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Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. [1] [2] Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social ...
The term attitude with the psychological meaning of an internal state of preparedness for action was not used until the 19th century. [3]: 2 The American Psychological Association (APA) defines attitude as "a relatively enduring and general evaluation of an object, person, group, issue, or concept on a dimension ranging from negative to positive.
Since – for him – the soul is motion, it needs an explanatory principle for bodily motion. [9] Aristotle's theory of the "three souls (psyches)" (vegetal, animal, and rational) would rule the field of psychology until the 19th century. Prior to Aristotle, a number of Greek writings used the term psyche in a less precise sense. [10]
Features entailed by the definition of a concept must be both necessary and sufficient for membership in the class of things covered by a particular concept. [11] A feature is considered necessary if every member of the denoted class has that feature. A feature is considered sufficient if something has all the parts required by the definition. [11]
Human behavior is studied by the social sciences, which include psychology, sociology, ethology, and their various branches and schools of thought. [1] There are many different facets of human behavior, and no one definition or field study encompasses it in its entirety. [2]
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a paradigm as "a pattern or model, an exemplar; a typical instance of something, an example". [11] The historian of science Thomas Kuhn gave the word its contemporary meaning when he adopted the word to refer to the set of concepts and practices that define a scientific discipline at any particular period of time.
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The earliest recorded definition of the term was published in Robert Jay Lifton's book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism in 1961 wherein he was describing the structure of language used by the Chinese Communist Party, defining the term as "the start and finish of any ideological analysis".