Some Areas of Interest in Psychology

• Biological psychology is the study of the biological mechanisms underlying behavior. Biological psychologists generally are interested in the brain and the nervous system, in the endocrine system, and in other organismic processes.
• Clinical psychology is the study of problems encountered by individuals, groups, and families especially problems involving psychopathology. Clinical psychologists are interested in the application of psychological knowledge and techniques for the alleviation of these problems.
• Cognitive neuroscience is concerned with understanding the neuroscientific bases of cognition. Various methods are employed to assess the roles of different brain systems in psychological functions such as memory, attention, language, executive control, decision making, response processing, and emotion.
• Cognitive and neurobiological aging examine how the aging process affects memory, thought, and brain function, as well as how life experiences affect cognitive function.
• Developmental psychology is the study of intellectual development, emerging personality, and the acquisition of language, as well as psychophysiological and social development processes as individuals develop from birth through old age.
• Community psychology is the study of social processes and problems of groups, organizations, and neighborhoods, and the development and evaluation of progress for social change and social policy based on psychological understanding.
• Engineering psychology is the study of human behavior in the context of interactions between humans and machines.
• Cognitive psychology is the study of basic behavioral and cognitive processes, including learning, memory, problem-solving, motivation, and language.
• Language processing and psycholinguistics focus on how humans acquire and use language and how these processes are related to neural organization.
• Measurement and mathematical psychology specialists develop mathematical models of psychological processes and devise methods for quantitative representation and analysis of data about behavior. These are used in the study of differences between individuals in ability, personality, preferences, and other psychological phenomena.
• Personality psychology focuses on individual behavior. It is the study of ways to understand and describe an individual's behavior and to predict an individual's future behavior.
• Personnel psychology is the application of techniques of assessment, prediction, and intervention to areas of human resources in organizations, including, but not limited to, standard personnel selection and training, attitude assessments and interventions, and program evaluations.
• Social psychology is the study of attitudes, social perception and cognition, interpersonal relations, interpersonal interactions, and social and cultural factors affecting human behavior.
• Visual cognition is the study of attention, visual perception, visual memory, and human performance. Visual cognition research uses tools drawn from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to better understand how visual information is perceived and remembered.