My Discipline

After the completion of my investigation into my interviewees, I will now talk about what drew me to them in the first place: psychology. Here, I describe the gist of psychology and what it means to study and then practice psychology.

1. What do students in your program or department learn how to do?

Students in the psychology department learn how to understand the way that people or groups think and feel. This allows them to learn how to work with people, understand people, and help people understand themselves.

2. What do people who get degrees in this field usually go on to do for work?

Depending on the degree level of the student. It can range from teaching to to monitoring hospital patients to to owning a private practice.

3. What drew you to this field?

My mom has a lot of degrees. One of these degrees is in psychology. She is also a certified mediator. She has used this knowledge as she has raised me. Even though I have not taken a psychology class, I have been exposed to it a lot.

Of everything I have learned about throughout my education, I have felt the most passion for psychology. There is endless discovery and it is endlessly interesting.

4. Name three of the leaders/most exciting people involved in this field right now in 2016. Why are they interesting or exciting to you? These could be individual people or specific companies, organizations, businesses or nonprofits. Hyperlink us to a homepage professional website for each person, if possible.

Hans-Werner Gessmann is a German psychologist based in Russia. He founded the Psychotherapeutic Institute Bergerhausen - an organization that is currently training over 1,500 psychotherapists.

He also founded the humanistic psychodrama which uses role reversal as a method of therapy. This is an interesting form of therapy to me because the successfulness of it is bizarre to me. It does not seem like it would be effective.

Brenda Milner is a Canada based neuropsychologist who is continuing to make meaningful contributions to the world of psychology as well as teaching classes at the age of ninety five.

She is interesting to me particularly because she is one of few renowned psychologists as well as being very old yet continuing to participate extensively in academia. Her research focuses on how the different hemispheres of the brain interact.

Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran studies phantom limbs, synesthesia, and body integrity identity disorder. Additionally, he developed the “mirror box” which is a method of studying the pain felt on a phantom limb.

These topics are all very fascinating. The complexities of each and room for exploration within each are intriguing. I like the room for subjectivity or interpretation in psychology. I think the concepts researched by Ramachandran demonstrate that room to discover.

5. What are the names of three leading academic/scholarly journals in your field? Where are they published? Give us the names and locations of at least 3. Make the titles of each journal into a working hyperlink to the website for that publication.

The Annual Review of Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and Perspectives on Psychological Science are the top three academic journals in the field of psychology. These are all available online.