Do you know our 8 basic psychological processes?

A resource that people have to adapt to the world is our behavior. This allows us to modify our environment and our reality to adapt to what happens. We know that these behaviors are mediated by internal mental processes, but what are those mental processes? This is where our 8 basic psychological processes come in.

The 8 basic psychological processes are: perception, learning, language, thinking, attention, memory, motivation and emotion. Throughout the article, we will discuss them individually, but these processes are highly related to each other. Although they maintain their terminological independence, many of them could not exist without the others; So it is better to understand this distinction as an artificial classification that makes scientific work easier.

Human behavior is, after all, one of the most complex dynamics that can exist. Psychology knows this well, and hence to understand much better why we are the way we are or why we do what we do, it may be interesting for us to understand the basic psychological processes.

1. Perception

How do human beings process everything that surrounds them? A caress, the smell of a flower, the feeling of oppression of a city with traffic and pollution, the presence before us of a person that attracts us… Within the basic psychological processes, Perception is responsible for us having an “image” of the reality that surrounds us, since this provides us with information about external stimuli through the senses.

Perception organizes and gives meaning to any sensory stimulus. The function of this process is obvious, knowing the environment allows us to move and interact with it; basic aspects to achieve an efficient adaptation. Even more, another curious fact about perception is that it offers us information about what happens in our own body.

The sensation of heat or hunger are sensory processes that also help us adapt and survive. As a curious fact, we can even highlight a study from University College London where it was studied why some people who had lost a limb continued to “perceive” that that hand or arm was still there.

Perceptual alterations

When this process is altered in any way, the way we perceive the world is modified in such a way that adaptation to the environment is compromised. This includes hallucinations, agnosia or synesthesia, for example.

2. Learning

Here we have the process by which we modify and acquire knowledge, abilities, skills, behaviors, etc. This works through what happened in the past, we learn to relate behaviors with their consequences, which is why it is closely related to memory.

The study of learning comes largely from the psychological branch of behaviorism, which gave us the theories of classical and operant conditioning. These are intended to explain to us the mechanisms by which we learn.

This process is useful because allows us to vary our repertoire of behaviors according to what happened in the pastsomething that allows us to respond more adaptively in present and future situations.

Learning disorders

There are several disorders in which learning is altered, but they are not usually limited to this process alone. Dyslexia, for example, causes the person to have difficulties learning due to dysfunction in reading ability.

3. Language

The human being is a social being, that is why Language is the process that gives us the ability to communicate with others. This communication, in the case of humans, is carried out through a complex symbolic code, language or language. The complexity of our language allows us to accurately describe almost anything, whether in the past, present or future.

The usefulness of this process is given by our need to maintain complex social relationships that allow us to survive in a hostile environment. Language allows us a mode of communication broad enough to maintain human societies.

The University of Copenhagen, for example, carried out a study demonstrating how language is closely related to the evolution of the mind.and how these two dimensions favor cohesion and that significant bond where the human being rises as the most advanced species on our planet.

Language disorders

The famous aphasia, where the production and/or understanding of language are altered or disabled, is the best example of language disorders. Other cases are dyslalia or dyslexia.

4. Thought

Thinking, by itself, makes up a very complex process that in psychology It is defined as the person in charge of transforming information to organize it and give it meaning. The study of thought began through Aristotelian logic; but this was not effective for analysis, because the human being did not reason logically. It contains abstract processes and the emotional impulse prevails above all.

The function of thought today remains a controversial topic. This is partly due to the existing terminological confusion around it. But, even so, the most accepted idea is that Its objective is to act as a control mechanism in the situations that arise.

Thought disorders

When the train of thought is disrupted, ailments such as bradypsychia or delirium appear. The truth is that the symptoms of this type of disorder are varied and comorbid with many other conditions.

5. Attention

Attention is the process responsible for focusing our resources on a series of stimuli and ignoring the rest. This is because people receive a large amount of stimuli that we cannot attend to at the same time.

The attentional process is adaptive, since if it did not exist, we would find ourselves lost without knowing what stimulus we should react to. It is paradoxical that the self-imposition of a cognitive limitation implies an evolutionary adaptation, but it is so.

Attentional dysfunctions

Attention disorders are often limiting and a continuous struggle for those who suffer from them. ADD, for example, can last into adulthood.

6. Memory

The basic psychological process of memory allows us to encode information to store it and then retrieve it. We are facing an essential process and closely related to all other processes.

Memory allows us to remember explicit information such as what the capital of France is or procedural information such as riding a bike. Memory exists because it is really useful for us to have information about our past experiences to reason and act on future events. Furthermore, without this process the other basic psychological processes would not exist, since they all have a strong support in memory.

Deficits in memory processes

The famous amnesias are the terror of many people due to the great implication that memory has on one’s own identity. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s affect data retention and episodic memory.

7. Motivation

Among the basic psychological processes, motivation is responsible for providing the body with resources to carry out the behavior. It is the process responsible for activating the body and putting it in the ideal state. Another important aspect of motivation is its directionality; It not only prepares the body, it is also responsible for directing behavior between possible options.

The function of motivation is to ensure that the individual directs behavior towards his or her goals and objectives. and prevent him from standing still without doing any behavior. It is a process closely related to emotion and learning.

Alterations in motivation

Apathy and abulia are, perhaps, the most representative examples of the alteration of this process. They are closely related to emotions, which are usually the triggers that trigger the subject’s action.

8. Emotion

Emotions are reactions to external stimuli, which allow us to guide our behavior and act quickly in response to the demands of our environment. Emotions have a triple component: (a) somatic, which would be the physiological changes that the emotion causes, (b) behavioral, which would include the spectrum of behavior that triggers the emotion, and (c) feeling, which would be the individual’s subjective experience of the emotion.

The function of emotion is to direct our behavior quickly and effectively. Most decisions lack the necessary importance to dedicate significant time and resources to them, and that is where emotion comes into play. It is important to understand that any decision is mediated by our emotions to a greater or lesser degree.

emotional disorders

It is common knowledge that, today, depression and anxiety are two epidemics that must be taken care of every day. In these two examples, emotions are disrupted and require professional attention.

In this article we have explained the basic psychological processes in a very superficial way, all of them are broad subjects of study and with a multitude of details. The intensive study of each of them provides us with the basic information to understand the behavior and mental processes of human beings. An undoubtedly interesting topic that is worth delving into.

You might be interested…