Q.Define psychology and explain what sports psychology studies.

Human Behaviour and Mental Processes

Think of a person walking into a room, seeing a friend, smiling, and walking over to shake hands. What you just observed — the walking, the smiling, the handshake — is behaviour. It is outward, visible, and measurable. But what you did not see is everything that happened inside that person's mind: recognising the friend, feeling happy, deciding to approach, planning the handshake. That inner world — thoughts, feelings, memories, decisions — is the mental process.

The two are inseparable. Behaviour is the window through which we infer mental processes; mental processes are the engine that drives behaviour.

The Intuition

Imagine you are solving a math problem. Your behaviour is what someone else can see: you sit at a desk, you scribble on paper, you mutter numbers. Your mental processes are what only you experience: you recall a formula, you feel frustration, you hold a number in your working memory, you decide to try a different method.

Without the mental process, the behaviour is meaningless — a robot could scribble. Without the behaviour, the mental process is invisible — a dream no one else can witness.

The Precise Statement

Human behaviour refers to any observable action or response of an organism — from a blink to a speech to a complex social ritual. It is overt, measurable, and can be recorded.

Mental processes refer to the internal, subjective activities of the mind — thinking, feeling, remembering, perceiving, deciding, imagining. They are covert, private, and must be inferred.

Together, they form the subject matter of psychology. The discipline asks: How do mental processes give rise to behaviour? And how does behaviour shape mental processes?

A Simple Table to Hold the Distinction