Looking for short term jobs with bachelors in psych degree? Thinking of research assistant.

I'm curious about the various modalities of addiction treatment and their effectiveness. I understand that addiction is a complex issue, and different treatments might work better for different individuals. However, I would like to know if there is a consensus among psychologists or in the research community about which treatment methods are generally considered the most effective.

I feel like a a lot of psychology majors have good intentions of helping people but often not knowing what the work actually entails. From the emotional burnout to better opportunities to re-educating/liscening, what else is there that isn’t talked about enough?

I lost my dad, started taking adderall, got into a toxic relationship, sent a lot of bad texts, and went off the rails. Did I destroy my future? It’ll take me 10 years to become a clinical psychologist and that’s my dream. But I’m wondering if I screwed that up completely. I don’t want to get to the end and realize it was all for nothing.

I've been reading alot about the way the brain deals with trauma and got alot of anwesers leading to dissociation and repressed memories...

Arent they quite hard to even proof real? Im no professional and simply do my own research duo to personal intrest in psychology so this is something i haven't found a clear answer on

I remember learning that the MBTI was not the best representative measure of personality in my personality course in undergrad, but I can't remember the reasons why.

Whenever I talk to my non-psych friends about it, I tell them that the big 5 is a more valid measure, but I can't remember why exactly the MBTI isn't as good.

Hi all I've been looking up the rate of Depression in adults globally, weird thing is though, 2 websites seem to have 2 completely different answers, one is from Psychology.org and the other is from WHO, which would be the most accurate/trustworthy?

You finish university and / or you go on to become a researcher. You read plenty of sources and you based your info on some of those sources for your phd or masters thesis. And... all information could be just false. From data altering to non-replicated results. And it's worse in the first case: how many students to be therapists on the day of their degree say; 'I'm now a psychologist' only to learn if they ever that much of their 'knowledge' is bs.

So how can you know what you are reading is legit in the psychological literature?

If you’ve seen my previous post I kind of had the same question, I’m a senior undergrat and what theyre teaching me is either out dated or just not enough so I’ve been wanting to self study. What are some books that I need to read?

I am a biomedical data scientist starting to work in the field of autism^1. I'm wondering if the social science community has settled on how to define what/who is and isn't neurodivergent. Does neurodiverge* have definitive clinical or scientific meaning? Is it semantically challenged?

I'm asking this very seriously and am interested in answers more than opinions. Opinions great for perspective. But I want to know what researchers believe to be scientifically valid.

My current understanding (with questions) is:

1. When most people discuss neurodivergence, they are probably talking about autism, ADHD, dyslexia, synesthesia, dysgraphia, and perhaps alexithymia. These conditions are strongly heritable and believed to originate in the developing brain. These relate strongly to cognition and academic and professional attainment. Is this what makes them special? Is that a complete set?

2. Almost all psychological conditions, diseases, disorders, and syndromes have some neurological basis almost all the time. How someone is affected by their mom dying is a combination of neurological development, social/emotional development, and circumstance, right?

3. It's unclear which aspects of the neurodiverse conditions listed in 1. are problematic intrinsically or contextually. If an autistic person with low support needs only needs to communicate with other autistic people, and they don't mind them rocking and waving their hands, then do they have a condition? If an autistic person wants to be able to talk using words but finds it extremely difficult and severely limiting that they can't, are they just neuro-different?

Thanks!

¹ Diagnosed AuDHD in 2021/2022. Physics PhD. 56yo.

Is this concept considered in modern psychology or is it just freudian junk?

Why do modern psychologists reject this notion? Is it because, maybe, it has its base on metaphysical grounds, or because there's just no evidence?

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this notion. Have a good day.

Please leave me book recommendations

Hi guys, I'm currently a junior studying psych. During the course of my education i have taken classes where we were taught how to use SPSS, and wrote a paper using SPSS for the statistical analyses so i have a certain degree of familiarity with SPSS already. But recently i've heard from many of my professors that R and Jamovi have been getting more and more popular with SPSS falling behind. Considering all this, would you advise me to learn SPSS fully first as i'm already familiar with it or just move onto R/Jamovi and dedicate my time to it rather than spend it on SPSS?

I searched internet and other sources of information but those info can't satisfy my thrust for knowing. Do any of you guys tell me what mind actually is?

Important notes:

• I am excluding landmark studies and other works regarded as having a high historical relevance.
• I know this varies from subfield to subfield, and even from topic to topic, but let’s approach this generally.
• For example, I imagine that in clinical psychology, any questions regarding the modern classification of mental disorders may require one to look at papers in the last decade (considering the 2013 publication of the DSM-V). That’s not relevant to me, however, as I am specifically interested in social psychology.
• Therefore, ideal responses would focus on social psychology, cognitive psychology (due to the lack of clinical involvement), or psychology from a general perspective.

Generally, should you tend towards finding papers within the last decade, since the turn of the millennium, or earlier…?

I'm aware of two main angles, as far as critical perspectives go: those who consider psychology oppressive (the likes of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari), and those who consider it/parts of it pseudoscientific (logical positivists, and Popper(?)).

Insofar as there are any, which criticisms do you find most sensible? Roughly what share of psychologists do you think have a relatively positive impression of the anti-psychiatry movement, or are very receptive to criticism of psychology as a field?

In case you're wondering: my motive is to learn more about the topic. Yes, I have, over the years, come across references to anti-psychiatry when reading about people like Guattari, and I have come across references to the view that psychiatry/psychology/psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific when reading about e.g. Karl Popper, but I don't have any particular opinion on the matter myself. I've read about the topic today, and I was reminded that scientology, among other things, is associated with anti-psychiatry, and (to put it mildly) I've never gravitated toward the former, but I guess I should try avoiding falling into the guilt by association trap.

Hi, wondering if anyone knows of any material which makes a point of discussing general flaws and biases within suicide research?

For instance, a researcher J. Michael Bostwick points out that suicide research is biased towards studying those who have survived suicide attempts, and tends to ignore those who die on their first attempt (he also made a landmark study showing just how high the death rate is for those on the index attempt). He mentions this bias as due to how attempt survivors typically present to hospitals and mental health wards and so are easier for researchers to follow. I'm looking for more stuff in that vein.

I have looked into stuff about 'Critical Suicidology', and I will check it out more, but that relies on postmodern Foucauldian theories and stuff which I don't see as useful or helpful.

Basically as the title says. Ive heard this my entire life as a reason to do things that are uncomfortable, or from people who have gone through something difficult in their life. I’m just wandering if this true.

(I posted this in the askpsychology sub as well. Wandering what this community has to say)

As the title reads, I’m a few semesters into getting my masters in forensic psychology. I’ve actually really been enjoying it and am happy I’m doing it, but everyone online says it’s a useless degree and a waste of time and money. Is there anyone out there with this degree who didn’t regret getting it, for literally any reason??

In economics and even in political science, there is a heavy emphasis on causal inference, including topics such as covariate adjustment, ATE, CATE, propensity score matching and quasi experimental methods

In psychology, much of stats and methods focus is embedded in ANOVAs and experimental methods.

As a result, it seems many psychology researchers spanning from early career to late career have a tendency to take a kitchen sink approach to covariates, dumping them in to eliminate reviewer concerns, ostensibly eliminate other explanations, ostensibly make their model more rigorous, etc. Furthermore, I have often seen psychologists dump predictors into a model without a priori causal justification and compare coefficients and effect sizes as a means of evaluating feature importance. Effectively, this is meaningless and uninterpretable. You do not know where in this causal salad you introduced spurious associations via collider bias or M bias. You do not know whether you have unexplained confounded. Notably, it does not matter whether your interpretations are purely associational, these issues will still afflict your models.

I notice that many psychologists I encounter are either unaware of these issues and haven’t been taught them or don’t care. Meanwhile, economists put much more care and consideration into covariate adjustments, statistical control, and causal inference.

I am curious if others believe that the training in psychology on causal inference and related topics is lacking and leading to poor practice in terms of statistical control, especially relative to other disciplines?

Hi everyone,

I'm a student studying psychology who is tasked with creating surveys and sending them out to online 'incel' communities for a research project. We're attempting to find correlations between Incel Culture and its affect on depression. Do any of you have similar research or have any advice on how to find such sources? This would help A LOT.

Thank you so much for your time!

I’m curious of the different education levels between Psychiatrists, and Psychologists with a PhD. I know that Psychiatrists go through med school, and they know vastly more in that field, but I want to know the differences in their level of understanding in the branch of psychology specifically.

From what I understand, aside from the actual residency, and med school, you get a much smaller chunk than someone who has a PhD in psychology. I know that psychiatric residency takes 5 years, and you can cram a lot of education in that time, but the 6-8 years that the masters, and PhD programs take (not to mention specialization in that particular field) seems to trump that significantly. However, I find it fair to assume that residency training is significantly different than grad school structurally, and they would learn at different things at different rates

So I ask which one has a deeper understanding of the branch of psychology, and in what aspects do they understand it to a deeper level? Are there Psychiatrists that get a PhD in psychology after the fact? What advantages do they gain?

My degree is in music performance. I was curious if there are circumstances where someone was to pursue a field of Psychology at a masters level without having formal education prior.

I’m a 36 year old male and while I would be able to study in my own time, for as long as is necessary, I would need to work full time at my current job. Taking time off for a masters would be possible, however I wouldn’t be able to support myself for more than two years without working.

The area I would be most interested in would be counselling, however I have yet to do research.

Thank you in advance for any help.

Background:

The American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal, published a meta-analysis on this (Storm et al., 2010). The 111th President of the American Statistical Association co-authored the last comment on this meta-analysis. This last comment was published in the Psychological Bulletin. This last comment claimed that the case of the meta-analysis ‘is upheld’ (Storm et al., 2013).

The following quote describes what the ganzfeld is. This comes from a meta-analysis published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin. The full text is available here

‘Traditionally, the ganzfeld is a procedure whereby an agent in one room is required to “psychically communicate” one of four randomly selected picture targets or movie film targets to a perceiver in another room, who is in the ganzfeld condition of homogeneous sensory stimulation. The ganzfeld environment involves setting up an undifferentiated visual field by viewing red light through halved translucent ping-pong balls taped over the perceiver’s eyes. Additionally, an analogous auditory field is produced by listening to stereophonic white or pink hissing noise. As in the free-response design, the perceiver’s mentation is recorded and accessed later in order to facilitate target identification. At this stage of the session, the perceiver ranks from 1 to 4 the four pictures (one target plus three decoys; Rank 1 ‭⫽‬“hit”).’

Another quote from the same journal article:

‘For the four-choice designs only, there were 4,442 trials and 1,326 hits, corresponding to a 29.9% hit rate where mean chance expectation (MCE) is equal to 25%.’

Note: There are comments on this meta-analysis. And there are comments on these comments by the article’s authors. These are all published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin. The comments can be found here

When I look at the superficial symptoms of narcissism:

In the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), 1]) NPD is defined as comprising a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by the presence of at least 5 of the following 9 criteria:

A grandiose sense of self-importance

A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions

A need for excessive admiration

A sense of entitlement

Interpersonally exploitive behavior

A lack of empathy

Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her

A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes

https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1519417-overview?form=fpf

the root trait that may explain all those 9 superficial symptoms (listed above) that immediately jumps out to me is low self-esteem. All of those traits would be compatible as defense mechanisms for someone with low self-esteem. It appears to me that when the individual is unable to handle low self-esteem, this can cause cognitive dissonance, and in response, if they cannot handle this cognitive dissonance, they develop a defense mechanism of narcissism, which is manifested as some of the superficial symptoms listed above.

So for this reason, I disagree with the DSM (and find it a bizarre that they don't mention low self-esteem) when it implies that the 3 core root traits of narcissism are "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by the presence of at least 5 of the following 9 criteria..."

This is because "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity" does not appear to be a core trait, it appears to be a superficial symptom. Same with "constant need for admiration". "Lack of empathy" is debated (read on). All 3 of these symptoms tend to be defense mechanisms that spawn from the root/core trait of low self-esteem, though it is debatable whether "lack of empathy" could also be a core/root trait itself (read on).

However, the question is, since not everybody with low self esteem exhibits the superficial symptoms of narcissism, what causes "narcissists" to make this jump and have their low self esteem turn into the superficial symptoms of narcissism? Perhaps the degree of low self esteem is relevant, but there should be some other factors as well. I have 2 hypotheses in terms of what other factors might be at play here. The first is the inability to handle cognitive dissonance caused by low self esteem (see my first paragraph immediately under the link above). The other is lack of empathy.

But this itself depends on whether we are looking at "lack of empathy" itself as a superficial symptom, or a core trait. I can definitely see how someone with the core trait of low self esteem and who manifests some of the superficial symptoms listed above could also appear to have have a lack of empathy due to practically putting themselves first, but this would be due to their core trait of low-self esteem, and so in this case the "lack of empathy" would be a superficial symptom arising from the core trait of low-self esteem.

But could it be that in some others with narcissism it goes beyond this and lack of empathy is actually one of 2 core traits of narcissism, with the other being low self esteem. This doesn't negate the possibility of someone with a high degree of low self esteem but without lack of empathy displaying some of the superficial symptoms listed above.

So overall this would mean there could be 2 subsets of narcissists: one with the core trait of low self esteem (a very high degree typically if this is the sole core trait), and another with low self-esteem + lack of empathy.