3.9 KiB
Disciplines That Diagnose or Illuminate Human Behavior
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Clinical Psychology
• Core Purpose: Formal diagnosis and evidence-based treatment of mental-health disorders and maladaptive behaviors.
• Typical Tools: Structured interviews, DSM-5/ICD-11 criteria, validated psychometric tests (e.g., MMPI-3), randomized controlled therapy trials.
• Context Snapshot: A clinician evaluating persistent social withdrawal in an adolescent will use parent/teacher reports, standardized rating scales, and direct observation to determine if the pattern meets criteria for Social Anxiety Disorder or Autism Spectrum Disorder, then recommend CBT or family therapy accordingly. -
Behavioral Psychology / Behaviorism
• Core Purpose: Explain how all behaviors (normal or problematic) are learned and can be modified through conditioning principles.
• Typical Tools: Operant conditioning protocols, token economies, single-case experimental designs.
• Context Snapshot: A school team reduces classroom tantrums by reinforcing on-task behavior with immediate praise and small rewards, documenting frequency before, during, and after intervention to confirm effectiveness. -
Cognitive Psychology
• Core Purpose: Uncover the mental mechanisms—attention, memory, decision-making—that drive outward behavior.
• Typical Tools: Laboratory reaction-time tasks, eye-tracking, fMRI, computational modeling.
• Context Snapshot: Researchers discover that split-second “implicit bias” on an IAT predicts real-world hiring decisions, prompting HR departments to adopt structured interviews to offset unconscious preferences. -
Neuropsychology
• Core Purpose: Link specific brain structures/functions to behavioral changes, especially after injury, illness, or neurodevelopmental conditions.
• Typical Tools: Neuroimaging (MRI, DTI), lesion mapping, domain-specific cognitive batteries (e.g., Wisconsin Card Sorting Test).
• Context Snapshot: Following a mild traumatic brain injury, a patient’s sudden irritability and poor impulse control are traced via neuroimaging to damage in the right orbitofrontal cortex; targeted cognitive rehabilitation is then prescribed. -
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)
• Core Purpose: Systematically apply behavioral principles to change socially significant behaviors in real-world settings.
• Typical Tools: Functional behavior assessment (FBA), discrete-trial training, data-driven progress graphs.
• Context Snapshot: A child with autism who engages in self-injury receives an FBA revealing that head-hitting functions to escape noisy environments; intervention teaches an alternative communication response (“break, please”) while gradually increasing noise tolerance. -
Social Psychology
• Core Purpose: Understand how social context—groups, norms, relationships—shapes individual and collective behavior.
• Typical Tools: Controlled experiments, large-scale surveys, archival data analysis.
• Context Snapshot: An experiment shows that merely reminding people of their recycling identity increases actual recycling rates by 25 %, informing municipal “nudge” campaigns. -
Behavioral Economics
• Core Purpose: Merge psychological insights with economic models to explain why people systematically deviate from “rational” choices.
• Typical Tools: Choice-architecture field experiments, incentive-compatible games, econometric modeling.
• Context Snapshot: A pension program switches from opt-in to opt-out enrollment; participation rises from 45 % to 92 %, demonstrating the power of default bias and guiding national retirement-policy reform.