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.
One estimate of the capacity of human memory is that over the course of a lifetime, a person will store more than 500 times as much information as appears in the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Somehow, with all that information in there, a lot of it is immediately available …
Mental retardation (MR) is a disorder characterized primarily by intellectual functioning that is markedly below average, as well as a general deficit in social and self-care skills. Most people’s understanding of MR begins and ends with IQ scores, but there is substantially more to the disorder than an …
The MMPI-2, the latest version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, is currently the world’s most widely used instrument for diagnosis of psychopathology. Originally published in 1943, the MMPI is a 567-item, true-false test that was designed as an aid to psychiatric diagnosis. It produces scores on ten …
Mood disorders are characterized primarily by marked changes in mood that interfere with the person’s ability to function. Mood disorders fall into two categories: unipolar (also known as depressive), which involves depression only; and bipolar, which involves episodes of elevated mood (mania or hypomania) in addition to depression. …
In trying to describe the stages through which children achieve cognitive development, a number of theorists have recognized that, since not all reasoning involves the sort of school-derived tasks that frequently drive research on child cognition, they should attempt to describe the development of reasoning about moral dilemmas …
One of the most widely disseminated fad ideas in the history of psychology, the Mozart effect is a term for the improvement in brain development that allegedly occurs in children when they are exposed to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart prior to the age of three. This …
Probably the most controversial of all psychiatric diagnoses, multiple personality disorder (MPD) has as its primary symptom the presence of two or more conscious identities in the same person, although only one is conscious at a time. Each identity is capable of controlling behavior. These other personalities are …
Munchausen syndrome is the most severe and chronic form of the factitious disorders, in which a person feigns, exaggerates, or even self-induces illness, with the apparent goal of winning attention and nurturance that has otherwise been unavailable. This is technically different from “malingering,” in which the illness is …
Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder in which a person in an active waking state shifts abruptly into several minutes of REM sleep, usually with no warning at all. As REM is the sleep stage in which most dreaming occurs, the disorder may be thought of as a sudden …
Not a diagnosis so much as a euphemism, nervous breakdown is a term that was once widely used by the general public and the mass media, but rarely mentioned by psychiatrists or clinical psychologists, at least among themselves. It is an inexact term that has been popular since …
The major biological determinant of human behavior is the nervous system, which is made up of two different kinds of cells: glial cells and neurons. Both types are very important, but the neurons tend to get most of the attention, because they are the cells that actually transmit …
Potential clients and students of psychology often ask a very good question: “Which therapy works best or, at least, does one work better than others?” Unfortunately, the answer, at least according to a famous meta-analysis (Smith et al., 1977, 1980), may be that all therapeutic approaches are equally …
Probably no single event in world history has distressed psychologists so much as the Nazi Holocaust. How could apparently normal, civilized members of a modern society treat their fellow human beings with such unparalleled cruelty and savagery? Early attempts to explain the Holocaust tended towards a psychoanalytic approach, …
Opioids (opiates) are also known as painkillers because of their analgesic, or pain-relieving, properties. This class of medications, also widely referred to as narcotics, is made up primarily of substances derived from opium, or artificially created analogs, and includes morphine, codeine, heroin, and related drugs. Morphine is frequently …
The paraphilias are a set of sexual disorders that share a pattern of recurrent, intensely arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving either nonhuman objects, suffering and/or humiliation either of one’s self or one’s partner, or nonconsenting persons. The pattern must occur over a period of at least …
The field of parapsychology, or the scientific study of scientifically paranormal claims, dates back to the creation of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882 (the American Society for Psychical Research, today called the Parapsychological Association, followed in 1885). Belief in the phenomena they attempt to …
In 1967, Diana Baumrind claimed, based on her research with a sample of California professors and their children, that the child-rearing methods adopted by parents had a profound influence on those children later in life. She identified three different parenting styles, which differ from each other on two …
Of the many questionable uses to which hypnosis has been applied, probably none is more absurd than past-life regression (PLR). In PLR, the hypnotized person is alleged to journey back into the past, to lives she or he lived before the Of the many questionable uses to which …
As a physiologist who was actively hostile to psychology, which he viewed as an intellectual dead end, believing that the study of physical processes was the proper path to a better understanding of human nature, Ivan Pavlov might be amused to see that he has had such a …
This is a DSM-IV category of childhood disorders characterized by severe deficits in communication, impaired social skills, repetitive, stereotyped movements, and unusual preoccupations and interests. These are also known as the autism spectrum disorders, and they occur in ten to twenty children per 10,000 births. Of those, about …
