Conway 

Learning. Although learning is usually defined in terms such as 'acquiring knowledge', psychology often makes use of a much more general way of defining this concept. Learning is seen as the process of acquiring changes in behaviour, knowledge, or any other type of understanding as a result of experience. To count as 'learning', these changes must be relatively stable and long-term. There are obvious links here with MEMORY, as the resulting behavioural or conceptual changes must be stored in some way in long-term memory. 

Education. This term originally comes from the Latin educere, meaning to 'draw out from within'. Thence follows the concept of a teacher as a facilitator, helping his or her students to make connections with the material they are exposed to. Education has a quite distinct meaning from training, in that the latter is explicitly focused on developing an ability towards a specific practical application, whereas the former consists of a wider, more general development of the mind, which hopefully will fit its owner to be able to cope with the demands of an ever-changing environment. 

The 1960s spawned innumerable new social, political and religious movements. After the austerity of the post-Second World War period there was an economic boom in the West. The decade opened as South Africa left the Commonwealth with the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, giving his famous 'Winds of Change' speech in which he argued for a 'partnership of races' in that continent, and for inclusion of all in political and economic power. However , the struggle against apartheid and brutal white supremacist regimes was not to be complete until almost three decades later. In 1962 the USA became very nervous about the fact that the Soviet Union was building medium range missile sites in Cuba with strike capability on the USA. After supporting an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, the US blockaded Cuba. Despite the exhortation of his chiefs-of-staff to use nuclear weapons to end the confrontation, President John F. Kennedy insisted on negotiation and averted what could have been the first (and probably last) nuclear war. In 1964 in Great Britain the Conservatives lost the general election and Harold Wilson became the first Labour prime minister since 1951. The United States became involved in a war in Vietnam, supporting a series of Saigon-based governments against rebels who appeared to have backing from Communist China and/or the Soviet Union. The US poured in resources, including up to 500.000 troops in the country at any one time. This war was one of the first in which a civilian population was attacked as much as the forces against whom was undertaken. The use of chemical weapons such as napalm (a jelly-like chemical flammable substance dropped from the air) and Agent Orange (a herbicide) did vast and terrible damage to the country, its people and the food systems that supported them. A huge popular protest movement in both the US and across Europe developed against the war. The ethic of rebellion and questioning of the traditional status quo fuelled the development of protest and alternative cultural, arts and religious movements too. These movements included the Pop Art movement, modernism and minimalism in art and architecture, the rock, soul and motown movements in music, and transcendental meditation, many cults of various kinds and the alternative lifestyle called 'hippy'. The idea that individuals should explore their own inner psyches and develop spiritually was also connected to particular drug cultures, where drugs like LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) were purported to produce the same self-knowledge and awareness as meditation and religious experience did. The chief proponent was an American psychologist Timothy Leary, who famously exhorted his followers to 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'. This decade spawned relaxation of dress codes and liberalisation of sexual behaviour, enabled by the development of a contraceptive pill, which enabled women for the first time in history to control their fertility. Despite the apparent tremendous optimism and energy with the decade opened, it closed more sombrely with the promise of wars and destruction becoming ubiquitous. The Vietnam war continued with thousands dead and opposed by violent demonstrations across the US and Europe; the six-day Arab-Israeli war occurred in 1967; in 1968 Martin Luther King, a US black rights activist was assassinated and Enoch Powell in the UK gave his notorious 'Rivers of Blood' speech opposing immigration; in 1968 also the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia after its liberal leader Alexander Dubcek had introduced the 'Prague Spring' of liberal reforms; in response to sectarian conflict over civil rights in 1969 British troops began to patrol the streets of Northern Ireland. The continuing sectarian conflict and its consequence became know as the 'Troubles', and has continued into the new century; in 1969 the there was a very severe famine amongst the Biafran people of Nigeria. For the first time television began to bring the acute suffering of people of the developing world into the living rooms of every industrialised nation. 

Philosophy as an academic discipline can be divided into a number of central topics, such as the origins and nature of human knowledge, language, logic, ethics, aesthetics etc..Many of these topics are of great importance to psychologists. Indeed, many of the debates within psychology (e.g. concerning fundamental issues on what should be considered appropriate methodologies, what counts as valid data, the relationships between theories and evidence etc.) are not just scientific, but philosophical questions, requiring the tools of philosophical analysis for a proper treatment. Historically, psychology itself was once a branch of philosophy, called 'mental philosophy'. It became a clearly-recognised discipline in its own right only towards the end of the nineteenth century, with researchers such as Wilhelm Wundt (in Germany), and William James (in the United States). There are still important aspects of psychological issues which can (and perhaps need) to be tackled using the tools of philosophy, in that they need rational argument rather than simply engaging in further experimental/empirical research. One example of this is the study of consciousness which brings up the so-called 'mind-body problem' – the problematic relationship between mental experiences and the physical world. Although neurosciences and other disciplines can try to throw some light on important aspects of this, much of the debate actually centres round questions of rational analysis, use of language and the precise meanings of words etc., which come within the remit of philosophy. 

Humanistic. Psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers developed humanistic psychology in the late 1950's as a 'third force' in reaction to the then prevailing disciplines of behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Humanistic psychology shared the rejection by psychoanalysis of the behaviourist insistence on studying only those aspects of human psychology which were open to precise observation and measurement. Also like psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology wished to examine subtleties of what it feels like and means to be human which are difficult (if not impossible) to capture in experimental settings. However, unlike psychoanalysis, humanistic psychologists took a much more optimistic viewpoint on people's capacity to be consciously aware of themselves, and of their capacity for agency (i.e. to consciously initiate change in their lives). It also takes a holistic approach, attempting to study the 'whole person' – thoughts, feelings, and bodily awareness. Humanistic psychology has developed or influenced a wide range of methods for facilitating personal growth, such as: Bioenergetics, Rebirthing.; Rogerian counselling, Encounter groups, Gestalt therapy, Co-counselling, Personal Construct therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Rational-emotive therapy; Psychosynthesis and many others. Research methods used by humanistic psychologists typically take an 'inside' viewpoint (in contrast to the 'outside' viewpoint of many other perspectives in psychology), using qualitative methods to try to understand people's subjective experience. They also take an 'idiographic' approach, in that they typically try, as much as possible, to understand people in terms of each person's unique way of viewing themselves and their world. So instead of experiments or psychometric measures, humanistic psychologists might use methods such as depth interviews. There is a considerable focus on helping people achieve their full potential, or self-actualization, in Abraham Maslow's term ('becoming all one is capable of becoming'). This is a quite different aim for psychology than, say, an experimental focus on eliciting reliable, 'scientific' data about cause-effect relationships. The best way to understand why different perspectives in psychology have such different methodologies, and focus on such different subject areas, is to ask, quite simply, what their aim is. There have been many critiques of humanistic psychology. As mentioned above, it is criticised for its lack of experimental methodology. Another criticism is that although it does acknowledge the existence of social influences, it arguably underplays the extent to which these construct many aspects of human experience (and, indeed, the way humanistic psychology itself can be seen as a product of postwar US culture, in its individualism and optimistic focus). It does not attempt to provide, as psychoanalysis does, a comprehensive theory of why we are as we are. Although, like the psychoanalytic perspective, humanistic psychology has had limited influence within academic psychology (because of its non-experimental focus), it has had a great influence in counselling and the various 'human potential' therapies. I has also had influence on teaching, and with aspects of work (e.g. some methods used in managementtraining and the development of interpersonal skills). At its best humanistic psychology provides conceptual frameworks and methods for encouraging personal growth that many people have found extremely valuable in their everyday lives. Ultimately, not unlike psychoanalysis, it takes an essentially pragmatic viewpoint in seeing the value of humanistic ideas and methods in their practical efficacy in helping human beings to lead more fulfilled lives. 

Neuroscience. Neurological scanning (e.g. MRI, PET) Techniques used involve neurological scanning of different parts of the brain (using complex and expensive apparatus with techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI, and Positron Emission Tomography or PET). Such scanning can, for example, show which parts of the brain are active when different cognitive or emotional activity is happening. They have allowed psychologists to map the brain activity that occurs in different everyday activities.\nAnother technique measures the small electrical signals produced by the brain, using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Different frequency ranges of signals are recorded separately, as Alpha Waves, Beta waves, Delta waves etc. Researchers have studied correlations between different brain wave activity (e.g. relative proportion of Alpha and Beta waves) with different psychological states, such as dreaming, non-dream sleep, normal waking activity, day-dreaming etc. Interesting correlations were found with things like rapid eye movement periods in dreaming (REM) and high levels of brain wave activity. Operations and case studies of brain damaged patients\nOne way of studying how different parts of the brain may be affecting human experience is to study the behavioural and experiential consequences of alterations to the normal brain set-up. Obviously, this cannot ethically be done as a deliberate experiment on humans (though it is sometimes carried out on animals – see section on animal research, and associated ethical issues). However, psychologists can study the resulting effects when this occurs in humans because of brain-damage (either present from birth, or due to injury), or surgical intervention. An example of the latter is the operation to sever the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain (this is sometimes carried out to help very severe cases of epilepsy, for example). \nResearchers such as Sperry have used special equipment in the laboratory to present different tasks to the two brain hemispheres. These studies gave considerable insight into how cognitive functions such as touch and vision appear to be processed by the different hemispheres. For example, visual stimuli presented so as to be processed by the left hemisphere of the patient could be described easily. However, when presented to the right hemisphere, they could not be described, or even properly recognised in conceptual terms, although they affected the emotions. This shows how language is a left-hemisphere function (for right-handers), and is a good example of the kind of research done with this methodology. 

Psychoanalytic approaches provide both a psychological theory and a therapeutic method. There is a particular focus on the emotional conditions of early childhood, with many emotional problems in adult life seen as relating to unresolved developmental conflicts from this period. A key assumption is that much of our motivation is driven by unconscious forces, with their origins in this early childhood emotional development. Although there are many different psychoanalytic approaches, such as neoFreudians, Jungians, Kleinians, Object Relations etc., they all hold the above assumptions in common. A number of other therapeutic approaches also draw heavily on psychoanalytic ideas, such as Gestalt therapy, Transactional Analysis, and many others. It is useful in getting an understanding of psychoanalytic approaches to study the key Freudian ideas, as his theories still provide the basis of much psychoanalytic thinking. Freud's developmental model focuses particularly on a series of psychosexual stages in the first five years or so of childhood. These stages relate to shifts in basic sources of pleasure and satisfaction, including the oral, anal and phallic stages. Too much frustration or over-gratification at any of these stages is seen as leading to fixation, and later neuroses. Each of these stages must be successfully completed for the development of a healthy personality. A key stage occurs in the resolution of the phallic stage in the Oedipus complex, where a jealous desire to kill the same sex parent and possess the opposite sex parent leads to fear of being punished for this desire. This fear is dealt with by identification with the same-sex parent, seen as crucial for successful development of the super-ego and gender identity. It is probably fair to say that Freud's descriptions of female gender identity have often been viewed as rather less convincing than the male equivalent. It should also be noted that post-Freudian theorists have often proposed significant revisions to this developmental model (e.g. Melanie Klein's much greater emphasis on the importance of infancy, or the Object Relations school seeing motivational drive more as connecting with people rather than just focused on satisfying instincts). Freud's basic model of the mind sees the instinctual driving forces of the id often battling against the internalised social demands (initially received via the parents) of the super-ego. The ego has the job of finding an acceptable compromise between the conflicting demands of the id and super-ego, and of the external world. The anxiety associated with these conflicts in early childhood can, if the ego is too weak to cope with them at that time, lead to repression, with 'defence mechanisms' shielding the conscious, rational mind from disturbing anxieties and urges towards forbidden impulses. This repressed material will then go into the unconscious (i.e. it will no longer be accessible by the rational conscious mind), potentially leading to neurotic behaviour patterns. Psychoanalytic therapy essentially tries to reverse this process, creating a hopefully safe environment where the skills of the therapist can help identify the defence mechanisms in operation and acknowledge and release the previously repressed material. The libido ('life energy') associated with these defence mechanisms is then redirected, so the ego can deal with the conflict in a way which is more in harmony with the different parts of the psyche, and with current reality. The idea that the conscious mind is unable to be aware of the main emotional driving forces of the psyche mean the psychoanalytic approaches are much more pessimistic than humanistic approaches, for example, about possibilities for human agency (i.e. capacity to make genuine, conscious choices). However, although the theory is essentially deterministic, the therapy is less so, as genuine change is seen as possible with the help of therapeutic alliance with the psychoanalyst. Therapeutic techniques used include (among others): free association: clients are encouraged to say whatever comes into their heads, bypassing conscious editing. Silences or abrupt changes of topic can act as a signal to the analyst of resistances to this process, indicating a defence mechanism linked to the material being talked about at that point. Dream interpretation: where the overt, or manifest content is seen as screening an underlying latent content relating to inner conflicts. Transference: the emotional feelings aroused in our early relationships can be unconsciously 'transferred' into relationships in adult life. In analysis, early childhood emotional conflicts (often with the parents) are relived through the analyst-client relationship, with the analyst helping the client bring them into conscious awareness. Psychoanalytic approaches in general have had very great influence on Western culture as a whole, and are particularly influential in the therapy world. However, their emphasis on qualitative, clinical data, and limited 'testability' have tended to limit their influence within academic psychology departments, which have generally emphasised more experimental approaches. Psychoanalysts in clinical practice are, nevertheless, in a position to collect a great deal of data of different kinds (behavioural, inner experiences and symbolic) over long periods of time with the same patient. Patient's responses to psychoanalytic interpretations, whether immediate or in terms of the long term clinical effectiveness of treatment provide evidence for their ideas. It is problematic, however, that much of this evidence is essentially private and necessarily involves the subjective experience of both patient and analyst. 

Neuropsychological basis of the mind/consciousness. Neuropsychology examines how neurological processes in the brain affect both behaviour and the experience of consciousness. This involves studying the brain, for example by examining the structure of the brain and the corresponding neural activity within it. Another approach is to examine damaged brains, looking at the consequences of the damage for behaviour, perception and language. Many cognitive functions have specific centres in the brain, though some cannot be localised in this way, and attention has turned instead to the identification of networks of interacting brain areas.