Psychology

Did you ever wonder where your dreams come from and what they mean? What triggers your bad and good moods? What exactly the term "mental illness" means? What intelligence is? Whether we use all our brain or only 10 percent, as some claim? How humans are alike and how we differ? If we are shaped more by our genetic inheritance or by the environment we grow up in? How we select our mates?

Then you'll be interested to know that it's the scientific discipline of Psychology that investigates and attempts to answer these types of questions.

Contemporary psychology is defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. Behavior is anything an organism does that can be observed and recorded. Mental processes are internal, subjective experiences, and include sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and feelings. The mental processes are inferred from observable behavior.

The key word in the definition of psychology is science. Science uses careful observation and rigorous analysis to make predictions. Psychological science attempts to describe and explain human nature through basic research that builds psychology's knowledge base, and applied research that tackles practical problems,  To achieve its goals, psychology uses a number of methods, including case studies, correlational research, surveys, experiments, and statistical analyses.

Psychological science is a fascinating and useful discipline that has relevance for all students regardless of their chosen field of study.

The Psychology Department at Douglas College is one of the largest academic departments in the College. We offer both university transfer courses in first and second-year Psychology as well as a full Bachelor of Arts Degree program in partnership with the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV). You are invited to visit us and/or our Web site and learn more about the Psychology Department at Douglas College.

Fact or Fiction?

Test your psychological knowledge. Which of the following statements have been confirmed or refuted by psychological research?

1. If you want to teach a behavior that will be very persistent, it is best to reward the behavior every time it occurs rather than providing reinforcement for the action intermittently (just once in a while).
2. Memories of traumatic experiences, such as physical or sexual abuse, experiencing a terrorist attack, surviving torture and confinement, etc., are almost always "repressed" in the unconscious and typically cannot be consciously recalled.
3. The polygraph is one of the most effective technological devices for detecting when someone is lying.
4. Eyewitness testimony is almost always the most accurate and reliable source of evidence and is rarely subject to memory distortion or error.
5. Listening to a set of tapes with subliminal messages that covertly suggest you have a great memory can actually help improve your memory.
6. Multiple personality disorder (MPD - now called DID, or Dissociative Identity Disorder) is one of the most common forms of schizophrenia.
7. Most people would refuse to obey an order given by an authority figure if it meant hurting an innocent person (for example delivering painful electric shock).
8. Couples who live together before they get married (premarital cohabitation) are much less likely to get divorced or separated than those couples who do not cohabit.
9. Under hypnosis people can recall with great accuracy events which they would otherwise not be able to remember.
10. People who have had the right and left cerebral hemispheres of their brains surgically split from each other (the corpus callosum that joins each hemisphere is severed) typically become comatose and remain in a vegetative state for the rest of their lives.

All of the above statements are false. How did you do? If you are curious and want to know more, taking Psychology may be for you!