What Is Psychology: November 2012

How Can Psychology Help You To Solve Practical Problems

How Psychology Help You

Were you afraid of the dark as a child? This is one of the mos common childhood problems. Psychologists have developed a number of methods to help children overcome these fears. Psychologists Jean Giebenhain and Stan O'Dell (1984) pput some of these methods together into manual worked. They located the parents of six children who were so afraid of the dark that they threw tantrums at right, insisted on sleeping with their lights on, or were unable to go camping or spend the night with friends. The manual taught parents the following procedures:

Giving the child control via a rheostat: A rheostat allowed the child to set the illumination level of a room lamp which was placed beside the child's bed. The rheostat levels set by the child were recorded every night.
Relaxation Training: Every night before bedtime, the parents and children practiced procedures for getting very relaxed.
Positive Self-Statements: At the same time, the parents helped their children memorize and repeat positive statements about themselves and their ability to get along in the dark. Some sample statements were "I am brave..." and "I can take care of myself when.... I'm in the dark."
Record Keeping And Feedback: Every night, the children set their rheostats at the lowest level they thought they could tolerate. The levels were numbered from one (total darkness) to eleven (maximum brightness). The goal was to make the light dimmer by one-half number every night. A graph showed the child's settings for each nigh. Every morning, the parents and children recorded the child's setting from the right before and checked the child's progress.
Rewards For Success: Whenever the children's morning entry showed progress, the parents responded with praise, hugs, and sometimes special treats.
Phasing Out Rewards: Whenever a child reached the low level of illumination that the parents and experimenters had agreed to aim for, the rewards were gradually phased out. The hope was that being brave in the dark would become its own reward.

The hope was apparently well founded. Within 2 weeks, all the children were sleeping all night with their lights at or below the goal level. And the children's reports on a "fear thermometer" indicated that they were not afraid. The experimenters checked up on the children 3 months later, then 6 months later, then 1 year later. Each time, it was found that the children were doing as well as, or better than, they had at the end of training.

The manual these parents used cost less than $2 to produce. The rheostat costs about $12.5. All in all, not too steep a price for bravery in the darkness!

Definition Of Psychology

A Definition Of Psychology

Strange as it may seem, defining psychology is no easy matter because of both the wide scope the wide scope of its concerns and the philosophical differences among its practitioners. But if you ask a psychologist to define the word, the chances are good that you will be told something like: Psychology is “the science of human and animal behavior; it includes the application of this science to human problems.”

The fist part of this definition calls psychology a science. What is Psychology? The second part of the definition is about the application of the psychological principles to life’s problems. Can psychology help solve life’s problems? You may also wonder about the word behavior in the definition. Why behavior rather than mind or thoughts or feelings? Another question which may occur to you is whether psychology is the only science of human and animal behavior. Are there others? Suppose we look at each of these question, beginning, first, with the one about science.

Psychology As A Science

A science is a body of systematized knowledge that is gathered by carefully observing and measuring events. Psychologists do experiments and make observations which others can repeat; they obtain data, often in the form of quantitative measurements, which others can verify. This scientific approach is very different from forming opinions on the basis of individual experience or arguing from premises that no one can test. Thus experiments and observations are at the core of scientific psychology.

As a science, psychology is a systematic. Data from experiments and observations are essential, but for them to make some sense in helping us understand events, they must be organized in some way. Scientific theories are important tools for the organization of observed facts. To some people, the word theory simply means someone’s unsupported and unfounded notion of how things ought to be done or a set of abstract principles that do not work in practical situations. However, theory has quite a different meaning in science. Scientific theories are general principles which summarize many observations and predict what can be expected to happen in new situations. As summarize and predictors of events, scientific theories should not be thought of as “right” or “wrong” but merely as more or less useful in helping summarize what has been observed and in making predictions about what is to be expected when new observations or experiments are done. As new data are obtained, theories are subject to modification, or old theories may eventually be scrapped in favor of new ones which do a better job of summarizing and prediction than did the old theories. Many of the arguments scientists have with each other are over the modification and scrapping of theories as new data are gathered.

Another important part of most sciences psychology included is measurement, defined as the assignment of numbers to objects or events according to certain rules. We are all familiar with measurements of physical scales length, time, temperature, and the like. Measurement in psychology is often more difficult than it is in sciences such as physics and chemistry because many of the things psychologists study cannot be measured directly by physical scales. What are the yardsticks of happiness or friendship, for example? Even though many behaviors are difficult to measure, psychologists have devised many ingenious tests to assign numbers to them. Of course, not everything psychological is as difficult to measure as are happiness and friendship. We can often design our experiments and arrange our observations so that we can use physical measures of space and time to tell us about psychological events. For example, we can count the number of times a person behave one way in one situation and another way in another situation, or we can measure the time taken to make a response in one situation or another.

Behavioral Psychology Studies

How Can Psychology Help You To Solve Practical Problems