Trends in Psychology

Psychology and current trends in psychology

The study of thoughts and behaviours of mind is ideally called as psychology. The behaviours we do, feel, think and say everything is determined by the functioning of the mind and this behaviours are used as a raw data for analyzing about how the mind works and this all theoretical testing’s of mind is called as psychology. Psychology is a multi disciplinary subject, it lies at the intersection of other different disciplines like sociology, biology, medicine, physiology, linguistics, and anthropology. For example, health and clinical psychology is closely related to medicine and neuropsychology is allied with biology. The disciplines of psychology is wide-ranging, they include: health, clinical, developmental, cognitive (memory & intelligence), evolutionary, forensic, social, occupational and neuropsychology’s. In every area of subject, psychologists apply scientific methodology to formulate theories, and test hypotheses for explaining behaviours of individuals through experimental observations, and statistical techniques. People may visit a psychologist for any number of reasons like stress and chronic pain, depression and grief, sleeping and sexual problems, performance and personal growth issues, developmental disorders (e.g. autism) and behavioural difficulties etc.

Current Trend in Psychology

Health psychology

Even though psychology is employed in marketing, industries, education, fashion, social, and other varying fields, psychology in health and related sciences is exciting area and have very notable development. Over the last decade, health psychology focuses mainly on prevention and treatment of disease, promotion and maintenance of health, improvement of health care and policy information. In general, health psychology (bio-social model) focuses on how wide-range of factors like social (cultural beliefs, relationships), behaviour, psychological (life style, stress levels), and biological (inherited traits, genetic circumstances ) factors influence on illness and health.

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Current research in health psychology is highly engaged on stress reduction, smoking cessation, weight management, daily nutrition improvement, and reduction of sexual behaviours. Recently, psychologists are conducting applied research on identifying associations between physiological and psychological process, (like anxiety influence on heart diseases) and prevention of unhealthy behaviours through working with individuals, and communities (Mokdad et al., 2004). The realization of feelings, thoughts, behaviours, psychological, environmental and other social factors depends on how good people understand the power/command of mind. Psychologically this factors play a major roles in managing addictions, illness, health, along with disease genetic tendency. The division 38 (American psychological associations APA) of health psychology engaged with understanding about health and illness relationship, and health care policies.

Social psychology

Social psychology studies about social perception, how people’s felling, or thoughts, influenced by others, leadership and aggression. Parents and society expectations, role of genders, racism, career choice and religious factors generally cause a high amount of pressure/stress on someone to act and behave in different manner and it finally have impact on overall health of that person. The choice of work always have a direct relationship with physical and emotional health of a person, the more risk and frustration in career, the more psychological and/or emotional illness. Psychology study on early life stress and depression by Heim et al. (2012), explained that early life stress related issues like childhood abuse, neglect and loss, plays a major prominent role in developing depressive disorders later in life. Recent research on physician’s emotional neutrality related to anger, shame revealed the importance of signals mediated by emotions (Hareli et al., 2013).

Clinical Health Psychology

Clinical psychology answers the questions related to better understanding of relationship between physical wellness, health and illness, and connection among environment, body and mind. Psychologists find strategies to minimize/remove pain and known about pain abnormalities like analgesia, neuralgia and phantom limb pain. One of the difficult task for psychologists is, standard encouragement and/or motivating people towards positive thinking, to stick to medical direction and treatment. Psychology can help people towards physical fitness, support with chronic pain reduction, and finally improve the quality of patient everyday life. Clinical psychologies mental imagery domain have relevance to many social phobia, clinical disorders, depressions, and post-anxiety disorders (Pearson et al., 2013).

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology deals with mental process such as perception, attention, language use, decision-making, problem solving, intelligence, memory, judgement, conceptual development, thinking and creativity. Cognitive psychology is highly concerned about internal mental processes and it relies on both subjective observations and scientific research methods. The psychology method called cognitive behavioural therapy is highly useful in case of anxiety-disorder treatment (frequent feeling of strong/extreme worry, fear, anger, and other emotions). In general, cognitive control can assist us stay on track or changing of tasks (Dreisbach, 2012). A recent study related to cognitive psychology by Schneider et al (2012), explained the role of cognitive related stress in theory-of-mind (ToM) processing.

Forensic psychology

Forensic psychology deals with implementation of psychological principles, insights, skills and concepts in better understanding and functioning of the legal, judicial, correctional and law systems. Forensic psychology have broad range of role in criminal law system from justice enforcement to offenders treatment. Forensic psychology is a organizational psychology, it rooted to other areas including social, clinical, medicine, cognitive, experimental, political science, anthropology, philosophy, management and linguistics (Otto, 2002). Forensic psychology also have unique structure of research which deals about risk assessment of potential for violence, criminal behaviour, aggression, jury behaviour and selection, legal competency, domestic violence and anti-social behaviour. The APA division 41, covers the forensic psychology. Recent studies on forensic psychology is well advanced and identified two genes (MAOA and CDH13) which are linked with violent crimes by examining offenders in Finland (Tiihonen et al, 2014).

Non-pharmacological interventions in psychology

Recently, some traditional non-pharmacological treatments are using for certain diseases like dementia and alzheimer’s. There is a strong research evidence that art therapy, music therapy, and other non-pharmacological therapies are very useful in treating diseases like autism, depression, dementia, alzheimer’s, and anxiety. In case of dementia, non-pharmacological therapies like behavioural therapy, validation therapy, reality orientation, reminiscence therapy, cognitive therapy, aroma and multisensory therapies are first choice than pharmacological treatments (Douglas et al, 2004). In non-pharmacological treatment of alzheimer’s art therapy, music therapy, cognitive stimulation, aroma therapy, doll and interpersonal therapies are using quite regularly. Eventhough, this all non-pharmacological therapies explains there important role in the treatment of diseases, there is a much need of advanced further reliable and valid date analysis for wide recognition of these non-pharmacological therapies.

Conclusion

Psychology is a growing discipline by using other related disciplines. The wide range of psychology applications are identified and recognized by society. These aspects with good number of opportunities are very encouraging, motivating and at the same time very favourable to psychology subject to make as highly encouraging and existing one. It may not be a full list of current research in psychology (not included fashion psychology, colour psychology and other related psychologies), but it provides a good outline of current trend that are happening in psychology.