section_path: Fields and methods of inquiry/Psychology
section_name: Psychology
paragraph_text: Psychology
  
  Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. It investigates conscious and unconscious mental phenomena, including perception, memory, feeling, thought, decision, intelligence, and personality. It is further interested in their outward manifestation in the form of observable behavioral patterns and how these patterns depend on external circumstances and are shaped by learning. Psychology is a wide discipline that includes many subfields. Cognitive psychology is interested in higher-order mental activities like thinking, problem-solving, reasoning, and concept formation. Biological psychology seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms on the physiological level and how they depend on genetic transmission and the environment. Developmental psychology studies the development of the mind from childhood to old age while social psychology examines the influence of social contexts on mind and behavior. Further subfields include comparative, clinical, educational, occupational, and neuropsychology.
  
  Psychologists use a great variety of methods to study the mind. Experimental approaches set up a controlled situation, either in the laboratory or the field, in which they modify independent variables and measure their effects on dependent variables. This approach makes it possible to identify causal relations between the variables. For example, to determine whether people with similar interests (independent variable) are more likely to become friends (dependent variables), participants of a study could be paired with either similar or dissimilar participants. After giving the pairs time to interact, it is assessed whether the members of similar pairs have more positive attitudes toward one another than the members of dissimilar pairs.
  
  Correlational methods examine the strength of association between two variables without establishing a causal relationship between them. The survey method presents participants with a list of questions aimed at eliciting information about their mental attitudes, behavior, and other relevant factors. It analyzes how participants respond to questions and how answers to different questions correlate with one another. Surveys usually have a large number of participants in contrast to case studies, which focus on an in-depth examination of a single subject or a small group of subjects, often to examine rare phenomena or explore new fields. Further methods include longitudinal studies, naturalistic observation, and phenomenological description of experience.