TOK and Psychology

As an IB student, a required subject that we must do is Theory of Knowledge. Although I find TOK quite difficult as we have to understand how certain things impact our knowledge and investigate certain abstract theories, there are still lots of connections between our other subjects and TOK.

In psychology especially, a key area in TOK that we have investigated is the impact of the way of knowing 'emotion' on psychological research. Within psychology, we always have to evaluate studies and theories from a critical lens. This enables us to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of certain theories and whether certain studies properly support key ideas.

There are many links to TOK and emotion, particularly in the cognitive level of analysis where we learnt about how certain factors interact in emotion and how emotion may affect certain biological factors. For my outcome on biological factors and emotion, my class explored the way that emotion can impact memory, specifically the theory of 'Flashbulb Memories'. Emotion can heavily impact the way in which we attain knowledge, and using the idea of 'Flashbulb Memories', can lead to enhanced memories in times of extreme emotion.

Another link between Psychology and TOK is the idea of 'ethics'. It is important when evaluating empirical data in psychology is the ethics involved. A question that must be asked or considered is whether the ethics behind certain studies is worth the knowledge that is gained. Some studies break extreme ethical considerations, however many psychologists believe that the ethics broken in conducting these studies is justified due to the new advancements in human knowledge.

#psychology #tok