外文资料翻译--生活中的心理学(编辑修改稿)

外文资料翻译--生活中的心理学(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

n coping with the stress of her husband’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s disease. However, the subject might also be a chimpanzee learning to use symbols to municate, a white rat navigating a maze, or a sea slug responding to a danger signal. An individual might be studied in its natural habitat or in the controlled conditions of a research laboratory. Many researchers in psychology also recognize that they cannot understand human actions without also understanding mental processes, the workings of the human mind. Much human activity takes place as private, internal eventsthinking, planning, reasoning, creating, and dreaming. Many psychologists believe that mental processes represent the most important aspect of psychological inquiry. As you shall soon see, psychological investigators have devised ingenious techniques to study mental events and processesto make these private experiences public. The bination of these concerns defines psychology as a unique field. Within the social sciences, psychologists focus largely on behavior in individuals, whereas sociologists study the behavior of people in groups or institutions, and anthropologists focus on the broader context of behavior in different cultures: Even so, psychologists draw broadly from the insights of other scholars. Psychologists share many interests with researchers in biological sciences, especially with those who study brain processes and the biochemical bases of behavior. As part of the emerging area of cognitive science, psychologists’questions about how the human mind works are related to research and theory in puter science, artificial intelligence, and applied mathematics. As a health sciencewith links to medicine, education, law, and environmental studiespsychology seeks to improve the quality of each individual’s and the collective’s wellbeing. Although the remarkable breadth and depth of modern psychology are a source of delight to those who bee psychologists, these same attributes make the field a challenge to the student exploring it for the first time. There is so much more to the study of psychology than one expects initiallyand, because of that, there will also be much of value that you can take away from this introduction to psychology. The best way to learn about the field is to learn to share psychologists’ goals. Let’s consider those goals. The goals of the psychologist conducting basic research are to describe, explain, predict, and control behavior. These goals form the basis of the psychological enterprise. What is involved in trying to achieve each of them? The first task in psychology is to make accurate observations about behavior. Psychologists typically refer to such observations as their data (data is the plural, datum the singular).Behavioral data are reports of observations about the behavior of organisms and the conditions under which the behavior occurs. When researchers undertake data collection, they must choose an appropriate level of analysis and devise measures of behavior that ensue objectivity. In order to investigate an individual’s behavior, researchers may use different levels of analysisfrom the broadest, most global level down to the most minute, specific level. Suppose, for example, you were trying to describe a painting you saw at a museum . At a global level, you might describe it by title, Bathers, and by artist, Georges Seurat. At a more specific level, you might recount features of the painting: some people are sunning themselves on a riverbank, while others are enjoying in water, and so on. At a very specific level, you might describe the technique Seurat usedtiny points of paintto create the scene. The description at each level would answer different questions about the painting. Different levels of psychological description also address different questions. At the broadest level of psychological analysis, researchers investigate the behavior of the whole person within plex social and cultural contexts. At this level, researches might study crosscultural differences in violence, the origins of prejudice, and the consequences of mental illness.。