mentalism (psychology)

In psychology, mentalism is an umbrella term that refers to those branches of study that concentrate on mental perception and thought processes, in other words, cognition, like cognitive psychology. This is in opposition to disciplines, most notably behaviorism, that believe that study of psychology should focus on the structure of causal relationships to conditioned responses, that is to say behaviors, and seek to support this hypothesis through scientific methods and experimentation. Over the course of the history of psychology, mentalism and behaviorism have clashed, with one or the other representing the dominant paradigm of psychological investigation at different times in history.