EXPERIMENTATION PSYCHOLOGY

Experimental Psychology is a branch of psychology that uses experimental methods to study psychological phenomena and processes. Experimentation psychology is a methodological approach rather then subjective study of psychology. The experimental method in psychology tries to explain the activities of human beings and animals and the functions of mental process

 The experimental method in psychology attempts to account for the activities of animals (including humans) and the functional organization of mental processes by influencing the variables that may cause change behavior. The experimentation psychology is primarily concerned with discovering laws that describe relation between psychological events and physical events. That is the relationship between sensations and the stimuli that produce them.  

The experimental psychology deals with study of perception, learning, sensation, motivation, behavior, conditioning and memory. The experimental psychology also deals with other branches like clinical psychology, personality psychology, educational psychology, child psychology, Old age, and social psychology. The experimental psychologist usually deals with normal organisms; However in biological psychology, studies are often conducted with organisms that has organic abnormalities or some emotional disorder or the experiments is conducted with organisms that are modified by surgery, radiation, drug treatment, or long-standing deprivations of various kinds.

Experimental psychologists use a number of different research methods and tools to investigate human behavior. A basic psychological experiment involve assigning participants to groups randomly, defining variables, developing a hypothesis, and finally altering the independent variables to measure the dependent variables.

Psychological experiment basic steps:

• Formulation of the problem, which is best stated in the form of question. Requirement: the question must be answerable by using the tools that are available to the psychologist.
• The psychologist usually guesses a tentative solution, which is called hypothesis. Hypothesis is a solution which may be required solution or a just a vague guess.
• After developing hypothesis, the psychologist must try to determine whether the solution is true or false.
• To find an answer to the hypothesis, the experimenter should collect data.
• Testing the hypothesis can be done through experimental method or through observation.
• Drawing the conclusion from hypothesis test on the basis of their research findings.