Test: Psychology- 1 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

Psychologists can study any of these core content areas including developmental, cognitive, affective, social and biological processes and behaviour.

The best answer is that the study of psychology involves the science of behaviour and mental processes. Psychology also involves emotional, developmental and physical processes, but is not limited to these types of processes. Psychology is not the science of philosophy.

In the past, many practitioners operated within a frame of reference that regarded homosexuality as a psychological disorder. However, there is no empirical evidence for this position, and it has therefore been abandoned (homosexuality is now regarded by psychologists as a sexual preference rather than as a psychological disorder of any kind).

Controlled measurement and experimentation are the key tools in the science of psychology. Speculation, common sense, generalisation, personal experience and collective wisdom are anecdotal, non-systematic and uncontrolled method of collecting information and testing hypotheses.

Empiricism is the belief that knowledge comes from observation and experience, and sensory experience is the source of all knowledge. This orientation requires observable evidence that can be confirmed or refuted by data collection and statistical testing, which is the common, underlying principle across subfields of psychology.

According to the information-processing framework, both the brain and the computer consist of millions of components, yet the behaviour of computers can be understood by studying the programs that run them. In the same way, a good account of human behaviour is considered possible by using terms abstract enough to transcend the operation of the brain’s approximately 100 billion nerve cells. From the human information-processing perspective, information delivered to the senses is translated into a cognitive code. In other words, specific aspects of the environment are detected and their organization begins. According to this framework, two types of processing can occur: automatic processing, which is effortless and unconscious, and controlled processing, which is effortful and conscious.

Modern psychology has roots in philosophy, physiology and psychophysics. The bystander effect, Milgram’s experiments and behaviourism were outgrowths of modern psychology and did not precede the establishment of modern psychology.

The connectionist approach views the cognitive system as conducting information processing tasks in parallel, with the system functioning as a whole unit together as opposed to breaking down into the single units. Human information-processing approaches support the idea of a central control unit, and neither approach can observe the brain as it operates naturally in real life situations.

Although compulsive violence can be associated with brain activity and/or poor socialization in certain individuals, the tendency for high ambient temperature to be associated with naturally occurring aggression is likely to be due to something more prosaic: environmental regulation of behaviour, affecting everyone. Even in cooler climates, hotter years, seasons and days are more likely to produce more assaults, murders, rapes, riots and partner abuse.

Several factors led psychology away from behaviourism, and towards the 'Cognitive Revolution', including the realization that 1) the strict methodological controls that were part and parcel of behaviourism had resulted in the elimination of those concepts from people's everyday experience (e.g. their experience of consciousness); 2) the stimulus-response approach was inadequate for explaining many psychological phenomena (e.g. how language develops); and 3) behaviourism had therefore deprived psychology of some of its most interesting problems (e.g. how people ascribe meaning to events and how this meaning influences subsequent behaviour).