Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Psychology of Religion



Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes, emotion, personality, behavior, and relationships. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental health problems.
Psychology differs from the other social sciences — anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology — in seeking to explain the thinking, emotion and behaviour of individuals, couples, families and other social groups.
Psychology differs from biology and neuroscience in that it is primarily concerned with mind rather than brain, in other words experience and behaviour rather than brain structure or chemistry. However, the subfield of neuropsychology studies the actual neural processes and how these relate to the mental and experiential phenomena. It is clear that our life experience influences our brain states and vice-versa in complex ways.
Knowledge is what is known. Like the related concepts truth, belief, and wisdom, there is no single definition of knowledge on which scholars agree, but rather numerous theories and continued debate about the nature of knowledge.


Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association, and reasoning. The term knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject, potentially with the ability to use it for a specific purpose.
The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek ???? psyche ("soul," "mind") and -????a -ology ("study").


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