Psychology has become one of the important careers when it comes to helping people with behavioral challenges. Psychology in itself has many branches from behavioral to forensic and everything in between. It is a good thing that nowadays psychology is seen as a useful tool to help people overcome their mental challenges and come to terms with their past traumas. Though it has many branches, this article focuses on the applied psychology.
What is Applied Psychology?
A patient explaining himself to his psychologist.
Applied psychology as the name suggests is a field that uses all the resources, technology, and studies from various branches of psychology and applies them to solve real-life problems. It works around the contexts that influence a change in behavior of both children and adults.
Examples of Applied Psychology
1. Automobile industry: We now live in an era where people have the mindset that everything should be digitized. The automobile industry is changing cars drastically from the inside and new technological-rich interiors are being installed in the new cars. Psychology is being used here to determine the colors of the interior, the way everything is laid out, and controls that make the ride more comfortable and causes fewer distractions so fewer accidents may occur. It is believed psychologists will be an essential part of the designing industry in the coming future.
2. Work-life balance: Since the term work-life balance rolled out, everyone is trying to achieve a perfect balance among their professional and personal life and that is thanks to psychology. Prior to this, employees used to work extreme hours which caused harm to their personal life. Psychologists researched and presented the importance of breaks and more importantly paid sick leaves in the United States of America. So next time you use your paid sick leave, thank the applied psychology.
3. Helping veterans: Not limited to veterans but most retired military personnel suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, where a person has flashbacks, nightmares, and anxiety due to experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event. It is natural for these people to engage in drugs in order to escape their mental negativity. In previous years, only drug abuse was addressed, which resulted in causing further damage to veterans’ mental health. Thanks to applied psychology, PTSD is now addressed first and psychologists are able to make their mental health better.
Highlighting the word “PTSD”.
4. Choosing a career: The role of psychologists is increasing in education and career counseling. Choosing the right career or majors can be an exhausting task and chances are once you start the work, you’ll find that this is not what you desired. This is natural but having invested so much time and effort into a certain field, people believe they must carry on even though it drains them on a daily basis. Here is where psychology comes to the rescue. An individual’s strengths and weaknesses are addressed and career is decided based on their personality and capabilities. Not only that, if someone happens to be rethinking their career, psychologists are more than happy to guide them to a job where they can utilize their full potential.
5. Saving relationships: In the past, once a relationship started to fall apart there was no way to fix it and in most cases resulted in divorce. However, it has changed as psychologists are able to help couples maintain a healthy relationship without it causing stress to each other. Additionally, domestic violence cases and their related trauma is being helped by applied psychology.
As you can see applied psychology is very different from general or theoretical psychology. In the future, this can provide more scope and ways to help people overcome their hidden mental issues, as well as creating a better world for us all.
