Psychological Foundations
The Five Psychological Domains
Learning Objectives
- List and define the five major domains, or pillars, of contemporary psychology
Introduction to Contemporary Psychology
Link to Learning
Please visit this APA divisions website to see a list of all the divisions and to learn more about them. Student resources are also available through the APA.
Psychologists agree that there is no one right way to study the way people think or behave. There are, however, various schools of thought that evolved throughout the development of psychology that continue to shape the way we investigate human behavior. For example, some psychologists might attribute a certain behavior to biological factors such as genetics while another psychologist might consider early childhood experiences to be a more likely explanation for the behavior. Many expert psychologists focus their entire careers on just one facet of psychology, such as developmental psychology or cognitive psychology, or even more specifically, newborn intelligence or language processing.
While the field of study is large and vast, this text aims to introduce you to the main topics with psychology. You’ll get exposure to the various branches and sub-fields within the discipline and come to understand how they are all interconnected and essential in understanding behavior and mental processes. The five main psychological pillars, or domains, as we will refer to them, are:
- Domain 1: Biological (includes neuroscience, consciousness, and sensation)
- Domain 2: Cognitive (includes the study of perception, cognition, memory, and intelligence)
- Domain 3: Development (includes learning and conditioning, lifespan development, and language)
- Domain 4: Social and Personality (includes the study of personality, emotion, motivation, gender, and culture)
- Domain 5: Mental and Physical Health (includes abnormal psychology, therapy, and health psychology)
These five domains cover the main viewpoints, or perspectives, of psychology. These perspectives emphasize certain assumptions about behavior and provide a framework for psychologists in conducting research and analyzing behavior. They include some you have already read about, including Freud’s psychodynamic perspective, behaviorism, humanism, and the cognitive approach. Other perspectives include the biological perspective, evolutionary, and socio-cultural perspectives.
Helpful Hints
A neat way to remember the major perspectives in psychology is to think about your hand and associate each finger with a prominent psychological approach:
- Index Finger: Tap your finger to the temple of your head as if you were thinking about something. This is the cognitive perspective.
This represents the behavioral perspective, which falls under the developmental domain.
- Ring Finger: This is typically where you would wear a wedding band. For some people this is a healthy lifestyle choice, and for others this is a cause of stress. For some, the thought o