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This approach often involves homework assignments. Your psychologist might ask you to gather more information, such as logging your reactions to a particular situation as they occur. Or your psychologist might want you to practice new skills between sessions, such as asking someone with an elevator phobia to practice pushing elevator buttons. You might also have reading assignments so you can learn more about a particular topic. In contrast, psychoanalytic and humanistic approaches typically focus more on talking than doing. You might spend your sessions discussing your early experiences to help you and your psychologist better understand the root causes of your current problems.

Your psychologist may combine elements from several styles of psychotherapy. The main thing to know is whether your psychologist has expertise in the area you need help with and whether your psychologist feels he or she can help you. Psychologists who specialize in psychotherapy and other forms of psychological treatment are highly trained professionals with expertise in mental health assessment, diagnosis and treatment, and behavior change.

After graduating from a four-year undergraduate college or university, psychologists spend an average of seven years in graduate education and training to earn a doctoral degree. As part of their professional training, psychologists must complete a supervised clinical internship in a hospital or organized health setting. In most states, they must also have an additional year of post-doctoral supervised experience before they can practice independently in any health care arena. It is this combination of doctoral-level training and clinical internship that distinguishes psychologists from many other mental health care providers.

Psychologists pass a national examination and must be licensed by the state or jurisdiction in which they practice. Licensure laws are intended to protect the public by limiting licensure to those who are qualified to practice psychology as defined by state law.

Most states also require psychologists to stay up-to-date by earning several hours of continuing education credits annually. If you plan to use your insurance or employee assistance program to pay for psychotherapy, you may need to select a psychologist who is part of your insurance panel or employee assistance program.

But if you're free to choose, there are many ways to find a psychologist:. This service makes it easy for you to find practicing psychologists in your area.

Psychologists may work in their own private practice or with a group of other psychologists or health care professionals. Practicing psychologists also work in schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, health systems and health management organizations, veterans' medical centers, community health and mental health clinics, businesses and industry, and rehabilitation and long-term care centers. APA estimates that there are about 85, licensed psychologists in the United States.

How can you find the one who's right for you? Psychologists and clients work together, so the right match is important. Good "chemistry" with your psychologist is critical, so don't be afraid to interview potential candidates about their training, clinical expertise and experience treating problems like yours. Whether you interview a psychologist by phone, during a special minute consultation or at your first session, look for someone who makes you feel comfortable and inspires confidence.

But it's also important to check more practical matters, too. When you're ready to select a psychologist, think about the following points:. You'll need to gather some information from the psychologists whose names you have gathered. The best way to make initial contact with a psychologist is by phone. A psychologist will probably call you back anyway. Just leave a message with your name, phone number and brief description of your situation. Once you connect, some questions you can ask a psychologist are:. If you have particular concerns that are deal-breakers for you, ask the psychologist about them.

You might want to work with a psychologist who shares your religious views or cultural background, for example. If you have private health insurance or are enrolled in a health maintenance organization or other type of managed care plan, it may cover mental health services such as psychotherapy. Before you start psychotherapy, you should check with your insurance plan to see what is covered. That means insurers are no longer allowed to charge higher co-pays or deductibles for psychological services or arbitrarily limit the number of psychotherapy sessions you can receive.

However, insurance companies vary in terms of which mental health conditions they cover. That means some insurance policies may not cover certain mental health disorders. Your employer may also offer an employee assistance program. These programs typically offer one to eight sessions of mental health treatment for free or at a very low cost.

Your spouse or partner may also be eligible for these benefits. Government-sponsored health care programs are another potential source of mental health services. These include Medicare for people age 65 and older and people with disabilities, as well as health insurance plans for military personnel and their dependents. In some states, Medicaid programs may also cover mental health services provided by psychologists.

Other options include community mental health centers, free clinics, religious organizations, and university and medical center training programs. These groups often offer high-quality services at low cost. Look on the back of your insurance card for a phone number for mental or behavioral health or call your insurance company's customer service number. Before your first psychotherapy appointment, ask your insurer the following questions:. You may feel nervous about contacting a psychologist. That anxiety is perfectly normal.

But having the courage to overcome that anxiety and make a call is the first step in the process of empowering yourself to feel better. Just making a plan to call and sticking to it can bring a sense of relief and put you on a more positive path. Psychologists understand how difficult it can be to make initial contact.

Leave a message with your name, your contact number and why you are calling. You might be tempted to take the first available appointment slot. Take a few minutes to stop and think before you do. If it does not fit with your schedule, you can ask if there are other times available that might fit better for you. You'll need to think about the best time of day and week to see your psychologist. Factors to consider include:.

Once you've made an appointment, ask your psychologist how you should prepare. A psychologist might ask you to:. It's normal to feel nervous when you head off to your first psychotherapy appointment. But preparing ahead of time and knowing what to expect can help calm your nerves.

A typical psychotherapy session lasts 45 to 50 minutes. To make the most of your time, make a list of the points you want to cover in your first session and what you want to work on in psychotherapy. Even a vague idea of what you want to accomplish can help you and your psychologist proceed efficiently and effectively.

If a teacher suggested that your child undergo psychotherapy, you might bring in report cards or notes from his or her teacher. Your psychologist can also call these professionals for additional information if you give written permission. Records from previous psychotherapy or psychological testing can also help your new psychologist get a better sense of you. It can be difficult to remember everything that happens during a psychotherapy session.

A notebook can help you capture your psychologist's questions or suggestions and your own questions and ideas. Jotting a few things down during your session can help you stay engaged in the process. Most people have more than a single session of psychotherapy. Bring your calendar so you can schedule your next appointment before you leave your psychologist's office. You'll also need to bring some form of payment.

If you'll be using your health insurance to cover your psychotherapy, bring along your insurance card so your psychologist will be able to bill your insurer. Some insurers require psychologists to check photo IDs, so bring that along, too. If you'll be paying for psychotherapy out of pocket, bring along a credit card, checkbook or cash. Don't worry that you won't know what to do once the session actually begins. Psychologists have experience setting the tone and getting things started. They are trained to guide each session in effective ways to help you get closer to your goals.

In fact, the first session might seem like a game of 20 questions. Sitting face to face with you, your psychologist could start off by acknowledging the courage it takes to start psychotherapy. For example, you might feel angry or sad without knowing what's causing your feelings or how to stop feeling that way.

A psychologist will also want to know what kind of social support you have, so he or she will also ask about your family, friends and coworkers. While guiding you through the process, your psychologist will let you set the pace when it comes to telling your story. Once your psychologist has a full history, the two of you will work together to create a treatment plan. This collaborative goal-setting is important, because both of you need to be invested in achieving your goals.

At the end of your first session, the psychologist may also have suggestions for immediate action. If you have chronic pain, you may need physical therapy, medication and help for insomnia as well as psychotherapy. By the end of the first few sessions, you should have a new understanding of your problem, a game plan and a new sense of hope.

Perspectives in Psychology

You and your psychologist will engage in a dialogue about your problems and how to fix them. As part of the ongoing getting-to-know-you process, your psychologist may want to do some assessment. Psychologists are trained to administer and interpret tests that can help to determine the depth of your depression, identify important personality characteristics, uncover unhealthy coping strategies such as drinking problems, or identify learning disabilities.

Test results can help your psychologist diagnose a condition or provide more information about the way you think, feel and behave. You and your psychologist will also keep exploring your problems through talking. For some people, just being able to talk freely about a problem brings relief. You might role-play new behaviors during your sessions and do homework to practice new skills in between. As you go along, you and your psychologist will assess your progress and determine whether your original goals need to be reformulated or expanded.

In some cases, your psychologist may suggest involving others. Similarly, an individual having parenting problems might want to bring his or her child in. And someone who has trouble interacting with others may benefit from group psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is different from medical or dental treatments, where patients typically sit passively while professionals work on them and tell them their diagnosis and treatment plans. Psychotherapy isn't about a psychologist telling you what to do. It's an active collaboration between you and the psychologist. The therapeutic alliance is what happens when the psychologist and patient work together to achieve the patient's goals.

He believed that the unconscious mind consisted of three components: The 'id' and the 'superego' are constantly in conflict with each other, and the 'ego' tries to resolve the discord. If this conflict is not resolved, we tend to use defense mechanisms to reduce our anxiety. Psychoanalysis attempts to help patients resolve their inner conflicts. An aspect of psychoanalysis is Freud's theory of psychosexual development.

It shows how early experiences affect adult personality. Stimulation of different areas of the body is important as the child progresses through the important developmental stages. Too much or too little can have bad consequences later. The most important stage is the phallic stage where the focus of the libido is on the genitals. During this stage little boys experience the 'Oedipus complex,' and little girls experience the 'Electra complex. However, it has been criticized in the way that it over emphasizes the importance of sexuality and under emphasized of the role of social relationships.

The theory is not scientific, and can't be proved as it is circular. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis has been greatly contributory to psychology in that it has encouraged many modern theorists to modify it for the better, using its basic principles, but eliminating its major flaws. Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person know as holism.

Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior, not only through the eyes of the observer, but through the eyes of the person doing the behaving. Humanistic psychologists believe that an individual's behavior is connected to his inner feelings and self-image. The humanistic perspective centers on the view that each person is unique and individual, and has the free will to change at any time in his or her lives.

The humanistic perspective suggests that we are each responsible for our own happiness and well-being as humans. We have the innate i. Because of this focus on the person and his or her personal experiences and subjective perception of the world the humanists regarded scientific methods as inappropriate for studying behavior. Two of the most influential and enduring theories in humanistic psychology that emerged in the s and s are those of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

Psychology Perspectives

Psychology was institutionalized as a science in by Wilhelm Wundt , who found the first psychological laboratory. His initiative was soon followed by other European and American Universities. These early laboratories, through experiments, explored areas such as memory and sensory perception, both of which Wundt believed to be closely related to physiological processes in the brain.

The whole movement had evolved from the early philosophers, such as Aristotle and Plato.

Evolutionary Theory and Psychology

Today this approach is known as cognitive psychology. Cognitive Psychology revolves around the notion that if we want to know what makes people tick then the way to do it is to figure out what processes are actually going on in their minds. It views people as being similar to computers in the way we process information e. For example, both human brains and computers process information, store data and have input an output procedure.

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This had led cognitive psychologists to explain that memory comprises of three stages: It is an extremely scientific approach and typically uses lab experiments to study human behavior. The cognitive approach has many applications including cognitive therapy and eyewitness testimony. For instance, we now know that the threats our ancestors faced left their legacy in the particular fears and phobias humans are most likely to acquire — fears of fanged creatures like spiders and snakes, but not of modern-day threats like the guns and fast moving cars that are far more likely to kill us today.

Research applying Darwinian principles has also shown that kinship is a privileged social relationship, governed by specialized psychological mechanisms that infer relatedness based on ancestrally available cues that reliably distinguished kin from non-kin and between different types of kin. We have also discovered that human females, like our mammalian cousins, have an estrus phase of the cycle in which their sexual preferences and behaviors shift in reproductively sensible ways.

Looking forward, the application of evolutionary principles continues to permeate different subdisciplines within psychology including clinical science, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Despite widespread application, obstacles remain. It is often misapplied — for example, by assuming that adaptations work for the benefit of the group or species or by side-stepping rigorous consideration of the historical selective pressures leading to the evolution of a particular capacity. This will only continue if psychologists do not receive serious training in evolutionary biology.

The study of the human mind must be grounded in biology, the study of life. Of course, there are those who oppose the full integration of biological theorizing into psychology, but this is based on concerns that, at least to us, are largely outdated. Psychologists have often relied on unreliable technological metaphors to develop hypotheses about the nature of the human mind. As Gigerenzer has shown, statistical tools such as, e. In contrast to these unreliable and often unprincipled discovery heuristics, evolutionary theory provides psychology with a well-motivated and powerful method for discovering human psychological traits.

Nobody seriously denies that the mind is made of evolved traits, and, in combination with discoveries about animal behavior and psychology, archaeological findings, and anthropological data from hunter-gatherer studies, evolutionary theories can lead psychologists to develop plausible hypotheses about the nature of these evolved traits.

What Americans Build and Why | Psychology Today

Taking evolutionary theory seriously has costs. Although psychologists rarely have the time and competence to engage with the burning controversies within evolutionary biology, they should keep up with the developments of evolutionary thinking instead of relying on somewhat outdated theories. Furthermore, showing that some psychological trait evolved and, a fortiori, that it is an adaptation is more difficult than is typically acknowledged by evolutionary-minded psychologists.

These should be willing to broaden the toolbox they currently use, and to make place for the sources of evidence biologists view favorably. From tools to theories: A heuristic of discovery in cognitive psychology. Psychological Review , 98, Just what does Darwin tell us about the human mind? Discussions of evolutionary psychology sometimes seem to be premised on the first. While talk of function certainly has its place, examples like the injury-prone human spinal column an unwise modification of the more sensible horizontal spine of our four-legged ancestors suggest that the usual considerations of optimal function should be supplemented with consideration of what one might call evolutionary inertia.

Consider human memory, which is far less reliable than computer memory. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and will never forget it. Whereas computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations, with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map, we have no idea where anything in our brains is stored. We retrieve information not by knowing where it is, but by using cues or clues that hint at what we are looking for.

In the best case, this process works well: The catch however is that our memories can easily get confused, especially when a given set of cues points to more than one memory. What we are able to remember at any given moment also depends heavily on the accidents of which bits of mental flotsam and jetsam happen to be mentally active at that instant. Our mood, our environment, even our posture can all influence our delicate memories. Our memories may work in this fashion not because that is the optimal solution, but simply because, at the time of human evolution, cue-dependent memory was a firmly entrenched off-the-shelf part: The structure of human memory might thus exist as it does not because it is the ideal solution fittest possible but simply because it was the fittest solution that was readily available Marcus, The haphazard evolution of the human mind.

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Daniel Povinelli is James S. Darwin believed that earthworms have a sense of consciousness and that plants can hear bassoons. Even those comparative researchers who acknowledge that there might be something qualitatively different about the human mind have largely attributed the discontinuity to particular domain-specific faculties—such as language or social-communicative intelligence—and have denied that there might be a more profound, domain-general discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds.

The evidence clearly suggests otherwise: The evolution of all these uniquely human abilities begs for explanation.


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It is possible that each of our uniquely human kinds of cognition results from a separate, domain-specific innovation. And it is possible that they all somehow arise from language. But it seems much more likely to us that some central cognitive capability co-evolved with and continues to subserve all our uniquely human abilities.