Psychologists study human action and mental processes to understand, explain, and change people's behavior. There are probably more kinds of psychologists than you realize. Within the "helping professions," clinical, counseling, family, health, and school psychologists treat problems ranging from misbehavior in school to addictions to major mental disorders.

Personality, social, developmental, educational and cross-cultural psychologists perform research on complex behaviors in social settings. Industrial/organizational, human factors and environmental psychologists do basic and applied research on problems involving the relationships between people and work and between people and their human-made or natural environments.

Skinner Box Until the 1970s, the heart of Experimental Psychology was in learning theory. Researchers used devices such as this classic Skinner Box to investigate the way rats learn. Pressing the bar (not visible) flips a switch that cranks a motor, ejecting a small food pellet into the plastic tube and down to a food tray.

Experimental psychologists perform basic research on the underlying physical and mental processes on which more complex behaviors are based. On any given day, while some psychologists are treating individual patients in a hospital, others are examining the effects of television violence on children in a university lab and a few are helping Apple or IBM design the next graphical user interface.

Still more info: You can learn more about what Psychologists do on the American Psychological Association student web site: http://www.apa.org/students

Nature of Psychology Index