PSYC 2030 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Abnormal Psychology, Percy Williams Bridgman, Communalism

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2030
• Professor: John Grundy

Document Summary

Some research in psychology concerns describing, predicting, and explaining the fundamental principles of behavior rand mental processes; this activity is referred to as basic research. Traditionally, those involved in basic research in psychology have studied such topics as sensation and perception, learning, memory and cognition, and basic neurological and physiological processes as they relate to psychological phenomena. On the other hand, applied research is so named because it has direct and immediate relevance to the solution of real-world problems. A basic research study might investigate the ability of people to simultaneously carry out two different information-processing tasks in a laboratory. An applied study on attention capacity might examine the limits of attention for a real-world task with important practical implications using a cell phone while driving a car, for example. It is sometimes believed that applied research is more valuable than basic research because an applied study seems to concern more relevant problems and to tackle them directly.