SY101 Lecture 9: Psychoogy chap 1
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Define psychology and describe the goals and levels of analysis psychologists use. From our earliest beginnings, people have been curious about the inner workings of the mind and have attempted to explain and predict the thoughts and emotions of themselves and of others. Today, the science of studying mental processes and behaviour is known as psychology. Psychology as a discipline is concerned with empirically examining the mind and behaviour and determining how each is influenced by the psychobiology of the organism as well as the effects of the external environment. Mental processes describe the activity of our brains when we are engaged in thinking, processing information, and using language. Mental processes include complex experiences such as thinking, imagining, and remembering. During psychology"s early history, the primary method for exploring internal mental processes was to observe outward behaviour, our observable actions, and make inferences, or guesses, about what was happening in the mind.
