Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist, 1, 415-422.

Warning The information in this reference is not intended to substitute for expert psychological, healthcare, or medical advice or treatment; it is designed to help you make informed choices. Because each individual is unique, a psychologist, healthcare practitioner, or physician must diagnose conditions and supervise treatments for each individual health problem. If an individual is under a psychologist’s or physician’s care and receives advice contrary to information provided in this reference, the psychologist’s or physician’s advice should be followed, as it is based on the unique characteristics of that individual. In this chapter, you find out how psychologists go about their business, including how overarching theories frame the questions they ask and the variables they look at. You also get a look at the various branches of psychology that include more than what people typically think of such as clinical psychology. Finally, you see how the discipline of psychology works to be as scientific as possible by basing its knowledge on research and statistical methods, which shores up its credibility among the other scholarly disciplines. Finding a Framework Humanistic, humanism, and humanist are terms in psychology relating to an approach that studies the whole person and the uniqueness of each individual. Essentially, these terms refer to the same approach in psychology. Behavior is not constrained by either past experience of the individual or current circumstances (determinism). Like all other carbon-based living organisms on planet Earth, human beings are staying alive machines. (Admit it; you instantly thought of the Bee Gees, didn’t you, or John Travolta in that white bell-bottom suit?) I’m not saying there is no meaning to life. Quite the contrary; I’m saying that the function of life is to be alive, to stay alive, and to perpetuate life. What’s the meaning of it all? Wrong book; try Philosophy For Dummies or Religion For Dummies.

Science represents a protracted attempt to contribute to a public edifice of knowledge founded on probabilistic evidence that the piecemeal construction achieves some important similarities with reality. No one sincerely believes that his or her single experiment will answer any useful question once and for all… .

Take the mind for example. Most people agree that they have a mind and that others (well, most others) have one too. But where does this mind exist? Psychologists accept that the mind exists in, or is synonymous with, the brain. The biological metatheory is integrated into the biopsychosocial model because of this component. You may say that, just as digestion is what the stomach does, mind is what the brain does. Thinking about the role of the mind

Qualitative research is useful for studies at the individual level, and to find out, in-depth, the ways in which people think or feel (e.g. case studies).

Independent variables

The tools and procedures that health care providers use to diagnose, fix, and maintain people include the following and other areas of research and practice: Basic Assumptions Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumption that people have free will: Postmodernists make the argument that people in powerful positions have too much to say about what is real and true in psychology, and they advocate a social constructionist view of reality, which states that the concepts of reality and truth are defined, or constructed, by society. These concepts, according to this framework, have no meaning apart from the meanings that society and its experts assign to them. Narrative and constructionist theories are examples that fall within the metatheory of Postmodernism. A Unifying Model? Working with the Biopsychosocial Model Remember The basic idea behind this model is that human behavior and mental processes are the products of biological, psychological, and social influences. Biopsychosocialists try to find out how these influences interact to produce behavior. They believe that any explanation of behavior and mental processes that doesn’t consider all three primary factors (body, mind, and environment) is incomplete. Feeling out the role of the body A first principle of my mad-scientist vision of psychology is that building a human requires you to know what the person’s function is. After all, engineers don’t build things without knowing what they’re supposed to do. Only with a purpose in mind can you know what to materials are necessary and how they work together.