Modern psychology is now divided into many areas that are constantly changing under the influx of new scientific data. This science is quite young, and therefore scientific psychologists are constantly making their corrections and additions. Studying such a subtle category as the soul, psychology as a science cannot be static, because it is very difficult to study and very difficult to prove using traditional methods. In addition to child, age, and social psychology , cognitive psychology and the psychology of groups and peoples are currently being actively developed.
Cognitive psychology has chosen as its subject the study of how a person thinks, how he receives information about the world, how this information is stored in memory, and how all this affects human behavior. Cognitive psychology considers its main task to understand the nature of human thought.
In the 50s. 20th century, scientists begin to actively develop the study of memory, attention, language processes, images, etc. This was due to a number of the following objective reasons:
- the passing of positions by behaviorism, which considered human behavior as a reaction to stimuli, but failed.
- the emergence of a communication theory, which with its appearance provoked a series of experiments on the study of signals, information theory and attention, i.e. in the areas studied by cognitive psychology.
- in modern linguistics, new approaches to grammatical structures and language appear.
- cybernetics and, in particular, the creation of artificial intelligence forced to radically change their views on the processing and storage of information in memory, etc.
Cognitive psychology uses for its research a model of information processing, which considers the process of cognition as a series of stages, each of which can be represented as a hypothetical unit and a series of individual concomitant manipulations when entering information. Assuming that the reaction to an event is another in a series of similar stages. At each of these stages, information from the previous stage is analyzed. Although it is almost impossible to identify the initial stage, because they are closely related.
Currently, cognitive psychology uses methods and studies from 10 different areas of research: memory, attention, imagination, language functions, developmental psychology, perception and pattern recognition, artificial and human intelligence, thinking, etc.
Group psychology
Social psychology includes a whole section dealing with the study of group psychology. This section studies the behavior of people and a person in particular in a group, how communication and interaction occur.
A group is a collection of people united by social, domestic, economic, etc. relations. That is, people are united on some basis and even consider themselves to be one of it.
Groups are large and small. Small groups include from 2 and more. Groups are also divided into conditional and real. Real groups, in turn, can be divided into informal and official, situational and sustainable, etc. A person can be in several groups at the same time: school, circle, street company, etc.
The psychology of peoples
The book "The Psychology of Peoples and Masses" written by Gustav Lebon became the desktop for dictators of the 20th century and all politicians who have achieved power in any way. In it, Lebon compares the masses with the crowd and gives his classification. And also says that the world is on the verge of an "era of the masses." Important in it is that Lebon gives in his work “Psychology of Peoples and Masses” the mechanics of the emergence, development and subsequent decline of peoples (races), as well as their role as great people and ideas in this process.