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There are a number of branches within Psychology. Here I list a few of them.

Abnormal & Clinical

Clinical psychology is concerned about face to face interaction with people, for example counselling, psychotherapy, and treatments of varies forms. People involved might be ordinary people, those having behavioural problems after brain damage or surgery, or those facing other problems or disorders.

Psychological disorders are the things studied by abnormal psychology. Common disorders include depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD, e.g. a person needs to wash his or her hands repetitively, maybe spending 12 hours everyday on it), attention-deficit & hyperactive disorder (ADHD), and schizophernia. Abnormal psychologists studies the cause of these disorders and find ways to prevent and treat them.

Cognition & Perception

Cognitive psychologists study thoughts and other mental processes. For example, they study how people process information, language, attention, and memory. Miller's work on short term memory is a prime example of cognitive psychology. Other examples includes huge numbers of models trying to explain how we understand written and spoken languages, how we recognise people and objects, and how we solve problems.

There are aspects of perception that is closely related to cognition. Perception refers to the way we use our senses to receive and process information. A lower level study of perception might includes the study of photoreceptors in the eye or cells specialised in vision or in auditory in the brain; whereas a higher level might be how we distinguish between two objects.

Developmental

Developmental psychology, obviously, studies the development of behaviour and ability. A lot of research focused on child development, from birth or before birth to adolescent. During the first ten or so years, the development is most noticeable. It would includes the control of body parts and senses, the aquiring of language, the forming of relationship and bond with family and friends.

But of course we develop throughout our life-time. Developmental psychology also addresses adult development, for example Erikson's psychosocial model states choices like "intimacy vs isolation", "integrity vs despair" in different stages of life.

Personalities & Individual Differences

We are most likely to associate psychology to personality studies, as we are always surrounded by "psychology tests" telling us what type of person we are. More scientific approach to personalities are based on more-well-designed and well-tested personality tests, maybe containing a few hundreds of items. But there are many ways to interpret the data. Traditional dimensions of personalities includes introvert, extrovert, psychotic, neurotic, etc. Intelligence is another individual differences studied by psychologists. One major problem of the study of intelligence is that it is very hard to define. The IQ tests are attempts to capture the essence of intelligence... some say unsuccessfully. More recent attempts to describe intelligence includes Howard Gardner's Seven types of intelligence, includes linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

Social

Social psychology studies the social behaviour of people. For example how people behave within a group of people, be it family, friends, colleagues, or culture or country. One interesting experiment about conformity involves testing a group of five people and ask them which one of three lines on a display is the same length as the template. Among the five people, only one of them is the real subject -- the other four are actually instructed by the experiment to give uniformly wrong answers. It was found that if the real subject was arranged to answer after the other four, he or she would hesitate to give the right answer, or conform to the other four strangers in the group and give the obviously wrong answer.

Another study is the minimal group experiment by Tajfel. In the study, children were abitrarily divided into two groups. Each child is then given a task to divide points among two other children. All information that the child has is whether the child is in the same group or different group as himself or herself. And it was found that they are prejudiced to assign more points to member of the same group then the other group. Tajfel concluded that it is not that there are anything wrong about the other group or that there are any dislikes, but that each person has a personal identity and a social identity, which is based on the identity of the group(s) one belongs to. One would therefore seeks to promote its own group over others.

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Last updated: 1 Jul 2004