Branches and uses

Like medicine, psychology has many specialities:

• Cognitive: attention, memory, thinking. Biological: how the brain, nerves and hormones relate to behaviour.
• Developmental: change across the life span (Chapter 3). Social: how people affect one another, why we want company, how attitudes form.
• Cross-cultural: how behaviour differs across cultures. Environmental: how surroundings such as noise or crowding affect us.
• Health: how habits and stress affect physical health. Sports: helping players perform under pressure.

Four roles are often confused:

• Counselling psychologists help with milder problems: stress, study worries, relationship difficulties, confusion about careers.
• Clinical psychologists diagnose and treat psychological disorders and give psychological tests, using therapy.
• Psychiatrists are medical doctors; they can prescribe medicine. No psychologist can.
• Industrial/organisational psychologists work with employees' well-being and performance at work; school and educational psychologists work with students and with how teaching and learning can be improved.

Psychology and other subjects. Wherever there are people, psychology is useful:

• Economics: how consumers make choices. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and others such as Herbert Simon and Thomas Schelling built on similar ideas.
• Law and criminology: how reliable eye-witnesses are. Political science: how leaders persuade. Education: how children learn best.
• Medicine: how a patient's mind affects recovery. Computer science: understanding human intelligence helped build artificial intelligence. Music and art: how they lift mood. Architecture: designing comfortable spaces.

Psychologists work in schools, hospitals, industry, prisons, sports teams and the armed forces.

In your own life, psychology helps you understand yourself and others more fairly. It can improve how you study and deal with exam stress. It also teaches empathy: seeing that someone who behaves badly may be struggling with something you cannot see.