Savage Psychology

02: What is Psychology?

Psychology can be defined as the scientific study of the mental processes, the behaviours and the experiences in different contexts; it is the explanation of how different mental processes result in different behaviours and how experiences affect our behaviour.

>Mental Processes
These are defined as the procedures that have to do with the cognitive aspect of the brain and include phenomena like learning, remembering, feeling etcetera.

>Experience
Experiences are an important factor studied by Psychologists when analyzing the mental aspect of an individual. These are subjective in nature and everyone perceives them differently under varying circumstances and at distinct points of their life.

For example: Venkat is most likely to feel uncomfortable with the idea of travelling in a crowded bus on a hot, summer day.

However, the same Venkat would be having the time of his life if he were to make room for a friend in a seemingly small space in a similarly crowded bus, on yet another hot, summer day when going for picnic.

The difference in Venkat's reactions is due to the fact that in the second scenario, he was more focused on chatting up the new X-Men movie with his friend rather than the sweating-hot discomfort.

>Behaviour
Behaviour constitutes of the activities that an individual chooses to engage in or the response/reaction that someone makes to a stimulus.

>Response
Response is more or less the behaviour of a living entity brought about by an external or internal stimulus.
For example: When an eraser is hurled at Venkat, he shuts his eyes close as a simple reflex action.

Reactions that can be observed from the outside are known as overt reactions and the ones that cannot be made out from the outside are termed as covert reactions.

Another example can be when Venkat calmly flipped through the pages of his Psychology Book; his overt reaction (external) was seemingly relaxed.

On the inside, however, Venkat internally screamed and his heart almost thumped out of his ribcage when wondering how in the world would he ever tolerate the thickness of his book; this reaction was a covert one (internal) which could not have been observed by the people around him.

>Stimulus
Stimulus can be defined as any event or occurrence that brings about a change/certain changes in an organism.