Category: Psychology Essay Examples
See our collection of psychology essay examples. These examples are to help you understanding how to write a psychology essay. The realm of pop psychology certainly overlaps the science of psychology, but there are large areas of the two that rarely meet. But many topics in popular psychology may offer students a great opportunity for an essay. Be sure to check our list of psychology essay topics.
As she walked in a park in 1988, Francine Shapiro noticed that the anxious thoughts that were troubling her became less of a burden when her eyes spontaneously shifted back and forth. Based on this experience, she developed an unusual treatment for anxiety. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing …
Francis Galton’s influence on modern psychology, and on scientific inquiry in general, cannot be overstated. His research, discoveries, and inventions included modern meteorology, as he discovered high and low pressure systems and fronts and invented the weather map, the use of fingerprints for identification, correlation analysis, the normal …
Disenchanted with the testing industry’s focus on intelligence as a single, unitary quality that can be captured in a single number, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner proposed in 1983 a radically different view of intelligence: the theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner’s theory is based loosely upon what is known …
One of the most influential movements in psychological history, the Gestalt school of psychology was born when a group of German researchers described the principles that govern human perception of familiar stimuli. At the time, psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt were focusing on attempts to break down human …
Gingko Biloba (also spelled ginkgo) is the world’s bestselling herbal dietary supplement, primarily because of the widespread claim that it will enhance memory and ward off the effects of senile dementia. The supplement is an extract from the leaves of the plant that has been used in Asia …
John Gray, a best-selling pop-psychology author of the 1990s and onward, sold over 15 million copies of his first book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which he then followed up with additional books, most featuring Mars and Venus prominently in their titles, a Mars and …
A nearly universal problem in research with human subjects is the impossibility, from both a practical and an ethical standpoint, of keeping research subjects unaware that they are participating in a research project. Unfortunately, the mere recognition that they are being observed can exert a profound influence on …
Homeopathy, or homeopathic medicine, is an early nineteenth-century system of diagnosis and treatment that predates the modern germ theory of disease. At the time, medicine was still quite primitive, and it was largely based on the humoral theory of disease that dated back to Galen and Hippocrates. Many …
Phrases like “you are getting very sleepy” are central to the popular image of hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness, in which the subject falls into a sleeplike trance. The popular image also includes a charismatic hypnotist with a powerful yet soothing voice, who may make mysterious …
Immediately after hatching, if baby ducklings see a large object move past them, they will follow the object as though it were their mother, regardless of what the object actually is. It could be a duck, a cardboard box pulled by a string, or even, in the most …
What is intelligence? That is hard to say. It seems to depend very much on who is asked. The subject has engaged thinkers for at least as long as people have been writing down their thoughts, and possibly for much longer. Intelligence-related terms are used all the time. …
Born into a wealthy family of intellectual giants (the novelist Henry James was his brother) and educated both in Europe and at Harvard, William James is regarded as the founding father of American psychology. He introduced experimental psychology to America in a laboratory founded at about the same …
One of Sigmund Freud’s early disciples, Carl Jung, accompanied him on his historic first visit to the United States in 1908 and was the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. Like many of Freud’s followers, however, Jung eventually came to disagree with and criticize certain portions of …
Kava (Piper methysticum) or kavakava is a flowering shrub related to the common black pepper plant, indigenous to Polynesia, the Sandwich Islands, and various other island groups in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its root has been used by island natives for thousands of years to prepare …
In one of the more bizarre mid-career shifts in scientific history, an entomologist previously known for his decades long study of the little-known gall wasp became, in 1948, the man who changed how America looked at sexuality. A number of observers have gone so far as to divide …
The most widely accepted definition of a learning disability in the United States has for decades been based on language that appears in federal law. It first appeared in 1975 when Congress passed Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. To require a free public …
In the 1990s beef from the United Kingdom and several other countries was banned worldwide because of fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a contagious progressive neurological disorder of cattle that is part of a group of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs. The disease results in …
William Masters and Virginia Johnson were pioneers in the scientific study of human sexuality, as well as innovators in the therapeutic treatment of sexual dysfunction. Masters, a gynecologist, recognized that although Alfred Kinsey’s work had made human sexuality a legitimate subject for scientific research, little was actually known …
Dr. Phillip C. McGraw, known to his fans as “Dr. Phil,” is currently one of America’s top-selling authors, as well as a television star. He got his TV start by dispensing folksy advice during weekly appearances on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show, and he has starred on his …
It has been estimated that the average child in the United States spends more time each week watching television than attending school. This is of great concern, as a surprisingly large proportion of what children watch is violent. Saturday morning cartoons, for example, present as many as twenty …
