Undergraduate courses: What is Psychology?
Our degree courses
We offer single honours and dual honours degree courses as follows:
- Single Honours BA in Psychology
- Single Honours BSc in Psychology
- Dual honours in Philosophy and Psychology
More about the courses
What is Psychology?
This is a question often asked by students who are considering reading the subject at university but are uncertain about its full scope, usually because it has not formed part of the school curriculum.
A standard textbook definition can help explain the overall nature of the subject:
- 'Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental activity; it is about understanding people; how they think, feel, communicate and act'
Perhaps a more helpful way of revealing the nature of psychology is to give you an idea of the questions currently being asked by our teachers and researchers:
- How do our memories work?
- Which neural circuits are affected in conditions such as Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and hypertension?
- What adverse effects can smoking, drugs and malnutrition have on an embryo?
- Why and how does language develop so rapidly in the normal child?
- To what extent can computers be made to think like humans, or indeed to 'think' at all?
A degree in Psychology encompasses may different strands of research into human behaviour, including the biological bases of behaviour, theories and models of cognitive process, development through the life span, and human social interaction.
Psychology is thus a wide field of enquiry which has important links with the biological sciences on the one hand and on the social sciences on the other.*
(* Psychology is not the same thing as psychiatry, which is a branch of medicine concerned with the understanding and treating of mental illness, although many psychologists are interested in this topic.)
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