Ministry of higher and secondary special education uzbekistan state university of world languages department of theoretical sciences of english language

Figure 1

One of the important goals of scientific theories is to organize phenomena in a way that helps people think about them clearly and effectively. For example, the theory of social facilitation and social inhibition helps organize and make sense of a large number of seemingly contradictory outcomes. The multilayered human memory model effectively encapsulates many important phenomena: limited capacity and short retention time of information of interest but not repeated, importance of repetition information for long-term retention, serial position effects, etc. Or consider a classical theory of intelligence shown in Figure 2 “A representation of a theory of intelligence”. According to this theory, intelligence consists of a general mental ability, g, plus a few more specific abilities influenced by g (Neisset et al., 1996). Although there are other theories of intelligence, this one nicely summarizes many of the statistical relationships between tests of different mental abilities. This includes the fact that tests of all basic mental abilities tend to be positively correlated and the fact that some subsets of mental abilities (e.g., reading comprehension and analogy) is more positively correlated than others (e.g. reading comprehension and computation).

Figure 2

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The second purpose of theories is to allow researchers and others to make predictions about what will happen in new situations. For example, a gymnastics coach might wonder if a student's performance in a competition would be better or worse than when training alone. Although this particular question has never been studied experimentally, Zajonc's motivation theory suggests an answer. If the student generally performs with no mistakes, she is likely to perform better during competition. If she generally performs with many mistakes, she is likely to perform worse.
In clinical psychology, treatment decisions are often guided by theories. Consider, for example, dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder). The prevailing scientific theory of dissociative identity disorder is that people develop multiple personalities (also called alters) because they are familiar with this idea from popular portrayals (e.g., the movie Sybil) and because they are unintentionally encouraged to do so by their clinicians (e.g., by asking to “meet” an alter). This theory implies that instead of encouraging patients to act on multiple personalities, treatment should include preventing them from doing so (Lilienfeld & Lynn, 2003). ⁶