So What Is Psychology?

I thought I would dedicate my first blog post here to asking the question: what is psychology? The easy answer is that it is the study of the human mind, behaviour and feelings. After that it gets a little complicated. After all, there is clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, health psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology . . . I will let Wikipedia take over from here. You're not here for a list, though. I assume you want my take on the matter or you would not be here at all. Well, here it is:

When I tell people I am studying psychology the response I get most often is 'You're not going to analyse me, are you?' When I feel mischievous I reply, 'I am analysing you right now.' However, the truth is, halfway through my second year I think I have only had one lecture on psycho-analysis. It's not that all of psychology has moved on from it; it's that psychology has grown so many branches since then and they all bear their own, individual fruits.

The biggest change in psychology was probably caused by the advancement of brain imaging, especially fMRI. Now we're able to look inside a living brain as its owner completes a task and see what's happening and where. That means we can begin to tease out how the brain works. We already had an idea that different parts of the brain performed different tasks, but there is so much coordination between brain regions that the overall picture is so incredibly complicated. For that reason, psychologists still need to come up with ever more ingenuous experiments to make sense of what is going on. Take the stroop test. Most of you should be familiar with what that is. It's where you have to say the colour a word is written in and not the colour the word is spelling out. So, for instance, if you see BLUE, you need to say 'green'. If you see RED, you need to say 'yellow'. This is difficult to do, especially quickly. But what is actually going on in the brain? Are we suppressing the word we are not supposed to say or are we promoting the word we are supposed to say? To answer that, someone very clever (Tipper, 1984) tweaked the experiment: they arranged the words so that each colour you're supposed to say was the colour you weren't supposed to in the preceding word. So, RED is followed by GREEN. Here, the word you want to say but are not supposed to is 'red' but the next word you are supposed to say is 'red' as well. The experimenters said that if you were suppressing the word 'red' then you would take longer to say 'red' when you are supposed to. If you were just promoting the correct word that would not have any effect. What they found was that participants took longer to say the correct colour when it was preceded by the same word that they weren't supposed to say. It's a very simple experiment but it allows us to say that, probably, we suppress things we're not supposed to say instead of promoting the words we are.

That's what psychology is. At least for me as a student most of the time. We're interested in what the brain is doing. Except when we're not. I am currently involved in some research that involves analysing conversation and looking for patterns in the way we report problems. That involves watching hour upon hour of videos of families eating dinner and transcribing anything that resembles what we're looking for. There are no fMRIs and no clever experiments: just lots and lots of watching and listening. Which is not to say it is not incredibly methodical. Conversation analysis uses a type of transcription called Jefferson. This allows us to break down conversation into recognisable and predictable parts so that we can see what language does as opposed to what it means. We're not trying to imply cognitive processes; we're trying to work out how we construct language to make it do what we want it to do. Why? Well, when a child calls a helpline to report abuse it really pays to know how best to coax out the information you need as quickly and as accurately as possible. However, while I am doing that, a few doors down the corridor, two of my friends are sticking their hands into icy water and seeing if swearing enables them to stand it for longer (Stephens, Atkins & Kingston, 2009).

I may not have helped you to understand what psychology today is. I hope, though, I have gone some way to helping you appreciate how broad and inventive it is. That should come as no surprise. We're trying to understand the human mind, which is still the most complicated thing we know of in the universe.

Refs.

Stephens, R., Atkins, J., & Kingston, A. (2009). Swearing as a response to pain. Neuroreport, 20(12), 1056-1060.

Tipper, S. P. (1985). The negative priming effect: Inhibitory priming by ignored objects. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 37(4), 571-590.