Linking mind, brain, and behaviour
Late in the 20th century, methods for observing the activity of the living brain were developed that made it possible to explore links between what the brain is doing and psychological phenomena, thus opening a window into the relationship between the mind, brain, and behaviour. The functioning of the brain enables everything one does, feels, and knows. To examine brain activity, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to measure the magnetic fields created by the functioning nerve cells in the brain, detecting changes in blood flow. With the aid of computers, this information can be translated into images, which virtually “light up” the amount of activity in different areas of the brain as the person performs mental tasks and experiences different kinds of perceptions, images, thoughts, and emotions. They thus allow a much more precise and detailed analysis of the links between activity in the brain and the mental state a person experiences while responding to different types of stimuli and generating different thoughts and emotions. These can range, for example, from thoughts and images about what one fears and dreads to those directed at what one craves the most. The result of this technology is a virtual revolution for work that uses the biological level of neural activity to address questions that are of core interest for psychologists working in almost all areas of the discipline.
Social cognitive neuroscience
The advances described above led to the development in the early years of the 21st century of a new, highly popular field: social cognitive neuroscience (SCN). This interdisciplinary field asks questions about topics traditionally of interest to social psychologists, such as person perception, attitude change, and emotion regulation. It does so by using methods traditionally employed by cognitive neuroscientists, such as functional brain imaging and neuropsychological patient analysis. By integrating the theories and methods of its parent disciplines, SCN tries to understand the interactions between social behaviour, cognition, and brain mechanisms.
Epigenetics
The term epigenetic is used to describe the dynamic interplay between genes and the environment during the course of development. The study of epigenetics highlights the complex nature of the relationship between the organism’s genetic code, or genome, and the organism’s directly observable physical and psychological manifestations and behaviours. In contemporary use, the term refers to efforts to explain individual differences in physical as well as behavioral traits (e.g., hostility-aggression) in terms of the molecular mechanisms that affect the activity of genes, essentially turning on some genes and turning off others.
Epigenetic regulation of gene activity plays a critical role in the process of development, influencing the organism’s psychological and behavioral expressions. Thus, while the genome provides the possibilities, the environment determines which genes become activated. In the early 21st century there emerged evidence for the important role of the environment (e.g., in maternal behaviour with the newborn) in shaping the activity of genes. Epigenetic factors may serve as a critical biological link between the experiences of an individual and subsequent individual differences in brain and behaviour, both within and across generations. Epigenetic research points to the pathways through which environmental influence and psychological experiences may be transformed and transmitted at the biological level. It thus provides another route for the increasingly deep analysis of mind-brain-behaviour links at multiple levels of analysis, from the psychological to the biological.
Evolving scope and structure of psychological science
The discoveries and advances of psychological science keep expanding its scope and tools and changing its structure and organization. For most of the 20th century, psychological science consisted of a variety of specialized subfields with little interconnection. They ranged from clinical psychology to the study of individual differences and personality, to social psychology, to industrial-organizational psychology, to community psychology, to the experimental study of such basic processes as memory, thinking, perception and sensation, to animal behaviour, and to physiological psychology. In larger academic psychology departments, the list got longer. The various subfields, each with its own distinct history and specialized mission, usually were bundled together within academic departments, essentially a loose federation of unrelated disciplines, each with its own training program and research agenda. Late in the 20th century this situation began to change, fueled in part by the rapid growth of developments in cognitive science and social cognitive neuroscience, including the discovery of new methods for studying cognition, emotion, the brain, and genetic influences on mind and behaviour.
In the early years of the 21st century, psychology became an increasingly integrative science at the intersection or hub of diverse other disciplines, from biology, neurology, and economics to sociology and anthropology. For example, stimulated by Amos Tversky’s and Daniel Kahneman’s theory of decision making under risk, new areas developed, including behavioral economics and decision making, often being taught by psychologists in business schools. Likewise, advances in cognitive neuroscience led to the subfield of neuroeconomics.
In another direction, links deepened between psychology and law. This connection reflected new findings in psychology about the nature of human social behaviour, as well as the fallibility of eyewitness testimony in legal trials and the distortions in retrospective memory.
Likewise, with recognition of the role of mental processes and self-care behaviour in the maintenance of health, the fields of behavioral medicine and health psychology emerged. These subfields study links between psychological processes, social behaviour, and health.
At the same time, within psychology, old sub-disciplinary boundaries were crossed more freely. Interdisciplinary teams often work on a common problem using different methods and tools that draw on multiple levels of analysis, from the social to the cognitive and to the biological.