Resumen:
The objective of this study was to know what psychology means for people, since
nowadays more and more paradigms are created about what psychology is. Today,
there are several occupations that seem or appear to be like psychology, or that
people, due to lack of information, can get confused with it. The present investigation
corresponds to a descriptive study, with a non-experimental cross-sectional design.
For the population, we worked with three samples, one was 35 students from the
Autonomous Mexico State University (UAEMex), Tejupilco Professional Academic
Unit who are studying a degree in psychology, another was 35 professionals between
the UAEMex and the National Council for Teaching and Research in Psychology
(CNEIP) who exercise their role as psychologists, and the other, 35 adults who had an
occupation other than psychology, either profession or trade. The Natural Semantic
Networks technique was used, whose main purpose is to approach the study of
meaning in a natural way, the word PSYCHOLOGY was used as a stimulus and the
phrases "Psychology is useful for ..." and "Psychology is ..." as illustrative sentences. to
guide them to define the stimulus. For the results, the word that was repeated the
most in the three samples was the defining word Help. This leads to saying that for
people the first thing that comes to mind when they think of psychology is helping.