INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY

It was the first class of psychology subject on the second day of our third semester. Being an engineering student, I really have no idea about what psychology is. Yes, I know it is something related to your mind. All this time I thought psychology is about reading people’s mind and understanding the way of thinking. But I never know that psychology is actually a scientific study of human behavior and mental process. There, I got one missed point about psychology –study of human behavior. Behavior here means outward actions and reactions while mental process is internal activity of our minds. 

Psychology is not about to study human behavior and the mental process only.There are 4 goals in psychology that we have learnt which are description, explanation, prediction and control. First, psychology is to describe what is happening with human behavior and its mental process.  A lot of methods can be used to describe behavior such as naturalistic observation, laboratory observation, case study, and surveys. All these methods will be explained more in detail. Second goal, psychology also is to explain the behavior. Why is it happening? Is it nature or nutured? In this case, theories are used as general explanation of a set of observation and facts. The third goal is to predict. We already know what is happening based on the observation made, and we already come out with theory that can explain our observation. So know we can predict what will happen or if it will happen again. The fourth one which is the last goal of psychology is to control. When we can describe, explain and predict, of course we can take control of the behavior. Learning psychology really has opened my mind and expectation about it. While everyone think psychology is just about reading human’s mind, psychology actually has its own goals to serve.  

            See, it is already a lot to share throughout our first week of psychology class. So I’m not going to tell everything that we have learnt in detail. To make it short I would like to share one thing I learnt in our psychology class which I found is really fascinating. It was about Pavlov’s dogs. So how does dog is related to psychology? Do you know that there was a Russian psychologist named Ivan Pavlov? He observed that his dogs will salivate in response to being fed. But what is interesting is when he noticed that the dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he was not bringing them food. Pavlov then conducted an experiment, where he used a bell as a stimulus to his dogs’ salivation.  Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As expected, the bell on its own now caused the dogs to salivate. 

         

I guess this example about Pavlov’s dogs is enough to cover our learning session for this week. From Pavlov’s experiment, we can see how the four goals are achieved. We also can see how psychology is very relatable to our daily life.  Psychology makes you understand better who you are and what your expectations and limitations are. I personally think that psychology has opened my eyes and change my perspective about this world. Since human beings are complex creatures, so I think learning psychology is going to be a fun journey!