Quotes About Psychology

I need to do psychology classes. That would be so interesting to me, studying people.

We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.

One has to understand the functioning of the normal brain before studying the badly malfunctioning brain.

Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid.

We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.

If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.

The idea of evil is always subject to denial as a coping mechanism.

The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective.

Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you've found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don't know.

I studied psychology, history, and religion. I was a heady girl, but frankly, I'm glad I studied those subjects because a lot of that has really helped me as an actress.

Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy.

Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.

What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it.

The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology were now validated in light of new and better methods.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

I feel like fear is a very real thing, a very ubiquitous thing, and it can be very subtle.

When girls bully, it's very subtle, and you can't define it. At least with boys, the bullying is usually explicit, and you can deal with it. It's psychological with girls.

All athletes speak about the mental element of athletics, and it usually boils down to the same thing: if you can remove your ego from the game, you can function with much more clarity and you are more likely to succeed. Wouldn't it be interesting if we all began speaking about the mental element of our lives in this way?

Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.

It is important to keep two key aspects of Piaget's account in mind. First, in Piaget's account, there are no innate modules with adultlike competencies that are suddenly switched on, nor is there any special processing mechanism that, out of the blue, comes online (see OI, p. 100; Piaget, 1967/1971, p. 327, fn.).

One outcome of this lack of appreciation of the relevance of epistemology for the study of psychology and psychological development is that epistemological assumptions often remain tacit. Practically, this amounts to many psychologists basing their theories on assumptions that originate in the empiricist tradition (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 10).

Piaget's view of infants as active agents that confer increasingly complex meanings on the things interacted with has yet to be fully assimilated in developmental psychology and in philosophy.6

Piaget, J. (2001). Studies in reflecting abstraction. Hove: Psychology Press. (Original work published in 1977)

the relevance of epistemology for the study of psychology and psychological development is that epistemological assumptions often remain tacit. Practically, this amounts to many psychologists basing their theories on assumptions that originate in the empiricist tradition (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 10).