The Definition of "Psychology"

The word "psychology" is the combination of two terms - study (ology) and soul (psyche), or mind.

Actual Meaning
"Psyche" is defined as: 1. The spirit or soul. 2. The human mind. 3. In psychoanalysis, the mind functioning as the center of thought, emotion, and behavior. And defining "soul", we have: 1. the spiritual or immortal elements in a person. 2. a person's mental or moral or emotional nature.

Nature
Psychology signifies the scientific study of the human mind and mental states, and of human and animal behavior. It seeks to predict and control the behaviors while finding out the causes through observation and reasoning process.

What Do Psychologists Do?

Psychologists study the human mind and human behavior. Research psychologists investigate the physical, cognitive, emotional, or social aspects of human behavior.Like other social scientists, psychologists formulate hypotheses and collect data to test their validity.Psychologists sometimes gather information through controlled laboratory experiments or by administering personality, performance, aptitude, or intelligence tests.Psychologists apply their knowledge to a wide range of endeavors, including health and human services, management, education, law, and sports.

Purpose:
The sole purpose of psychology is to know and understand why people behave the way they do.

Goals of Psychology
Psychology is the study of thoughts, emotions, and behavior, and their interaction with each other and the world. There are five basic goals of psychology:

1. Describe The first goal is to observe behavior and describe,

often in minute detail, what was observed as objectively as possible.

2. Explain While descriptions come from observable data,

psychologists must go beyond what is obvious and explain their observations. In other words, why did the subject do what he or she did?

3. Predict Once we know what happens, and why it happens, we

can begin to speculate what will happen in the future. Theres an old saying, which very often holds true: "the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior."

4. Control Once we know what happens, why it happens and

what is likely to happen in the future, we can excerpt control over it. In other words, if we know you choose abusive partners because your father was abusive, we can assume you will choose another abusive partner, and can therefore intervene to change this negative behavior.

5. Improve Not only do psychologists attempt to control behavior,

they want to do so in a positive manner, they want to improve a persons life, not make it worse. This is not always the case, but it should always be the intention.

What is an application of psychology?

Depending on the discipline, students are required to learn different citation styles. Psychology professors require APA, while English professors may require MLA. Despite discipline-specific differences, some psychology concepts from learning theory underlie the techniques used to teach effective writing. In this, the first of a series of two articles, the learning theory concepts of reinforcement and shaping will be presented and applied to three teaching approaches

that can be used in any discipline. The second article in this series will review strategies to address surface feature elements in writing assignments.

How can you apply psychology?Well, you can apply elements

of psychology in everyday life, e.g. emotional intelligence is useful when dealing with people, cognitive psychology helps to understand how human memory works so it gives you an inead on how to improve your memory; if you read through some recent studies in psychology (e.g. on the British Psychological Society website) you'd find out for yourself: psychologists research what affects prosocial behaviour in children (application: when your own children you'll know how to help them develop prosocial behaviour), how temperature affects our perception...not to mention that psychological therapies can be used to help people with, for instance, mental disorders. The list is endless! Psychology is very applicable subject.

REFRENCES:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_an_application_of_psychology http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_can_you_apply_psychology

http://www.sntp.net/psychology_definition.htm
http://www.google.com.pk/#pq=nature+of+psychology&hl=en&cp=2& gs_id=6w&xhr=t&q=GOALS+of+psychology&pf=p&sclient=psyab&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=GO+of+psychology&aq=0c&aqi=gc4&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=cf.osb&fp=fd270d82c7caa74&biw= 1024&bih=634