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How Psychology Impacts Us
Photo Credit: www.psychologytoday.com
Psychology is dedicated to understanding the individual's perception and finding ways to alter it when needed.
Jeffrey Jackson, Staff Reporter
February 7, 2012
Filed under Opinion
From the moment you were born, you have been sculpting your mind by making choices and feeling the way you feel. Your perspective on life is completely different from anyone else’s. Psychology is dedicated to understanding the individual’s perception and finding ways to alter it when needed. Although our bodies are all made of the exact same material, your perspective is really the only thing that separates you from anyone else. Your perspective is your outlook on life or the way you see things. It is yours and yours alone. Your perspective makes you an individual.
Understanding the way a person thinks is much more difficult than it may seem. Getting inside someone’s mind can be dangerous, because we never know what we’ll find. As Loren Eisley states in The Unexpected Universe, every person has within them a ghost continent, an inner island trying to be discoverd. As we search for this inner continent, we are taking steps towards understanding ourselves. Psychology is all about understanding perception and how the human mind works, and the result can save lives. Psychotherapy has helped millions.
What is it about psychotherapy that makes it so successful? Well, simply discussing issues and receiving professional advice can help. People pay heavy expenses to discuss their issues with psychiatrists every day. What could possibly take place behind those closed doors that keeps patients returning for more? Well, it seems that psychiatrists help patients by encouraging comfort and motivating discussion. By simply listening and directing someone towards the right path, a person can be helped.
Your perspective on the reality before you dramatically affects you and how you live. Actually, it is how you live. Your persepective is your emotional outlook on everything you percieve. Whether it is a person or an item. everyone relates things to an emotion or feeling. Every individual percieves a person, place, or thing quite differently. There is an immediate emotion that takes place when we are introduced to something new. That is our judgemental instinct, but once we understand what lies before us, our perception changes.
For example, perhaps I were to introduce you to a chair for the first time, it would seem odd. However, to someone who knows this object, it is not odd. It is only odd when we judge the item, but once we learn what the object is used for, it is no longer strange to us; we understand it. We gain an emotion for the item that becomes our seemingly permanent perception. This is also true when we are introduced to people. Unless you have thoroughly trained yourself to not judge others instantly, you immediately jump to a conclusion about a person and their appearance. If you were to be introduced to a very dirty man, you would at first probably assume he was repulsive and even rude. But once you talked with him, you learned he was a kind mud-skiing british gentleman. He then becomes the kindest man you have ever met.
This is psychology, but how does this field of study help us understand ourselves? Today, teenagers are constantly being diagnosed with all kinds of different disorders. It is a widespread diagnostic that is taking place in every hospital. Also, many times, the use of medications can lead to drug abuse. Despite the drug abuse taking place in today’s society, however, teens are improving due to the awareness and treatment of their disorders. These disorders may have always existed or may have simply adapted throughout human existence. Either way, the proof that the field of psychology helps us understand how our bodies and minds work is apparant.
A disorder that is frequently given today is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). ADD is a feeling of inability to focus, being under a constant state of day-dreaming, or feeling intensely distracted. This can become a major problem for school and work. Psychology teacher Miss Colleen Kahl admits that the rise is diagnosis is a good thing, considering that all areas of the medical field are advancing, especially psychology. We are obligated to feel that since psychology is advancing, the rise in these kinds of diagnoses is just a step towards understanding how the brain works. It also shows just how much psychology is being studied.
There is much more to the world of psychology than simply generating theories of the human brain. Like philosophy and science, it has many intricate categories of study. Neuroscience, for instance, specifically deals with the brain and is forced to use psychology as the source of its in-depth studies. The brain is something we have yet to fully understand. It is the most complex body organ.
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