Living Psychology

Psychology as an academic discipline has been defined as 'the scientific study of people, the mind and behavior' (British Psychological Society, 2014). You may think that this is a very broad definition, encompassing as it does everything that people think (mind) and do (behavior). Many, if not all, psychologists (including the authors of the chapters in Living Psychology) would probably agree with that assessment! Since its emergence as a distinct discipline in the late nineteenth century, psychology has embraced the whole range of human experiences. Psychology has investigated things that are common to most people and things that are rare (or even unique), and has explored them at levels of analysis from the individual person through social groups (from couples to nations) to the whole human species.Many questions that psychology has addressed are quite obviously psychological, such as: how do people make sense of the world around them? How do people think, make decisions, and come up with new ideas? How do people understand and interact with other people?Some questions are less obviously psychological, and may even appear to 'belong' to another academic discipline, but nonetheless psychology is relevant to, and necessary for, answering them. For example: could a computer ever think like a person does? How can the problem of global warming be solved? Both of these questions may seem to belong elsewhere (computer science and climatology, respectively), but they also involve elements of psychology: to know if a computer could ever think like a person, it is necessary to know how a person thinks (mind); to solve the problem of global warming, it is necessary to understand, and change, people's interaction with the environment (behavior). In fact, other than the purely physical (e.g. 'how does a knee work?'), it is difficult to think of any question involving people that is not. at least in part, a psychological question.The first challenge faced by the team that produced Living Psychology, then, was deciding what to include from the wealth of psychological issues that could be covered. A guiding principle for the team was to focus on aspects of psychology that have direct real-world relevance, including (we hope) to you, the reader - at least some of the time.That is one sense of the term 'living psychology: showing how psychology is not just a theoretical discipline (although theory[1:21 pm, 15/03/2023] BADE TECHNOLOGIES.: development is, of course, important) but also how it direly affects peoples lives. Indeed, some areas of psychology have developed specifically through the work of psychologists who want to make ? positive difference to people's lives. Examples of these include Counseling psychology, which aims to help people deal with (and concrimes solve) problems in their lives; forensic psychology, which sons to apply psychological knowledge to issues of crime and criminal justice, and health psychology, which aims to improve people's physica health by applying psychological principles to influence their health.Teared thoughts and behaviors. Such areas of psychology are referred to as 'applied" (as opposed to "theoretical) and, in that sense, these are therefore 'applied psychology chapters, focusing on psychology that can be and/or has been applied to real-world problems.However, the Living Psychology books do more than that - in a sense, the opposite of that - as well: they also show how psychology as a discipline is influenced by people's lives. Psychologists often respond to changes in the world, including social changes such as immigration and emigration, and technological changes such as the increasing pervasiveness of the internet in people's lives. This is another sense of the term living psychology: psychology itself as a living, ever-changing, discipline