Experimenting with animals and people, it tries to understand how they learn, and to devise better ways of teaching. A psychological school, known as behaviourism, maintains that human behaviour is a learned response to a stimulus, and consequently tried to establish learning as the central topic of psychology. .
The area of cognitive psychology concerns with the ways we perceive and we express how we store our perceptions and later recall them, and the way we think. Perception, memory, speech, and thinking are the main subjects of this branch. The study of decision making is a topic that has a great practical importance. The study of emotion and the study of personality are two related fields that delve into the profound question of why we are different and why we feel how we feel. While some scientists propose genetic traits as the reason, others look to the social environment as the cause of our differences. .
Abnormal psychology, also known as psychopathology, is a branch that attempts to describe and classify abnormal behaviours. Applications include the development of diagnostic tools like tests, and the proposal and evaluation of therapies. The corresponding applied specialty is known as clinical psychology or psychotherapy. .
Social psychology studies problems that arise from the interaction of men, because a person will behave differently when isolated than when in the company of other humans. Developmental psychology is interested in the ways in which the behaviour of people changes as persons pass from childhood to old age. Educationists are just one kind of specialists concerned with its results. .
The challenges that applied psychologists must confront range from helping a child to learn to train executives in decision making, from helping a person troubled by anxiety to smoothing the relationship between spouses. In these tasks the psychologist must make use of scientific knowledge combined with his own personal experience to address problems that most of the time cannot be postponed.
