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.
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