However, emotions gu...
This Research Topic is the second volume of the Research Topic "New Methodological, Intervention and Neuroscientific Perspectives in Sports Psychology". Please see the first volume <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/15225/new-metho...
There exist racial/ethnic survival differences among females with breast cancer worldwide, varying by sociodemographic (e.g., education, socioeconomic position [SEP], income, etc.), clinical (e.g., tumor subtype, hormone status, treatment status, sta...
Art and Psychology have influenced each other since long time: psychoanalysis, visual perception and artistic representation inspiring data visualization are just few examples of it. The challenges of our time call for an increasingly constant confro...
In today’s knowledge societies, literacy skills are key to promote success in many aspects of people’s lives, including employment and personal development. Yet, many adults are functionally illiterate. This Research Topic aims to bring together expe...
Topics for research, papers, and other projects
Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."
Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.
Are you looking for a developmental psychology topic for a psychology paper , experiment, or science fair project? Topics you might pick can range from prenatal development to health during the final stages of life.
Developmental psychology is a broad topic that involves studying how people grow and change throughout their whole lifetime. Topics don't just include physical growth but also the emotional, cognitive, and social development that people experience at different stages of their lives.
The following are just a few different topics that might help inspire you. Remember, these are just ideas to help you get started. You might opt to explore one of these areas, or you might think of a related question that interests you as well.
Developmental psychology is a huge and diverse subject, so picking a topic isn't always easy. Some tips that can help you choose a good developmental psychology topic include:
Before you start working on any paper, experiment, or science project, the first thing you need to do is understand the rules your instructor has established for the assignment.
Also, be sure to check the official guidelines given by your teacher. If you are not sure about these guidelines, ask your instructor if there are any specific requirements before you get started on your research .
If you are going to actually conduct an experiment , you need to present your idea to your instructor to gain their permission before going forward. In some cases, you might have to also present your plan to your school's Institutional Review Board.
After you have gotten to move forward with your chosen topic, the next step is to do some background research. This step is essential! If you are writing a paper, the information you find will make up your literature review.
If you are performing an experiment, it will provide background information for the introduction of your lab report . For a psychology science project, this research will help you in your presentation and can help you decide how to best approach your own experiment.
Choosing a topic for a developmental psychology experiment, paper, or project can be tough! The ideas above can be a great place to start, but you might also consider questions you've had about your own life. Once you have a general idea for your topic, narrow it down, do some background research and talk to your instructor.
Nielsen M, Haun D. Why developmental psychology is incomplete without comparative and cross-cultural perspectives . Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci . 2016;371(1686):20150071. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0071
Leite DFB, Padilha MAS, Cecatti JG. Approaching literature review for academic purposes: The Literature Review Checklist . Clinics (Sao Paulo) . 2019;74:e1403. Published 2019 Nov 25. doi:10.6061/clinics/2019/e1403
Grady C. Institutional review boards: Purpose and challenges . Chest . 2015;148(5):1148-1155. doi:10.1378/chest.15-0706
Kim WO. Institutional review board (IRB) and ethical issues in clinical research . Korean Journal of Anesthesiology . 2012;62(1):3-12. doi:10.4097/kjae.2012.62.1.3
By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."
Discover why these two "fun facts" are nothing more than tall tales..
Posted May 5, 2024 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
The human mind holds more wonders than we can imagine—so much so that, for centuries, we’ve dedicated ourselves to trying to understand it. It’s in the very name; “psyche”, meaning mind or soul, and “ology”, meaning study, come together to refer to the field we know, love and take a great deal of interest in: psychology.
Since the time of our psychological forefathers, we’ve come far in our attempts to grasp the essence of the human mind and brain. While there’s still plenty we’re not certain of, there’s perhaps an equal amount of knowledge we’ve been able to gain. However, with this pursuit of knowledge comes the spread of mythological thought—ideas that, despite their prevalence, lack any empirical support and mislead us in our understanding of the mind.
You’ve likely heard these two myths before. Through actual psychological insight, you can learn the truth behind them.
The idea that people are either “left- or right-brained” is an enduring concept. The left side of the brain is personified as being the logical one, and the right side as being the creative one—and the idea suggests our personalities and skills are shaped by the hemisphere we favor. Are you a logical, analytical left-brainer or a free-spirited, creative right-brainer? It’s an alluring dichotomy.
Although they are symmetrically located within the brain, it’s common knowledge that the left and right hemispheres of the brain both develop and function asymmetrically. They both share nearly 100 billion neurons—close to the amount of stars in the Milky Way galaxy—that are located in identifiable regions and tuned to take on specific tasks. These two hemispheres work in tandem, but not in the way our intuition would lead us to think.
Research from the International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change underlines the counterintuitive way that the left and right hemispheres operate. For instance, the brain processes incoming visual information from the eyes through the occipital lobes at the back of the brain; however, the left hemisphere processes information from the right visual field, and vice versa. Similarly, the left frontal lobe typically controls the movement of the right side of the body, and also vice versa.
However, despite these asymmetries, the authors explain that there is no evidence to suggest that normal cognitive functioning happens exclusively in one hemisphere or the other. The corpus callosum—the bridge between the hemispheres—allows extensive communication between the hemispheres, making sure that brain activity is coordinated across both sides.
While the idea of “left- versus right-brained thinking” may seem like a convenient framework, it ultimately falls short as a scientific reality. While some people may be more adept in analytical thinking, and while others may thrive in creative pursuits, these strengths can’t be reliably attributed to the dominance of one hemisphere over the other. In reality, most of us have a diverse range of skills that can’t be neatly categorized into left-brained or right-brained categories.
From the silver screen to casual conversations, the idea that humans only use 10% of their brains has made its way throughout popular culture. You might remember Scarlett Johansson’s portrayal of a woman unlocking superhuman abilities as she surpasses the “10% threshold” in the movie Lucy . This idea, however, begs too many questions.
Humans are often referred to as “cognitive misers” in psychology. According to renowned cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich, animals—including humans—have evolved over time to help their genes survive and reproduce, rather than to always make perfect decisions. This means that being rational, or making decisions that perfectly match reality, isn’t always the most important thing for survival. Sometimes, it’s more beneficial for us to use less energy or resources, even if it means being a bit inaccurate.
Put simply, we often take the path of least resistance when it comes to thinking—and it’s this notion that may have given rise to the idea that we only use 10% of our brains. However, the theory of humans being cognitive misers by no means suggests that we are incapable of using the “full capacity" of our brains. If this were the case, our reality as humans would look a lot different.
To prove this, neuroscientist Barry Beyernstein set out six pieces of evidence to debunk the “10% myth”:
The reality is that every part of our brain serves a purpose, and in no way does one half dominate the other. So, the next time you chat with a self-proclaimed “left-brainer”, or a person fantasizing about what humans would look like using 100% of their brain’s potential, remember that the truth about our minds is far more detailed and fascinating than these reductive myths suggest.
A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com.
Mark Travers, Ph.D., is an American psychologist with degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder.
At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.
Like many good ideas in science, it started with a walk in the woods.
During a stroll through the Berlin Botanic Garden in 2019, HHMI Janelia Research Campus Group Leader Jan Funke and some of his scientific colleagues started chatting about a familiar topic: how to get more information out of insect connectomes.
These wiring diagrams give researchers unprecedented information about brain cells and how they connect to each other, but they don't tell scientists how the signal from one neuron affects the other neurons in its network.
The group wondered if they might be able to use information from previous experiments identifying the neurotransmitters released from some neurons to predict the neurotransmitters released from others in the connectome. Neurons use neurotransmitters to communicate with each other, with different chemicals responsible for different signals.
The human eye can't tell the difference between the synapses on neurons where different neurotransmitters are released, but perhaps a computer model could. Funke and his colleagues were skeptical, but they thought it might be worth giving it a try.
"This is basically where we left it: we have the data, I guess we could try," Funke says. "We were not particularly optimistic."
Back at Janelia, Funke decided to give the project to Michelle Du, a high school student who was starting a summer internship in his lab. The project would allow Du to learn how to train a neural network to recognize images -- a useful skill for a budding computer scientist even if the project did not yield results.
A few days into her internship, Du showed up in Funke's office having trained the model on published data and evaluated its performance on test data. Though Funke had little hope it would work, the model was more than 90 percent accurate in predicting some neurotransmitters.
"I couldn't believe it," Funke says. "The numbers were way too good."
After checking the data and the model, Funke, Du, and their colleagues were convinced that the numbers weren't a mistake: The model could predict neurotransmitters. But the team was still cautious, and they didn't have a good grasp on how the network was making the predictions.
"I should have been very happy, but instead I was worried because we didn't understand what was going on," Funke says.
After ruling out possible confounders that could be skewing their results, the team developed a way to understand what the network was seeing that allowed it to make predictions.
First, they used their network to predict a neurotransmitter from a known image, which it did successfully. Then, they asked a separate network to take that known image and change it slightly to create an image corresponding to the release of a different neurotransmitter -- essentially identifying the minimum traits that need to be changed for the model to predict one neurotransmitter over 4another. Lastly, the team developed a separate method to identify these distinct traits.
From this information, the team understood the different features their original network used to make predictions. This gave them confidence to release their method to the wider neuroscience community in 2020.
"What most of the neuroscience community has seen from this work is the predictions," Funke says. "They were happy to use it, but for us it was very important to make sure it was actually working."
Five years later, Du is now an undergraduate at Duke University, and the method she helped develop has been used to predict neurotransmitters in connectomes of the fruit fly hemibrain, ventral nerve cord, and optic lobe created by Janelia researchers and collaborators, as well as the adult fly brain connectome created by FlyWire.
The information helps scientists understand how neurons in a circuit affect each other so they can then form hypotheses about the function of brain circuits that can be tested in the lab.
"It really all started with a bit of a crazy idea, something that no one was really too optimistic about. And what do you do with a crazy idea? You give it to a high school student as a learning experience," Funke says. "We were very fortunate that Michelle was extremely talented."
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Topics of Psychology Research Related to Human Cognition. Some of the possible topics you might explore in this area include thinking, language, intelligence, and decision-making. Other ideas might include: Dreams. False memories. Attention. Perception.
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This collection highlights our most downloaded* psychology papers published in 2022. Featuring authors from around the world, these papers showcase valuable research from an international community.
Recently published articles from subdisciplines of psychology covered by more than 90 APA Journals™ publications. For additional free resources (such as article summaries, podcasts, and more), please visit the Highlights in Psychological Research page. Browse and read free articles from APA Journals across the field of psychology, selected by ...
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Clearly, psychology research topics in the 21st century continue to be diverse and evolving. We believe that our choice of traditional and cutting-edge research paper topics reflects contemporary psychology's diverse nature. For example, the "traditional" research paper topics include the following:
Choose a Sub-Topic. Social psychologists are interested in all aspects of social behavior. Some of the main areas of interest within the field include social cognition, social influence, and social relationships investigating subtopics such as conformity, groupthink, attitude formation, obedience, prejudice, and so on.
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This can be an interesting topic worth exploring if you are intrigued by the idea of extending health and happiness using positive psychology methods and strategies. 11. Abnormal Psychology: Understanding Mental Disorders. Mental disorders, such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are also seeing ...
This introduction to the special issue on global perspectives frames the collection of articles around recent calls for expanding the focus of research in psychology in general, and school psychology specifically, beyond Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries and cross-cultural comparisons with non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic Confucian ...
The following Research Topics are led by experts in their field and contribute to the scientific understanding of psychology. These Research topics are published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology, as open access articles.
Topics you might pick can range from prenatal development to health during the final stages of life. Developmental psychology is a broad topic that involves studying how people grow and change throughout their whole lifetime. Topics don't just include physical growth but also the emotional, cognitive, and social development that people ...
My advice is to have experience in education, beyond having been a student, before attending graduate school in educational psychology. At least for me, this context was important for making the leap from theory to practice, for thinking about research critically, and for identifying my own research interests.
These additional free APA resources are also helpful to teachers: Psychology topics: Access research, podcasts, and publications on nearly 100 topics. APA Dictionary of Psychology: Over 25,000 authoritative entries across 90 subfields of psychology. APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards: These standards offer guidance on what ...
You've likely heard these two myths before. Through actual psychological insight, you can learn the truth behind them. 1. People Are Either "Left Brained" Or "Right Brained". The idea ...
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High school student helps transform 'crazy idea' into innovative research tool. ScienceDaily . Retrieved May 9, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com / releases / 2024 / 05 / 240509124703.htm