Elements of Psychology

Abstract

Psychology is the science of behaviour. It addresses the ways in which organisms behave, or respond to their environments, or react to the myriad stimuli which surround and continually impinge upon them. In more advanced organisms psychology seeks to explain how they perceive, learn, reason, think and feel. Psychology is concerned with the totality of behaviours evident on direct observation. But it also studies the nature of complex environmental stimuli evoking and initiating those behaviours, and the even more complex mechanisms, unobserved but inferred, which are interposed between the stimulus and response, and which mould, mediate, regulate, shape and impose recognizable patterns of individuality on behaviour. From the perspective of the human organism, psychology may be seen as the science most closely and centrally involved with understanding and explaining the adjustment of the individual to the environment. In so far as some individuals fail to adjust, psychology may also be seen as the science of behavioural abnormality or maladaptation. Psychology is, in fact and nature, the complete human science.