Psychology Branches & Methods PDF

# Branches of Psychology ## Branches of Psychology: - **Pure Psychology** - **General Psychology:** Deals with the fundamental rules and theories of psychology in relation to the study of behavior of a normal adult. - **Abnormal Psychology:** Deals with the behavior of individuals who are...

# Branches of Psychology ## Branches of Psychology: - **Pure Psychology** - **General Psychology:** Deals with the fundamental rules and theories of psychology in relation to the study of behavior of a normal adult. - **Abnormal Psychology:** Deals with the behavior of individuals who are unusual. It studies mental disorders and their causes and treatment. - **Social Psychology:** Deals with the group behavior and the inter-relationship of people with others. It studies various kinds of group phenomena such as public opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and crowd behavior. It studies the way in which individuals are affected by other behavior. - **Physiological Psychology:** Describes and explains the biological and physiological basis of behavior. It concerns of sensory organs, nervous system, muscles, and glands underlying all behavior. - **Parapsychology:** Deals with extrasensory perceptions, causes of rebirth, telepathy, and allied problems. - **Geopsychology:** Explains the relationship of physical environment, particularly like weather, climate, and soil with behavior. - **Developmental Psychology:** Describes the process and factors that influence growth and development in relation to the behavior of an individual from birth to old age. It is sub-divided into branches like child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric psychology. It tries to understand complex behavior by studying their beginnings and orderly ways in which they change or develop over a lifespan. - **Experimental Psychology:** Deals with the ways and means of carrying psychological experiments using scientific methods. They do basic research in an effort to discover and understand fundamental and general causes of behavior. Examples include learning, memory, sensation, perception, and motivation. - **Applied Psychology** - **Educational Psychology:** Tries to apply psychological principles, theories, and techniques to human behavior in educational situations. It tries to improve all aspects of the teaching/learning process. - **Clinical Psychology:** The largest subfield of psychology. It describes the causes of mental illness, abnormal behavior of a patient, and suggests treatment. - **Industrial Psychology:** Seeks the principles, theories, and techniques for the study of human behavior in relation to industrial environments. Their principles assist in public and private organizations. - **Legal Psychology:** Tries to study the behavior of persons like clients, criminals, witnesses, etc. - **Military Psychology:** Principles and techniques are in military science. For example, how to keep soldiers and high in wartime. - **Political Psychology:** Principles and techniques in studying politics and deriving political gains. ## Methods of Psychology ### Methods of Psychology: | **Method** | **Description** | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Introspection or self-observation method | One of the oldest methods of psychology. It means to look within. It deals with systematically observing one’s own behavior and reporting same, which is later analyzed to understand behavior. Not available to other natural sciences. | | Observational method | The observer observes and collects data. It deals with the behavior of individuals. Consists of perception of an individual's behavior under natural conditions and interpretation by the observer. Essentially a way of perceiving behavior as it is. | | Experimental method | The most scientific of objective methods of studying behavior. Experiment comes from the Latin word "to try," "to put to test." Studies the causes and effect relationship between the variables of human behavior | | Clinical or case history method | Aims at studying the cause and basis of people's anxieties, fear, and personal maladjustment. Information is collected from the memory of the individual, their parents, family members, friends, teachers, and all other available records and reports. The information includes past history of the disease, treatment already taken, changes if any, like improvement, present conditions, probable causes, signs and symptoms, etc. | | Survey Method | Problems in psychology cannot be studied by experiments and other methods. Some problems like the study of opinions, attitudes, health care needs, etc., need to be studies by means of the survey method. The survey method involves collection or gathering of information from a large number of people using questionnaires, inventories, checklists, rating scales, and interviews. | | Genetic and developmental method | Psychologists study not only the behavior of an individual at a particular point in time but also his development from *birth" to *death*, the influence of heredity and environment in the development of the person and "condition," favorable and unfavorable from normal and abnormal. This can be done in two ways: 1) *Cross-sectional study* where children of different age groups will be studied simultaneously and 2) *Longitudinal study* where the same child will be studied during various stages of their life. |