• Question: what is a psychologists? :L

    Asked by cfib to Helen on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Helen O'Connor

      Helen O'Connor answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi, wow, thats a big question. Psychology is the science of human thoughts feelings and behaviours – how the mind works. We do research to understand how people learn to do new things, how our thoughts affect our feelings, how we develop, what happens in the brain when we do or think certain things etc. This is the ‘research’ side of psychology – and most of this is discovered by experiments with humans and animals.

      There is also the ‘applied’ side of psychology – this is where we take all the things we have discovered in our experiments, to actually create ways of helping people. So for example, laboratory experiments in biofeedback have shown us that we can help athletes get more focused and relaxed for a competition by using breathing and imagery techniques.

      I am more of an applied psychologist – I have done research, but most of my work is actually one on one with athletes to help them perform better.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/articles/psychology/what_is_psychology.shtml

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