Fascinated With What Makes People Tick? A Psychology Course Gives Answers

Introduction to Psychology is a survey course that many students will recognize is a prerequisite in their degree program. It deals with the many different issues concerning the study of psychology in today's world. There are many students who choose to enroll in Intro to Psychology for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons can include simply wanting to study a subject that is fascinating. Whatever the reason, Introduction to Psychology is the first course of study for anyone who is interested in learning about how the human mind functions.

There are many different individuals who are responsible for the advances within the study of psychology and they are all studied in the introductory course. Some of these people are outsized personalities who must be seen to believed, while others fit the stereotype of an old professor in a lab coat. Two of these personalities who greatly altered how psychology is studied are Erik Erikson and Philip Zimbardo. Thanks to their work, the study of psychology is far more advanced today.

Erik Erikson is responsible for the term "identity crisis" and this term relates to the psychological theory he worked on that is today called "Erikson's Stages of Development". This set of theories is responsible for defining the different stages people go through during their entire lives in relation to intellectual and social development. This is an important set of theories that is studied in the psychology introductory course.

Philip Zimbardo is a psychologist at Stanford University who is interested in seeing how people not only react to authority, but how people who are not trained in dealing with authority handle situations in which they are given absolute authority. The result of Zimbardo's curiosity is a study called the Stanford Prison experiment. In this experiment, Zimbardo had some of his psychology students assume the roles of prison guards, while other students acted in the role of inmates. This is an important study that students in this survey course can relate to as they are a similar age to the students who participated in the experiment.

There are many different theories and ideas that color psychology. Many students in the Introduction to Psychology course will be very interested to learn about how the brain handles the cognitive process of learning. Another point of interest for some students is to learn about the many different disorders found in the abnormal psychology unit.

There are quite a few diverse theories on how people actually learn intellectual and social behaviors. One group of psychologists that studied these ideas for most of the 20th century is called the Behaviorists. The basic premise behind behaviorism is that if an action is rewarded for performing that action correctly, then the sentient being will perform that action with more regularity knowing that the reward is coming.

Abnormal psychology is the area of the field that studies the many diagnosed and undiagnosed psychological disorders. Some of these disorders are covered are schizophrenia, autism, bi-polar disorder, and dissociative disorder.

There are many compelling reasons to choose a career in psychology and you may discover some you've never considered when you take a psychology course. There are several free college classes offered, and this is one of them, where students are exposed to learning online as they discover the thrill of education and the convenience of distance learning.