psychology
Pluralpsychologies (some meanings)
- 1The systematic study of the human mind.
He switched his major from biology to psychology in his second year.
Modern psychology draws on controlled experiments, brain imaging, and clinical observation.
- 2The mental, emotional, and behavioral traits that characterize a particular person, group, or activity.
Understanding the psychology of crowds helps planners design safer venues.
The novel explores the dark psychology of its central character.
Similarmentality, psyche, mindset, character
Note
Here the word stops naming a discipline and becomes something a person or group has, so it can be counted: a warped psychology, the psychology of a laborer, and in the plural, psychologies. The usual frames are "the psychology of" plus a person, group or activity, or an adjective before "a psychology." Mary M. Luke's A Crown for Elizabeth (1970) sets "a warped psychology" beside a deformed body as rival explanations for Elizabeth's spinsterhood.
- 3The scientific study of human and animal behavior.
Comparative psychology examines behavior across different species.
She used psychology to understand why shoppers choose certain products.
- 4The study of the soul, in the word's older and now historical sense.
Medieval philosophers approached psychology as the study of the rational soul.
For Aquinas, psychology dealt with the soul rather than with measurable behavior.
Note
The meaning closest to the word's parts: Greek psukhē, "soul," plus -logia, "study of," carried into English through Renaissance Latin psychologia and French psychologie. Today it lives mainly in histories of philosophy. Harold Tarrant, writing on Platonism in 2010, uses it for Alcinous's discussion of the soul's three locations in the Timaeus. When writing about ancient or medieval thought, make clear you mean this sense, not the study of the mind.
Practice
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Origin
From French psychologie, from Renaissance Latin psychologia, from Ancient Greek ψυχή (psukhḗ, "soul") plus -λογία (-logía, "study of"). Some believe the Latin term was coined by Croatian humanist Marko Marulić (1450–1524), though this is disputed; it is first attested in the 1570s and may be a Hellenization of the established Latin expression dē animā ("on the soul").