Misconceptions In Psychology

Mentally unstable persons study psychology because they want stable persons to unlock their hidden mental state to drive others insane. Psychology is the study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a specific situation. Based on personal experiences at the University of The West Indies, Mona Campus (UWI), I have seen instances where students question the availability of employment of someone with a psychology degree. In fact, psychology is a broad area of study and contains different areas of study, for example, clinical, developmental and school psychology. However, persons living in Jamaica believe that a psychology degree does not comprise of all these things, they only see psychology as a single entity

Jamaicans who specialize in different areas of the working class, such as business and finance, for example, would question what can a student with a psychology degree do in the business and finance sector that is profitable for them. Even though Helms & Rogers (2010) asserts that, the degree in psychology is applicable to any working environment, Brown (1983) highlights that these misconceptions manifest in introductory psychology students. Brown (1983) carried out an experiment with 79 students from the Oklahoma State University; they got 37 true/false statements to identify if they knew what the misconceptions were. From Brown’s (1983) study, students had a misconception about psychology in general because they were not going in depth. Since the students had a basic understating of what psychology is, then they would not comprehend the different areas of psychology. Even though Brown administered it to psychology students, they were able to disregard some of these misconceptions. On the other hand, Chan (1992) who conducted a similar experiment to 161 Chinese undergraduate health sciences students in Hong Kong. His results differed from Brown (1983) results, showing that the misconception mainly lies amongst those who only view one aspect of psychology and not psychology as a whole, including its parts. From this comparison, it is noticeable that the students outside the field of psychology would believe that it is not applicable to the labor force. Not applicable because those outside psychology do not grasp the fact that the different fields in psychology – like clinical and social psychology for example, are profitable fields and are fields that are necessary as