A Guide To Biological Psychology

I am Doctor Eldad Farhy. I am a counselling and psychotherapeutic psychologist. I run psychologyexpert.

co.uk, and today I will be talking about psychology. Biological psychology is that aspect of psychology that looks mostly into the effects biology has on psychology and vice versa.

To give you a couple of examples, we like fatty and sugary foods. This is because our bodies respond better to those foods that contain more calories and therefore we have evolved a predilection for those particular types of foods. That predilection was really useful in olden days when we had to expend many calories to find that food.

Of course, liking sugary and fatty foods ensured that we spent our calories looking for the most rewarding type of food and therefore, that we would survive. What has become a problem today is where food is quite easily obtainable, but the predilection continues, causing almost an epidemic of obesity within the affluent world. So biological psychology would look first why do we do something, what are the biological imperatives for doing it, and secondly how, by using psychological methods, we can change our behavior.

Therefore, biological psychology is a study of the interface between body and mind. The problem with biological psychology is that it is not as straight forward as it sounds. For instance, you may have heard of the selfish gene theory, that is the idea that our behavior is mostly mandated by our unconscious biologically fixed sort of tendency to pass on our genes to the future, to preserve the blood line.

However, the theory that sounds very simple and on first look quite true, can not explain things such as altruistic behavior, people will actually give up their life to save other people, not even related to them. Obviously, selfish gene therefore cannot explain all our behaviors. Biological psychology often offers mechanistic simple explanations to our behavior, based on our biology.

However, as the fallacy with the selfish gene theory has shown, we often act for far more complex reasons which have little to do with our biology. .