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Psychologist
Studies human behavior and mental processes; provides therapy and counseling (non-medication).
Did you know?
The 'cocktail party effect', focusing on one voice in a noisy room, was named by scientist Colin Cherry in 1953. Your own name can still grab your attention.
How subjects help
- Psychology: Use talking therapy to help someone change the thoughts that keep them feeling stuck.
- Biology: Understand how sleep, stress and hormones affect the way a person feels and acts.
- Mathematics: Score memory and attention tests and compare results with what is typical for an age.
- Statistics: Run studies to test whether a new therapy truly helps people or just seems to.
- Sociology: See how family, friends and community shape a person's problems and their recovery.
A famous name
B. F. Skinner: American psychologist who studied how rewards shape behaviour and invented the 'Skinner box'.
Try it yourself: Trick your brain with colour words
- On one sheet, write 12 colour words (red, blue, green…), each in its own matching colour. On a second sheet, write the same words in the wrong colours, such as "red" in blue.
- Time yourself saying the ink colour, not the word, down the first sheet as fast as you can.
- Now time yourself saying the ink colour down the second sheet. Count any mistakes too.
- Compare your two times, then test a partner. Why do you think the second sheet is so much harder?
Psychologists use the Stroop test to measure attention and self-control, and clinical psychologists use versions of it as one part of assessing attention or the effects of a brain injury.
Adapted from Neuroscience for Kids (University of Washington): Stroop Effect.
Also try: Trace a trait through a family tree.
Known for it in
USA, UK, Netherlands, Australia, Canada