Tip When you see this icon, I’m trying to emphasize a bit of information that may come in handy someday. remember.eps Psychologists sometimes call this armchair psychologizing folk psychology — a framework of principles used by ordinary people to understand, explain, and predict their own and other people’s behavior and mental states. In practice, everyone uses a variety of psychological notions or concepts to explain individuals’ mental states, personalities, and behaviors. Two concepts in particular that people tend to rely on are beliefs and desires. That is, most people assume that people have beliefs and that they act on those beliefs. So when you wonder why people do what they do, it’s easy; it’s because of their beliefs. The approach also helped to provide a more holistic view of human behavior, in contrast to the reductionist position of science. Examples Personal agency refers to the choices we make in life, the paths we go down, and their consequences. Individuals are free to choose when they are congruent (Rogers) or self-actualized (Maslow). Shows you how understanding human psychology can help you make better decisions, avoid things that cause stress, manage your time to a greater degree, and set goals

The biological approach centers on the biological underpinnings of behavior, including the effects of evolution and genetics. The premise is that behavior and mental processes can be explained by understanding genetics, human physiology, and anatomy. Biological psychologists focus mostly on the brain and the nervous system. (For more on biological psychology, see Chapter 3.) Neuropsychology and the study of the brain, genetics, and evolutionary psychology are included within the biological metatheory. The approach is optimistic and focuses on the noble human capacity to overcome hardship, pain and despair. People are motivated to self-actualize: The humanistic approach has been applied to relatively few areas of psychology compared to the other approaches. Therefore, its contributions are limited to areas such as therapy, abnormality, motivation, education, and personality. When putting together the psychology statistics you need to report when you’re describing a variable, you need to know which of the three measures of central tendency — the mode, median and mean — you should use. Take your cue from the advantages and disadvantages of each measure. One day, I realized that I had sampled works from every section in this bookstore, but I still wasn’t satisfied. Then, I had a strange thought: This bookstore is full of opinions! How was I supposed to find the answers or the truth when I was only getting opinions? Many of the books contained testimonials, logical arguments, and stories, but very little, if any, evidence or proof. If I questioned something, I simply had to take an author’s word for it and trust it was true. But they couldn’t all be right because some authors contradicted or criticized others. So who was right?Humanistic psychologists also believe that the most fundamental aspect of being human is a subjective experience. This may not be an accurate reflection of the real world, but a person can only act in terms of their own private experience subjective perception of reality.

There may be a day when psychology reaches a pinnacle of knowing and understanding all the determinants of behavior, all the ingredients of the human mind, and all the processes. Maybe the field can figure it all out through that reverse engineering process mentioned earlier. Or, at the very least, maybe psychology will figure out people, and all the information that experts gather can be stored or formulated into an algorithm or recipe for making people that, one day, a super-intelligent robotic life form can utilize to re-create the human species thousands of years after it becomes extinct. I did say that I sometimes think like a mad scientist, right? The humanistic approach emphasizes the individual’s personal worth, the centrality of human values, and the creative, active nature of human beings.Rogers and Maslow placed little value on scientific psychology, especially the use of the psychology laboratory to investigate both human and animal behavior. Carl Rogers (1946) publishes Significant aspects of client-centered therapy (also called person-centered therapy). The range is the difference between the highest score and the lowest score in a variable. These are the values that have been scored by participants in the study, and not necessarily the highest and lowest possible scores. When working with psychology statistics you can classify variables according to their measurement properties. When you record variables on a data sheet, you usually record the values on the variables as numbers, because this makes statistical analysis easier. However, the numbers can have different measurement properties and these determine what types of analyses you can do with these numbers. The variable’s level of measurement is a classification system that tells you what measurement properties the values of a variable have. First, they must be looked at as a whole and meaningful and not broken down into small components of information that are disjointed or fragmented like with psychodynamic theorists. Rogers said that if these individual perceptions of reality are not kept intact and are divided into elements of thought, they will lose their meaning.

Interval: If you measure a variable at the interval level of measurement, it has the measurement properties of magnitude and equal intervals. Smith KV, Thew GR. Conducting research in clinical psychology practice: Barriers, facilitators, and recommendations. Br J Clin Psychol. 2017;56(3):347-356. doi:10.1111/bjc.12142True absolute zero: The true absolute zero point means that the zero point on the measurement scale is the point where nothing of the variable exists and, therefore, no scores less than zero exist.