The word Psychology came from the two Greek words, “psyche”
and “logos” which literally translate to the study of the
soul and later on it
progress to the study of the mind. Today many authors would define psychology
as the scientific study of behavior and mental
processes.
Let us dissect the meaning to further understand the meaning
of psychology. When we say behavior, two things come to mind – covert
behaviors as well as overt behavior. Overt behaviors are behaviors visible to the eye.
In short seen behaviors. Examples of overt behaviors are the way you dress,
the way you talk, the way you eat, the color of your hair, the color of your
pants. In a nut shell, these are the actions of individuals or groups that we
see everyday. These are the actions that are observable and can be measured
right there and then. In contrast, covert behaviors are behaviors not visible
to the naked eye. These are unseen behaviors. Examples of covert behaviors would
be anger, jealousy, pity, kindness, happiness, sadness. These are behaviors
that you cannot discern at one glance unless you are good. Covert behaviors are
also measurable but it entails a more intricate process. You can deduce the
covert behaviors from the overt behaviors. It’s like playing the charades
game. The player acting in front of the group, who is doing the actions, is
actually doing overt behaviors. The person is acting out related behaviors so
that his/her group mates would be able to guess the answer. Covert behavior is
like that. How do we know that a person is sad? Happy? We can know this by
observing the overt behaviors. We can say that a person is sad when that
person is not smiling, the eyes are teary, staring at you blankly and so on so
forth. While a person who is smiling, singing up-tempo songs, jumping here and
there could be assumed that that person is happy. So those are the definition
of behavior, covert and overt.
When we say mental processes, again, two things come to mind
– conscious mental process and unconscious mental process. Conscious mental
processes are the processes wherein we are aware of. Example, we are aware that
we are reading this text right now, that we are moving the mouse pointer or
scrolling down the text. Conscious meaning we are thinking about it. While
unconscious processes are the processes that we are not aware of or we are not
constantly thinking about it. Consider breathing, we are not thinking moment by
moment that we have to breathe. It comes in naturally.
And those are the two parts of our definition of psychology,
the behavior and mental processes. Sometimes we have the tendency to jump on
hasty conclusions specially if don’t like the person. When we see a person who
is always alone, it is easy for us to say that that person is anti-social. That
he/she is nerd, not exciting to be with. We made the conclusion based on just
one observable, overt behavior. That’s where the scientific study comes in to
play. Psychology is a scientific study and its not just making conclusions out
of one overt behavior. When we say scientific study, the conclusion is
obtained through systematic and objective methods of observation and
experimentation. It follows a step by step procedure in doing the observation
and conducting tests before making a comprehensive conclusion.
Basically psychology is step by step observation and
experimentation, of overt and covert behaviors and see if it is process
consciously or unconsciously.