Portal:Psychology

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Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors. Psychology has the immediate goal of understanding individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases, and by many accounts it ultimately aims to benefit society. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioral, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and biological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors. Psychologists explore concepts such as perception, cognition, attention, emotion, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships, including psychological resilience, family resilience, and other areas. Psychologists of diverse orientations also consider the unconscious mind. Psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. In addition, or in opposition, to employing empirical and deductive methods, some—especially clinical and counseling psychologists—at times rely upon symbolic interpretation and other inductive techniques. Psychology has been described as a "hub science", with psychological findings linking to research and perspectives from the social sciences, natural sciences, medicine, and the humanities, such as philosophy. (Full article...) Template:/box-footer Consciousness is the quality or state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives." (Full article...) Australian soldiers near Ypres in 1917, during World War I. Soldier on left is likely suffering from shellshock, now described as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder image credit: public domain "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me." — Sigmund Freud Wilhelm Reich (/raɪx/; German: [ʀaɪç], 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud, and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several influential books, most notably Character Analysis (1933) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals: during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police. (Full article...) ...that Julian Rotter developed the locus of control theory, which has been widely used in the psychology of personality? ...that the effects of head trauma on memory can be seen by the post-operative results of HM, a patient who has been unable to form any new long-term memories since a surgical procedure performed in the 1950s? ▼ Psychology ► Psychology awards ► Behavior ► Branches of psychology ► Cognition ► Psychology experiments ► Human development ► Humor research ► Psychology lists ► Mind ► Psychology organizations ► Personality ► Popular psychology ► Psychiatry ► Psychologists ► Psychological schools ► Sexology ► Psychological testing ► Psychological theories ► Psychology stubs Template:/box-footer Neuroscience Psychiatry Medicine The following WikiProjects work to improve the quality and scope of articles related to psychology. Please join us at any of them. Psychology • Psychiatry • Neuroscience Template:/box-footer Template:/box-header {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Psychology/Recognized content}} Template:/box-footer The following Wikimedia sister projects provide more on this subject: What are portals? List of portals Featured portals