Anne Rooney - Think Like a Psychologist

PICTURE CREDITS

Corbis:(CinemaPhoto)

Getty Images:

Kobal Collection:

nyenyec:

Science Photo Library:(Daily Herald Archive/National Media Museum)

OpenStax College:

Shutterstock:

(Rob Wilson),

Lorna Tilley:

Peter Trevaris:

Wellcome Images:

Published in 2022 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

29 East 21st Street, New York, NY 10010

Copyright Arcturus Holdings Limited, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rooney, Anne.

Title: Think like a psychologist / Anne Rooney.

Description: New York: Rosen YA, 2022. | Series: Think like a

Identifiers: ISBN 9781499471007 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781499471014 (library bound) | ISBN 9781499471021 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Psychology--Juvenile literature.

Classification: LCC BF149.5 R66 2022 | DDC 150--dc23

Manufactured in the United States of America

CPSIA Compliance Information: Batch #CSRYA22.

For Further Information contact Rosen Publishing, New York, New York at 1-800-237-9932.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

What is psychology anyway?

The human brain is the single most compelling object of study or contemplation. Whatever interests you may haveart, politics, literature, sports, mechanics, astronomy, chessthey all originated with a human mind and you use your own mind to pursue them. How the mind works, in sickness and in health, is the realm of psychology.

To know how and why and what we think has fascinated humankind for millennia, but until recently we had little other than metaphor and stories to help us express our ideas about our minds workings.

Brain and mind, body and spirit

In the 17th century, the French philosopher and mathematician Ren Descartes suggested that the human body works rather like a machine. We can apply fluid dynamics to explain how the blood flows, for instance, and our bones and muscles work just like levers. But Descartes could not work out how the spirit which animates the bodywhat would later be called "the ghost in the machine"fits in.

Ren Descartes

"I think therefore I am," he said (in a different philosophical enquiry). We would probably all agree it is principally our minds that make us who we are. In theory, your physical body could be occupied by another brain (if we had the surgical skill to effect a brain transplant), and that body would no longer act for "you" but for the person whose brain was residing in it. We locate the "I" that is our identity in our mind, which is somehow in, or created by our brain.

To explain the mind in the brain, people have turned to stories and religions. Is it a spirit or soul breathed into us by God? Is it a portion of some vast world or universal soul, a little chip off a cosmic block of consciousness? Today, we are getting closer to understanding how the brain works and although we still cant quite locate or define the mind, we can explain a lot of how it works in terms of neurology.

Psychology, psychiatry, and neurology

Psychology is the study of how the mind (psyche) works. Psychiatry applies some of that knowledge therapeutically to help people with disorders of the mind. And neurology is the study of the physical and chemical structure and functioning of the brain. In studying "how the mind works," psychology involves neurology in some of its explanations.

Mind how you go

Many of us might be affected by certain types of mental illness from time to time, just as our bodies may be affected by various physical ailments. You might sometimes have anxiety problems, or suffer a period of depression, or you may be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), just as you may have had appendicitis or have suffered from eczema or asthma.

We are the lab rats

For many of us, the most personally relevant aspects of psychology are how our minds work in everyday ways. How we learn, how we interpret the world, how we interact with other people and what we are like. To find out about these aspects of the mind, psychologists often perform experiments, either in the laboratory or in the "field" (out in the world). Or they carry out studiesasking questions or examining statistics, for instance. Only by looking at the behavior or development of a large number of people can psychologists work out what falls in the middle of the spectrumwhat we casually call "normal." Some psychology studies focus solely on dysfunctional minds. This is not simply because dysfunctional minds might need special treatment and therapy, but because they can help to shed light on "normal" minds.

BEHIND THE MASK

To many people, mental illness is more frightening than physical illness. We cant see whats going on. Theres no rash or bruise to look at, so we cant imagine what the problem is or how severe it is. Many people feel threatened by any type of mental illness, even though someone with (say) OCD or depression is no threat to anyone else. We cant catch the illness, like we can catch flu.

As we start to understand how problems with the brain can cause some types of psychological conditions, perhaps people will become less worried. After all, producing too little dopamine in the brain (associated with depression and Alzheimers disease, among other conditions) is not conceptually any different from producing too little insulin in the pancreas (which causes type 1 diabetes).

Hard work

Psychological studies are plagued with problems. If people know their behavior is being investigated, they often change it. They might do this for various reasons: to please the experimenter, to seem like the kind of person they would like to be, to be perverse or, perhaps unconsciously, because the alien situation of the laboratory set-up makes them anxious. This means that many studies have had to be surreptitious, and that raises ethical problems. Some of the landmark experiments in psychology would not be allowed by an ethics committee today. Many of the subjects didnt give consent for what was going to happen to them. And some experiments risked causing genuine psychological harm to the people selectedencouraging them to act in ways they would later regret, for example. Later, we will look at some examples of psychology experiments that had potentially damaging effects on subjects.

Like-minded?

Its hard to say how far the results of a study can be extended to the general population, particularly to those of different cultures. The subjects are often of a certain typepeople who readily agree or volunteer to be involved in experimentsand therefore they are not necessarily typical of the population at large.

Subjects are sometimes chosen from an even more specific group of people; they may be students who are short of cash and therefore willing to take part in an experiment for the money.

How far can results gathered from studying affluent 21-year-old American college students (for example) be extended to explain the behavior of elderly Afghani goat farmers, workers in a Bangladeshi garment factory, Tibetan nuns, or Brazilian business tycoons?