniqueness of each individual. Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumptions that people have free will and are motivated to acheive their potential and self-actualize. When putting together the psychology statistics you need to report when you’re describing a variable, you need to know which of the three measures of central tendency — the mode, median and mean — you should use. Take your cue from the advantages and disadvantages of each measure.Forensic psychology: Sometimes referred to as "legal psychology," forensic psychology is a branch that focuses on psychological assessment of people who are involved in the legal system. Forensic psychologists must have strong clinical skills. You determine the most appropriate measure of dispersion as follows, depending on the nature of your data: Therefore, it is possible that the approach would not travel well and is a product of the cultural context within which it was developed, and an emic approach is more appropriate.

Use the table of contents and index to see what grabs your interest. If you’re new to the subject, by all means start with Chapter 1 and go. But you don’t have to read it cover to cover. Kind of like a cafeteria — take what you like and leave the rest. In case you were wondering (and worried), I am not engaged in an actual build a human project, except for having a model to work from. But if I did wa Is psychology right about people? It may or may not be, but in an attempt to live up to that challenge, psychology uses the standards of science to do so, and if conducting and practicing psychological science lends itself to some use, exposes someone to one new idea or way of thinking, and helps just one person live a better life, then it has served a valuable role in the world. It is not privileged per se. It cannot explain everything about being human. Come on, that would just pompous and downright impossible. Data measured at the nominal level: Because all three measures of dispersion require data to be ranked or summed, none of them are appropriate for data measured at the nominal level.

References

Like all other carbon-based living organisms on planet Earth, human beings are staying alive machines. (Admit it; you instantly thought of the Bee Gees, didn’t you, or John Travolta in that white bell-bottom suit?) I’m not saying there is no meaning to life. Quite the contrary; I’m saying that the function of life is to be alive, to stay alive, and to perpetuate life. What’s the meaning of it all? Wrong book; try Philosophy For Dummies or Religion For Dummies. Whenever someone tells you to look at the bright side, they’re coming from a cognitive perspective. When something bad happens, most people feel better if the problem gets solved or the issue is resolved. But how should you feel if nothing changes? If circumstances don’t change, do you have to feel bad forever? Of course not; in most cases, people can change the way they think about a situation. You can choose to look on the bright side — or at least not look solely at the downside. That’s the gist of cognitive therapy. Humanistic and existential Some of my patients have said, All you do is talk. Can’t you prescribe some medicine for me? Still others grant me seemingly supernatural powers of knowledge and healing. I wrote this book to clear up some misconceptions about psychology. What Is Psychology? Yes, this is the kind of blueprint or overlay I use to understand what psychology is: What are the ingredients of a person — mind, thoughts, emotions, perceptions, dreams, fears, personality, and brain — and what is the purpose of each ingredient? I’m not alone. Many psychologists engage in reverse engineering of the mind and behavior by looking at all the parts and how they work together to create . . . well, you. Finding the function

The tools and procedures that health care providers use to diagnose, fix, and maintain people include the following and other areas of research and practice: But then it happens: change. That’s right, something unexpected happens, and my human begins floundering, struggling, and verging on failing to achieve its primary function. How could I have forgotten that the world is not a static place? When someone is in a state of panic or extremely angry about something, it’s useful to have some basic ideas of how to help. You can use psychological first aid — a form of crisis intervention that consists of five easy steps. Now I’m going to enter into the fray with my own metaphor for better or worse. I don’t think this metaphor is particularly unique, however, and there’s likely chance that I borrowed it from someone else. But I think it’s a good one, so here it is:

When to call a mental health professional

B.F. Skinner (1948) published Walden Two, in which he described a utopian society founded upon behaviorist principles. The approach is optimistic and focuses on the noble human capacity to overcome hardship, pain and despair. People are motivated to self-actualize: What if this book was about botany? Would the biopsychosocial model apply? Only if you believe that plants have minds. In other words, it’d be a stretch! This highlights the uniqueness of the biopsychosocial model of psychology: The mind is central to understanding behavior and mental processes.

As Rogers once said, “The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive and experience it at this particular moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you perceive and experience at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many ‘real worlds’ as there are people! (Rogers, 1980, p. 102). In this chapter, you find out how psychologists go about their business, including how overarching theories frame the questions they ask and the variables they look at. You also get a look at the various branches of psychology that include more than what people typically think of such as clinical psychology. Finally, you see how the discipline of psychology works to be as scientific as possible by basing its knowledge on research and statistical methods, which shores up its credibility among the other scholarly disciplines. Finding a Framework One of the best places to catch armchair psychologists (people who speculate without systematic evidence) in action is the local coffeehouse or watering hole. People love talking about the whys and the wherefores of other people’s behavior. And then I said. . . . You should have told him. . . . Hanging out in public social spaces is much like being in group therapy sometimes. People work hard at figuring out other people.

Getting to know the range, interquartile range, and standard deviation

But then it happens — change. That’s right, something unexpected happens, and my human begins floundering, struggling, and verging on failing to achieve its primary function. How could I have forgotten that the world is not a static place? Before I give you a definition, I’m going to engage in a therapy cliché: Tell me what you think? Tell me how you feel? (There’s an old joke about psychologists: How many psychologists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two! One to do it and the other one to ask, How does that make you feel?) What are some of the ideas that come to mind when people think about the topic of psychology? It depends on whom you ask. Sometimes, I imagine myself as a guest on a television talk show. I’m bombarded by questions from the audience that I can’t answer. My heart starts to pound. I begin to sweat. I start to stand up so that I can run off the set, but then something comes to me that keeps me in my seat. I imagine asking the people in the audience what they think psychology is and why they think a psychologist can answer questions about people. Whys, Whats, and Hows of People The environment a person is exposed to and interacts with can either frustrate or assist this natural destiny. If it is oppressive, it will frustrate; if it is favorable, it will assist. Behavior must be understood in terms of the subjective conscious experience of the individual (phenomenology): Studying a person’s subjective experience is the biggest problem for scientific psychology, which stresses the need for its subject matter to be publicly observable and verifiable. Subjective experience, by definition, resists such processes. In some cases, you refer to variables as independent variables even when you’re not directly manipulating them. This type of independent variable is a quasi-independent variable. Dependent variables