Psychology Students

Psychology Students

The purpose of this essay is simply to cover some of the main questions psychology students try to answer during their undergraduate careers. Psychology students are often faced with the question “are you trying to analyse me?” Indeed, when you study a subject like psychology, upon meeting, a majority of people assume (or at least make it look like they do), that you’ll analyse them. Interestingly enough, what undergraduate psychology programs actually teach could not be further from the truth, in a way. For example, introductory level psychology textbooks are mostly filled with descriptions of experiments, statistics and names of psychologists who made important contributions to the social science. In addition, psychoanalysis, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, is no longer in use today in clinical and academic settings.

Conversely, branches of the discipline, such as interpersonal or social psychology and personality psychology, as well as courses on specialized topics such as genes and behaviour do influence how students of psychology interact with other people, since such subdivisions do shed substantial light on the thoughts, emotions, motivations and reactions of one’s peers and other people in one’s social environment.

University of Toronto. Photo: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

For instance, the famous Asch experiments on conformity demonstrated that most people would prefer to agree with the wrong opinion, despite going against their own intuition, to remain in agreement with others. In Asch’s experiments, confederates (paid actors) pretended to be participants in an experiment testing an hypothesis unrelated to the one truly being tested. When asked to compare the length of two lines, they consistently deemed the shorter line as the longest. Then, when the real subjects’ turn came, they made the same choice, rationalized by the researchers as trying to conform. In fact, as many parents afraid that their children or, even more so, teenagers, give into peer pressure and take part in dubious activities know, the need and want to belong is a strong human motivator.

Furthermore, to go back to the first paragraph of the present short entry, psychology students may analyse human behaviour, to an extent. For instance, a psychology undergraduate student may infer that someone jealous is simply slightly insecure, or assume that the beauty queen who always gets her way with everybody has a particularly well developed Theory of Mind (ToM – the array of mental schemas representing other people’s thoughts, intentions, emotions and motivations, lacking in such developmental disorders as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) – and diagnosed by such paradigms as Sally’s Hidden Marble).

The purpose of the present essay was to go over some of the ways psychology students learn about the academic world, particularly as it relates to their field. Alternatively, even after taking Introduction to Psychology or Psychology 101 (a prerequisite for admission in most university psychology programs), a student may likewise infer that his or her friend may be lacking serotonin (a neurotransmitter regulating mood) if he or she seems depressed all the time. Similarly, whereas other friends may simply attempt to interest the popular, but dangerously emaciated, cheerleader to join them for dinner, the psychology student may suspect that she has developed an eating disorder, such as anorexia or bulimia nervosa. Notwithstanding, a lot of studying psychology has to do with reading, reviewing and analysing existent research and looking at theoretical convergence in the general population, rather than analysing a particular person per se.