Fields Of Psychology

Psychology comprises a number of different kinds of enterprises, so different that they may seem to have nothing in common. One psychologist is engaged in vocational guidance and spends his day talking to high school students, studying their academic records and their test scores and, from these, showing the student how to clarify his own ideas about his future training and occupation. Another spends his day studying delayed reactions in goldfish or the navigation system of bats. Other psychologists are assisting in the diagnosis of neurotic patients, doing research on the childhood experiences that contribute to neurosis, or taking part in combined research on the effects of tranquilizers. But all such disparate activities have this in common: the methods used all derive from the same fundamental training in the procedures and conceptions of academic psychology, and the worker is either putting those conceptions to practical use, or trying to improve on them – or both.