Psychology is the study of behavior and mind, embracing all aspects of human experience. It is an academic discipline and an applied science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases. Here is a look at a few interesting things that we have been carrying around, known about it in a way but hadn’t realized:
1. Everyone feels pretty much the same way
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
2. The Human condition
An individual is a unique configuration of characteristics each of which can be found in everyone but in varying degrees. We are so much alike in our dreams, hopes, and thoughts yet we think that it is only us going through the struggles of life.
The problem occurs when you stifle these feelings and/or think of yourself as abnormal. That’s when real frustration and other more serious things occur. It’s not important to get it perfect. The important thing is to get it started.
3. Five stages of grief
You might have heard about it from numerous sources be it TV series, movies or books. The original study says that when a person is faced with the reality of impending death or other extreme, awful fate, he or she will experience a series of emotional stages:
1. Denial — “I feel fine.”; “This can’t be happening, not to me.”
2. Anger — “Why me? It’s not fair!”; “How can this happen to me?”; ‘”Who is to blame?”
3. Bargaining — “I’ll do anything for a few more years.”; “I will give my life savings if…”
4. Depression — “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”; “I’m going to die soon so what’s the point?”; “I miss my loved one, why go on?”
5. Acceptance — “It’s going to be okay.”; “I can’t fight it, I may as well prepare for it.”
4. You can alter someone’s dream as they are dreaming
What the brain does, ever so often, is include stimuli happening in reality in whatever one is dreaming. Say you throw water on someone who is sleeping and she wakes up all of a sudden and narrates what she saw in her dreams. More often than not this gushing of water is incorporated elegantly in the dream. This served as inspiration for a sequence in the movie Inception.
5. Bystander effect
You might want to believe that if you are in an accident or emergency, you would have a greater chance of being rescued if you are in a crowded place. But countless experiments and incidents have proven exactly the opposite.The greater the number of observers, the less likely it is that one of them will help you. This is due to a phenomenon called Diffusion of responsibility whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present.
6. Cocktail party effect
Even in a noisy, crowded place if someone says your name, you can tune out other noises and focus on that voice. This effect is also true for other information that might be important to us. This effect changed the way psychologists thought about auditory input and attention.
7. The Mozart effect
The Mozart Effect refers to a research done indicating that listening to Mozart’s music may instigate improvement on the performance of mental tasks – known as spatial-temporal reasoning – which is used in both computer science and psychology. It is the ability to visualize spatial patterns and manipulate them mentally in a time ordered sequence.
Sources: wikipedia.org, quora.com