XIV.

"So, traditionally, psychology is often broken up into the following — into five sub-areas:

1. Neuroscience, which is the study of the mind by looking at the brain;
2. Developmental, which is the area which I focus mostly on, which is trying to learn about how people develop and grow and learn;
3. Cognitive, which is the one term of the five that might be unfamiliar to some of you, but it refers to a sort of computational approach to studying the mind, often viewing the mind on analogy with a computer and looking at how people do things like understand language, recognize objects, play games, and so on. There is
4. Social, which is the study of how people act in groups, how people act with other people. And there is
5. Clinical, which is maybe the aspect of psychology that people think of immediately when they hear psychology, which is the study of mental health and mental illness.

And we'll be covering all of those areas. ...The discipline of psychology spills over to issues of how the mind has evolved. Economics and game theory are now essential tools for understanding human thought and human behavior — those issues connecting to philosophy, computer science, anthropology, literature, theology, and many, many other domains."

© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007