At its core, psychology is the rigorous scientific study of human and animal life. However, defining the exact subject matter of psychology requires moving beyond simple textbook definitions to understand its complex ontological and epistemological foundations.
If the scope of psychology defines the boundaries and applications of the field, the subject matter defines the actual phenomena being investigated—the specimen under the microscope. Historically, this has been fiercely debated, shifting from the “soul” to “consciousness,” and later to strictly observable “behavior.” Today, modern academic psychology has reached a consensus: the subject matter is officially defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, functioning within a specific environmental context.
This comprehensive guide explores exactly what psychologists study, diving into the observable, the unobservable, and the profound philosophical debates that shape graduation and postgraduate studies.
Part 1: The Core Subject Matter of Psychology
To understand this at a university level, we must break this subject matter down into its fundamental, measurable components.
1. Overt Behavior (The Observable)
Overt behavior constitutes any physically observable action or response emitted by an organism. Because it can be empirically measured, recorded, and verified by an independent observer, it forms the bedrock of objective psychological data. The subject matter here includes:
- Motor Behavior: Physical movements, reflexes, and voluntary actions (e.g., walking, reaching, flinching).
- Verbal Behavior: Spoken language, vocalizations, and the structural complexities of communication.
- Physiological Responses: Observable biological reactions, such as pupil dilation, galvanic skin response (sweating), or elevated heart rate in response to a stimulus.
2. Covert Mental Processes (The Unobservable)
While early 20th-century behaviorists attempted to eliminate unobservable phenomena from psychology’s subject matter, the cognitive revolution firmly re-established them. Covert processes are the internal, subjective experiences that cannot be seen directly but must be inferred from behavior or neurological imaging.
- Cognition (Intellect): The processes of acquiring, processing, storing, and retrieving information. This includes perception, attention, memory, reasoning, problem-solving, and language comprehension.
- Affect (Emotion): The subjective experience of feelings, moods, and emotional states, along with their physiological correlates.
- Volition (Motivation): The internal drives, desires, and goal-directed forces that initiate and sustain behavior.
3. Conscious vs. Unconscious Phenomena
The subject matter of psychology exists across different levels of awareness.
- The Conscious Mind: Immediate awareness of current thoughts, feelings, and surroundings.
- The Preconscious Mind: Information that is not currently in immediate awareness but can be easily brought to mind (e.g., recalling a specific memory or fact).
- The Unconscious Mind: A massive reservoir of implicit memories and automatic cognitive processes that operate below the threshold of awareness but heavily dictate overt behavior. Modern cognitive psychology studies this through implicit bias and automaticity, moving beyond strictly classical psychoanalytic interpretations.
4. The Interactionist Perspective: Individual and Environment
Psychology does not study behavior in a vacuum. The fundamental subject matter is the interaction between the organism and its environment. This is best summarized by Kurt Lewin’s foundational heuristic equation:
$$B = f(P, E)$$
This dictates that Behavior ($B$) is a function ($f$) of the Person ($P$)—their genetics, personality, and past experiences—and their Environment ($E$)—the immediate social and physical context. Therefore, the subject matter inherently includes the environmental and socio-cultural forces acting upon the individual.
5. The Bio-Psycho-Social Model (Levels of Analysis)
Because the subject matter is so complex, modern academic psychology mandates that any human phenomenon must be analyzed through three intersecting lenses:
- Biological Level: Genetic predispositions, neuroanatomy, brain chemistry, and evolutionary adaptations.
- Psychological Level: Learned fears, cognitive biases, emotional responses, and individual personality traits.
- Social-Cultural Level: Cultural expectations, peer group influences, media presence, and family dynamics.
For example, studying the subject matter of “anxiety” requires analyzing hyperactive amygdala responses (biological), catastrophic thought loops (psychological), and high-pressure academic or social environments (social-cultural).
Part 2: Advanced Perspectives on Subject Matter (Postgraduate Level)
For advanced scholars, defining the subject matter of psychology goes beyond simply listing “behavior and cognition.” It requires grappling with profound philosophical and methodological challenges that continue to shape the discipline today.
1. The Ontological Debate: The Mind-Body Problem
Before a psychologist can study the mind, they must confront what the mind actually is. The subject matter of psychology is intrinsically tied to the Mind-Body Problem, which asks how a non-physical entity (consciousness) can interact with a physical entity (the brain and body).
- Cartesian Dualism: The historical view that the mind and body are fundamentally distinct substances. While mostly rejected by modern cognitive science, its legacy still subtly influences how the medical model separates “mental” health from “physical” health.
- Materialism/Physicalism (Monism): The dominant paradigm in modern biopsychology and neuroscience, asserting that the subject matter of psychology is entirely physical. Mental states are simply brain states; therefore, studying the mind is ultimately studying neurobiology.
- Emergentism: A sophisticated middle ground often adopted by systems psychologists. It argues that while the mind is produced by the physical brain, consciousness is an “emergent property” with its own distinct rules that cannot be understood solely by reducing it to biology.
2. The Crisis of Operationalization
Because half of psychology’s subject matter (covert mental processes) is unobservable, the science relies heavily on operationalization—the process of strictly defining an abstract concept so it can be empirically measured.
For postgraduate students, the subject matter is not just the abstract concept of “intelligence” or “depression,” but how those constructs are operationalized into measurable data. If intelligence is defined solely by a standardized test score, the subject matter is inherently limited by the cultural and linguistic biases of that specific psychometric tool. Advanced psychology deeply questions the construct validity of its own subject matter.
3. Contemporary Paradigms: Shifting the Boundaries
The accepted subject matter of psychology is currently expanding through several cutting-edge theoretical frameworks:
- Embodied Cognition: This paradigm challenges the idea that the brain is a solitary computer. It argues that the subject matter of cognition is fundamentally rooted in the physical body’s interaction with the world. We think with our bodies, not just our brains.
- The Computational Theory of Mind: Often explored in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, this views the mind as an information-processing system. The subject matter here focuses on algorithms, mental representations, and neural networks.
- Neuro-phenomenology: An advanced approach that attempts to bridge the hard science of neuroimaging with the subjective, first-person experience of consciousness, refusing to let either side completely dominate the subject matter.
Conclusion
The subject matter of psychology is profoundly dualistic and endlessly complex. It is both the measurable twitch of a muscle and the abstract experience of human grief; the firing of a neuron and the collective behavior of a crowd. By applying rigorous scientific and philosophical analysis to both observable actions and unobservable minds, psychology stands as the ultimate bridge between the biological sciences and the humanities.
