Cognitive Psychology
Researchers studying cognitive psychology look at cognitive processes that happen within the human body. Some of those processes are: memory, perception, attention, language and proprioception.
People in this field have varied opportunities for occupation such as educators, curriculum designers, engineers, scientists, judges, public health and safety officials, architects and graphic designers, since all of these require knowledge of how our brain perceives and understands the world around us.
If you would like to know more, check out the article from LSPC blog below.
Climate and Environmental Psychology
Within environmental psychology, researchers study the interaction between humans and the environment, including natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. An example is studying how staying in nature benefits us. Some other examples of what environmental psychologists research include what messages may motivate people to change their behaviour and why, why people may not adopt positive behaviours, how people’s behaviour affects the environment and how the environment affects people.
People who have degrees in this sphere of psychology often continue to do their own research or work either for non-profit organisations or for the government to help create urban and city plans, environmental design and environmental health.
If you would like to know more, check out the article from our blog below.
Clinical Psychology
In short, it is “the study of individuals, by observation or experimentation, with the intention of promoting change.” – Compas, Bruce & Gotlib, Ian. (2002). Introduction to Clinical Psychology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
This means clinical psychologists are scientists, they study people and their brains, and they are not to be confused with psychotherapists and therapists who promote change in people individually by treating them. Clinical psychologists help find the way to help people more effectively with their psychological issues.
They work within fields, such as research, integrated health care, teaching, programme development and evaluation, consultation, public policy and professional practice.
If you would like to know more, check out the article from LSPC blog below.
Counselling Psychology
Counselling psychologists concentrate on overall wellbeing across the lifespan of a person, study different things that affect the person’s wellbeing, such as the qualities of the individual (e.g., psychological, physical or spiritual factors) and the factors in the person’s environment (e.g., family, society and cultural groups).
In their work, they can also either conduct counselling/psychotherapy or teach and perform scientific research with individuals of all ages, families and organisations (e.g., schools, hospitals and businesses).
If you would like to know more, check out the article from our School’s blog below.
Developmental Psychology
The focus for this area of psychological study is human growth, and physical, cognitive, social, intellectual, perceptual, personality and emotional development. People studying this subfield of psychology most often go on to conduct their own research on this topic or teach others about it. Another direction people who study developmental psychology take is health care, where they help people with developmental disabilities, as well as care for the elderly in hospitals or mental health clinics.
If you would like to know more, check out the article from our blog below.
Experimental Psychology
Experimental psychology is rooted in the idea that our personality and life experiences are defined by our behaviour to a certain extent. Knowing this, experimental psychology asks the question “What influences our behaviour?”, including perception, attention, memory cognition and emotion. To study and test these topics, scientists first make theories based on known facts, create more specific hypotheses and test them using different ways of collecting data.
As you have probably guessed, people interested in studying experimental psychology further go onto doing their own research and teach others about it. However, depending on what their research is about, experimental psychologists have the potential to contribute to other subfields of psychology, since in essence psychology is based on scientific research, using which it progresses to help people.
If you would like to know more, check out the article from our School’s blog below.
Forensic and Public Service Psychology
This field of psychology aims to help workers in public service learn how to assess and interact with dangerous or particularly vulnerable individuals. An example would be assessing parents in custody agreements to see if both provide a suitable environment for their child or selecting police officers who demonstrate the slightest inclination towards aggression.
People interested in this subfield of psychology have a wide range of potential work placements, including private practices, government, military, academia, prisons and psychiatric facilities. An example of what they can do in the criminal system is work on child abuse cases to get a grasp on the defendant’s sanity to determine if they understood what they were doing at the time.
Health Psychology
In health psychology, researchers focus on understanding how psychological, social, and biological factors influence how we treat our health.
Researchers in this area play a big part in informing health care practices, including pain management, smoking cessation and rehabilitation. Meanwhile, health care workers and health psychologists use this information to treat patients and help them make better choices about their health in the future.
Health psychologists also specialise in psychosomatic illnesses, emotional eating, linking people’s emotions to their behaviour, and its consequences.
If you would like to know more, check out the article from LSPC blog below.
Human Factors and Engineering Psychology
When creating devices for human use, engineers focus on efficiency and workability of electronic devices or applications. This, however, isn’t enough to make devices user friendly, especially for people who don’t know the inner workings or structure of such gadgets.
Human factor and engineering psychologists come in to help with this to ensure that things designed by engineers aren’t only effective, but also follow a logical layout and account for human error to make it less anxiety inducing for first time users to navigate through. Some examples where this intervention is helpful include the designs of websites to make them easy to find one’s way around and medical equipment to make it easier to use.
Industrial and Organisational Psychology
Psychologists working in this sphere are most interested in improving how businesses are run. When you first think about how to make a business grow you would think the most important thing is profitability. Yet, it is a much more complex issue which involves several aspects, such as communication, motivation in employees, effective training and clear company goals. And to understand how best to improve these parts, we need to have a thorough understanding of psychological and physiological needs of workers and how people communicate.
Industrial and organisational psychologists conduct studies and use their knowledge to help identify training and development needs, optimise the quality of work life, coach employees and organisation leaders, formulate and implement training programmes and evaluate their effectiveness, develop criteria to evaluate performance of individuals and organisations, and assess consumer preferences, customer satisfaction and market strategies.
Psychology of Teaching and Learning
Just as developmental psychology, teaching and learning psychology is complicated. It includes understanding how children and adults take in information during different stages of their lives, how to inform the instructional process depending on that, and how developmental issues can impact this further. Psychologists in this field also look at how people learn in different settings and what strategies work best in each one.
This can be studied from research centres, universities and through private/public health care, from afar or one-on-one. When working in health care, teaching and learning psychologists focus on one or more specific ranges of age and the ability to help overcome learning challenges.
Quantitative Psychology
While psychologists in other fields study different aspects of people’s behaviour and how it interacts with their environment, quantitative psychologists create and improve tools for studying human behaviour. An example of this would be the Likert scale that helps us put into numbers how fond a person is of something.
In the real world, quantitative psychologists are seen as experts at measurement, statistics, research methodology and programme evaluation, usually working in research centres or major universities where they collaborate with different scientists from a variety of other subfields.
Rehabilitation Psychology
Similarly to health psychology, rehabilitation psychology aims to help clients make better decisions about their health in the future. A major difference, however, is that rehabilitation on its own helps a wide variety of people and therefore psychologists who specialise in rehabilitation are needed. An example would be a person struggling with chronic pain would need understanding and advice about how they can cope with the mental and physical challenges of their conditions.
Rehabilitation psychologists work in a variety of settings, such as inpatient and outpatient physical rehabilitation centres, assisted living and long-term care facilities. Other kinds of patients they work with are individuals with specific disabilities, mental health issues, chronic illnesses like cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, brain injury or deafness.
Social Psychology
Social psychologists are most interested in studying how we and others perceive ourselves and how this influences our behaviour towards ourselves and others. Gaining understanding in this helps with insight into how we can change harmful attitudes towards concepts and people.
Specifically, social psychologists research social perception, social influence, and social interaction in terms of how it affects individual and group behaviour.
Despite seeming to be a narrow subfield of psychology, social psychology can be applied in other areas, such as creating educational programmes for organisations to help hire and train employees, and in socio-environmental issues by figuring out ways to encourage people to recycle to help slow down pollution. Due to this diversity, there is a wide range of career opportunities, such as hospitals, social service agencies, private corporations, non-profit organisations and government offices.
If you would like to know more, check out the article from our School’s blog below.
Sports and Performance Psychology
Being good at a certain sport is only half the work when we are talking about professional athletes. What truly gets them to the highest level and getting into competition is mental toughness. It gets you through to perform in a high stakes situation where most will fail without it no matter how good they are at the sport.
To help with this, sports and performance psychologists focus on studying and applying psychological principles concerning mental and physical performance and resilience to training.
In application, sports and performance psychologists usually work either in research facilities or in universities to study these phenomena. However, they also often work privately for professional athletes to help them overcome traumatic experience or anxiety as well as maximise physical performance. Performance, however, is also a big part of comedians, actors, and surgeons, all of whom need the same support, which gives sports and performance psychologists plenty of working opportunities.
Conclusion
To conclude, there are many fields of study qualified psychologists may specialise in, and there are many career paths professionals can pursue, depending on their education, work experience and interests. You can read more about careers in psychology here.
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