what do psychologists do? – Psychology Zone

Question: what do psychologists do?
- Keywords:
  psychology,
  work
Asked by anon-284818 on 2 Mar 2021.
- Simon Payne answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Typically, it’s teaching, research, and/or practice. Psychologists try to put their understanding of the brain/mind-behaviour connection to practical use, or do research which helps other people do a good job if their job also requires this understanding. So I might put my understanding of health psychology to use by working with the local NHS trust to encourage people to take up the covid vaccination, for example; or I could work with sport coaches to help them communicate in an autonomy-supportive manner with their players, which breeds better motivation, engagement, and hopefully, results. Perhaps I would conduct a research project to understand cancer nurse psychology during the pandemic to inform support that needs to be made available. There are lots of ways that psychologists work to try to bring about positive changes in the World!
- Rai Fayette answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  This is a really good question but it’s one that cannot be answered briefly as there are a lot of different branches of psychology such as forensic psychology, clinical, counselling, educational, sports, and others. On the whole, we conduct research either by reading other people’s research and/ or doing our own studies. We firstly ask ourselves, ‘what do we need to know?’ and ‘why?’, then we design and conduct our studies. The other main part of our job is to apply our knowledge of psychology to our practice. So for me, I apply my psychological knowledge to help children and young people realise and achieve their potential in education (from Nursery right up to college/ university). Sports psychologists on the other hand, apply their knowledge to help athletes, coaches and teams achieve their potential in their own sports. Some psychologists like me, also teach in universities.
- Alex Baxendale answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  There are lots of options! I spend my time doing research and teaching students, but other options include: Counseling to help people work through their problems, Occupational Psychology where you help businesses get the most of out of their employees (and make them happier too!), Forensic Psychology where you could help to track/identify causes for criminal behaviour, Neuropsychology where you can work in a hospital to help identify and treat brain damage, people can go in to data analysis (which is a fancy name for statistics, a type of math), or working with businesses on how they can use psychology to improve their sales (what makes people want to buy something?). There will be lots of other examples I haven’t included, but hopefully this will give you an idea of how broad the area is, you have plenty of time and space to try out different areas to find out what you are truly interested in!
- Marjorie Pichon answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Psychologists can do lots of different jobs, but the short answer is that they study why people behave the way that they do.
- Harry Piper answered on 2 Mar 2021: last edited 2 Mar 2021 9:06 am
  
  This is a really great question, and is really hard to answer!
  In psychology, there are loads (and I mean, loads) of different disciplines – in fact, you can probably find one for almost every letter of the alphabet! Some of these disciplines include abnormal psychology (where you might look at things such as mental ill health), counselling psychology (which is arguably one of the largest disciplines in psychology which is also (arguably) one of the most popular fields for motivation to start a career in psychology), developmental psychology (how we change and grow throughout life), and health psychology (how biology, psychology, behavior and social factors influence health and illness. These are just a few of the disciplines and there are so many more! Even within these disciplines what you do can vary! For instance in health psychology, you might look at stopping smoking, or you could look at telehealth (health services delivered remotely through computers – there has been a large move to this due to the pandemic, whereas before there was a lot of use for older more isolated (rural) individuals). This might also overlap with other disciplines within psychology. For example, if you want to explore motivations and barriers to giving blood, you will want to ‘market’ and showcase this work in a way for the general public the highlight the motivations and positives, but minimize and address the concerns – this would be an example where health and consumer psychology might cross!
  So, as you can see, there are a huge range of disciplines, and within those disciplines there is an almost unlimited number of topics you can research! So, it’s really hard to say what exactly we do. But, my experience involves conducting research (whatever the field may be), teaching students to be the next great lot of psychologists, and talking to folks about the research so that people know how results can be applied. Psychology is a science by the people, for the people and this is the best bit! This is by no means a brief answer, but hopefully it gives you an idea that in psychology, you can do almost anything!
- Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 2 Mar 2021: last edited 2 Mar 2021 9:22 am
  
  In a nutshell, psychologists study behaviour and mental processes. At the heart of what they do, psychologists seek to understand and explain thoughts, emotions, feelings, and behaviour (This can be human and non-human – that’s why there’s animal psychology 🐻).
  
  As you can imagine, what a ‘psychologists do’ would involve a lot of things; that’s why there are many subfields in psychology. For example, there’s clinical psychology, forensic psychology, cyberpsychology, positive psychology, etc. Why are there many subfields? Because you can’t put behaviour in a box! 😉
  
  Depending on their subfields, psychologists use techniques such as observation, assessment, and experimentation to develop theories about the beliefs and feelings that influence behaviour.
  
  I’m doing a PhD in clinical psychology which is concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. 🧠
- Amrita Bains answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Psychologists do lots of things! I think the fun thing is that we learn a lot about why people do the things they do. Why do people lie? How do our emotions affect us? Why do we prefer to eat chocolate than sprouts? So psychologists probably spend a lot of time answering questions that you may have asked yourself or your friends too. We then start answering these questions by using different experiments.
  
  Or, sometimes psychologists work in hospitals where they can help people and even some psychologists who work with the police looking at forensics.
  
  So, I think my answer is there are a lot of things which psychologists can do!
- anon answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Hi Ell,
  
  We do a lot! Firstly, there are many different types of psychologists that influences what exactly we do. Broadly you can split psychologists into two parts: academic (so things like teaching university students or working in research, like I am on my PhD) and applied (where you work face to face with people, such as an educational psychologist in a school or a clinical psychologist in a mental health setting).
  
  Though it has to be said most psychologists do a mix of the above! But whichever path you are on as a psychologist, we all have a common goal of better understanding the brain. This is mostly for the better such as improving mental health outcomes, but it can also be used for more sinister reasons such as using psychology in advertising making us buy things we don’t need!
- Gwen Brekelmans answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Psychologists do lots of things! Very broadly, we try to understand how humans work. This can be looking at people’s mental health, how people behave in groups, what things make up our identity, how we learn, how we communicate with each other, or ways in which we can help people learn more about themselves as well. In terms of what that means for day to day work, this can be something psychologists do in a practice (such as clinical psychologists or neuropsychologists who directly work with people to help them find tools to get better or improve their mental health), or in doing research and teaching people about it. I myself do more of those last two, where I try to figure out how we learn languages, how people differ in learning languages, and what can make it easier to learn them.
- Victoria Garfield answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Psychologists do lots of different things and I think that’s one of the reasons why a degree in psychology is so useful. When I went to uni I wanted to be a Forensic Psychologist and work with the police and the criminal justice system, but I’ve ended up actually working as a researcher using genetic (DNA) and health data from people in the population to understand how things like diabetes and high blood pressure affect our brains in later life, as we age. So, there’s always an element of studying the brain in my work, but I’m not a psychologist per se. I also teach on different psychology and genetics courses across a couple of universities. I have friends who I went to uni with who are clinical psychologists in the NHS, for example, but others work in HR, or have set up their own practice, or work as business consultants, or lecturers and some even went into teaching at primary/secondary schools, and some are social workers.
- Lisa Orchard answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Psychologists are interested in how people think, feel and behave. There are lots of different types of psychologists – and each will focus on different areas. For instance, clinical and counselling psychologists try and help people with their mental health. Occupational psychologists try to understand how people behave in the workplace. Forensic psychologists look at criminal behaviours and ways to tackle these. The BPS website is a good resource for looking at different types of psychologist: https://careers.bps.org.uk/
  
  I work in cyberpsychology, so I am interested in how people behave on the Internet. Why do people troll? Is social media bad for us? How do we keep people safe from negative things online? I am also an academic psychologist, which means I teach people about psychology as well as doing research.
- Ioana Stanciu answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  There are many different branches that you usually get to hear about in your undergraduate degree and then you can chose what to specialize in after you graduate: clinical psychologist, health psychologist, forensic psychologist, you can go into research (and that has many many branches too: health-related research, perception, memory etc).
- David McGonigle answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Wow! Good first question! I think if you asked five different psychologists, you’d get five different answers – there really are lots of different areas that ‘psychology’ covers. For example, some of my colleagues look at attitudes to climate change, to try to understand how people think about big questions in the world. Others are focused on what is called ‘human factors’, and do work with big companies like Boeing, Apple and Microsoft on driverless cars and virtual reality. And me? I use a lot of machines that tend to only be called by their initials (like EEG, PET, MRI, MEG, tES…the list is long!) to either record or stimulate the human brain. If you want to know more about these, ask me a question online on my profile page!
- Ellen Smith answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  There’s so many different types of psychologists, so it really differs for everyone. If you study psychology at school or university you will get to learn about some of the different pathways that you can go down to become a psychologist that specialise in different things. This is a brilliant article that explains a few of these options: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-9/careers-what-do-psychologists-do
  I work in research, so I run research studies that aim to answer questions about how the brain works. I look specifically at how food can impact brain function, so I have participants come into the lab, where I give them nutritional supplements (like vitamins) and see how they perform on cognitive tasks before and after. From then I can see if what I gave them made them perform better (or worse) on the tasks. We can then apply that research to real life and encourage people to take certain supplements or eat certain foods.
- Danielle Hett answered on 2 Mar 2021:
  
  Psychologists do lots of different things depending on the area they work in! Put simply though, psychologists are interested in why people behave the way they do and psychologists may be clinically trained to work with people therapeutically or they may be full-time researchers – or a mix of both! Thinking of the research side of things, there are lots of different branches within psychology and each area has its own focus of research. For example, there’s forensic psychology – which applies psychology to the field of criminal investigations – for example what makes people commit crimes? what factors influence memory and decision-making in lineup identification procedures? There’s also health psychology, which is focussed on using psychology to promote health and wellbeing and even educational psychology which looks at psychology in educational settings and helping to better understand children’s learning and development.
  
  I personally work in mental health research, which overlaps with the field of clinical psychology and psychiatry research. I examine questions around different mental health conditions, trying to understand more about the disorders themselves (e.g., the symptoms experienced), as well as the outcomes of those who are diagnosed with them (e.g.,relapse rates). I am really focused on learning more about ways to prevent mental health conditions so that new treatments can be developed and that we can intervene earlier to prevent people from getting ill.

Question: what do psychologists do?

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