Human psychology (with emphasis on the human)

Times of Higher Education:

Psychological thinking, particularly of the cognitive ilk, used to take place only in philosophy or physiology departments. For centuries, psychology did not exist as a separate discipline.

Then a more experimental cognitive approach was pioneered in the late 1870s by Wilhelm Wundt, the German “father of modern psychology”, and later in the Anglo-Saxon world by American behaviourist John B. Watson. The effect was to shift the discipline into the social and educational sciences.

Some sub-domains of psychology remain in the humanities to this day, but towards the end of the 20th century and increasingly since the start of the 21st, exciting new empirical methodologies have resulted in the departments increasingly migrating into faculties of science alongside biology, mathematics, genetics, chemistry and engineering.

Techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have given psychologists previously unimagined access to some of the inner workings of the brain.

Read the whole story: Times of Higher Education