How to get a B.A. in Psychology in 5 minutes

I was inspired by the article by Stephen Walt about "How to Get a B.A. in International Relations in 5 Minutes", where he presented 'all you really need to know about the fascinating world of International Relations', and decided to do one for my own major, Psychology.

As a psychology student, I get asked some of these questions often: "So what do you study in Psychology?" "Can you read minds?" "Do I have a mental illness?"

Most people have no clue about what Psychology undergraduates actually learn, and the only things they know about Psychology are the random articles that surface on social media, with the most common topic being 'What Psychology says about being happy' (examples: 1, 2, 3).

While learning about happiness is a good thing, 95% of a degree in Psychology isn't about Positive Psychology. In this article, I'll present what I believe to be the key ideas in Psychology, and are the things that we will remember in 5-10 years time after we have graduated.

I have structured this article according to the 5 general domains of Psychology: Abnormal, Biological, Cognitive, Social, Developmental, providing the gist of each domain. Assuming you don't read too slowly, you should be able to finish this in 5 minutes!

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Most university Psychology degrees are structured to capture the five general domains of Psychology as mentioned above, with more advanced courses branching off into each of these categories (e.g. Intro to Abnormal Psychology -> Therapies). There is also the general Research Methods (e.g. the scientific method - hypothesis testing, statistics, etc) courses which I will not elaborate on.

Abnormal Psychology
"What is abnormal is arbitrary and is constantly evolving"

The introductory course in Abnormal Psychology typically exposes you to a wide range of mental disorders (e.g. mood disorders (such as depression, bipolar, etc), anxiety disorders, etc) and their diagnoses/symptoms/basic treatments. More advanced courses delve into different areas such as therapies, counselling, assessment, which generally revolve around assessing, diagnosing, and treating a mental disorder.

Because everyone has problems

Learning about all these is largely memory work, but I have two main takeaways from Abnormal Psychology:

What is abnormal is arbitrary
One of the leading manuals of Abnormal Psychology is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). To put it very simply, it is a manual of what symptoms comprise each mental disorder, almost like a checklist of sorts (note that the recent trend is a shift away from dichotomies to continuums), that aids mental health professionals in making a diagnosis.
The strange thing about the DSM is that it is arbitrary - a group of experienced researchers/clinicians just came together and agreed upon what should be in the manual. This is why DSM constantly draws flak for being arbitrary, culturally-insensitive (though there are vast improvements in the recent editions), and even being driven by the pharmaceutical industry.

Hopefully your psychiatrist is less random than this.

What is abnormal constantly evolves
Because of the arbitrary nature of the DSM, it is also constantly evolving, depending on current research/clinical findings. This could mean what was previously classified as a mental disorder is now no longer considered one, or the emergence of new mental disorders (e.g. Internet Gaming Disorder in the DSM-V).

To wrap up this section, I return to the seemingly simple layman question: "Do I have X disorder?"
A well-educated Psychology student should be able to tell you that this is no simple question due to its many layers of complexity : Are you basing your assessment on clinical findings or arbitrary guidelines? How do the symptoms each vary on a continuum? Even if the client fails to meet the criteria for diagnosis, does that mean he doesn't need treatment? Which treatment should you use?
No single article will do this topic justice, and the simplified answer may be "It depends on the judgment of your mental health professional". Treatment-wise, the current trend is patient-centric treatment - the patient's needs and preferences come first, and a large goal is to let the patient be actively involved in the treatment process (versus in the past where the doctor is seen as the authoritarian figure and focused on physical symptoms and patients were passive).


Biological Psychology
"The brain is a complex system"

Given the current trends, this domain is more accurately termed 'neuroscience' or 'neuropsychology'. This field is interested in studying the specific workings of the human brain and investigating correlations between physiological (more specifically, of the brain) and behavioral changes.

Nice one, brain.

The most interesting thing I remember from Biological Psychology is learning about how we may get addicted to caffeine. While this article explains it more in detail,(or an even more 'sciencey' peer-reviewed article) here is my 30-second, simplified explanation of it:

• Caffeine belongs to a group of drugs that influence our brain (known as psychoactive drugs). When we consume caffeine, certain sites in the brain are activated by caffeine, which lead to the increase in energy we feel (thus caffeine is known as a stimulant). After repeated consumption, greater amounts of caffeine are required to activate the same sites, as they get used to the previous strength and need a larger 'kick' to be activated (this is known as tolerance).
• Because our body always tries to achieve balance or a neutral state (homeostasis) these sites may react in a way to produce an effect opposite to the effects of caffeine (i.e. make us feel lethargic). This explains the 'caffeine crash' some of us experience after caffeine has left our system (the lethargic effect is still firing away while there's no more caffeine to counterbalance this), and also explains caffeine withdrawal, when someone who regularly consumes caffeine stops consuming it and feels horrible (the lethargic effect kicks in but no caffeine is being supplied. In a sense, he is doubly lethargic now, with normal lethargy + no-caffeine lethargy combined).

This is only one sample of a complex neurological process (already one of the simplest) that you may learn in this field. I've also left out the more technical jargon such as brain receptors, action potential, neurotransmitters, etc.

Cognitive Psychology
"Remember what memory is and you'll have a foothold in all things within Cognitive Psychology"

If Biological Psychology can be analogous to identifying the different parts of a computer and learning what they do, Cognitive Psychology is learning computing language and understanding how things in the CPU combine to do what they do. The computer metaphor is commonly employed (as I will later on) to explain concepts in this domain. The big question in Cognitive Psychology is "How does our brain process information?"

This field covers an array of mental processes such as attention, reading processes, problem solving, thinking, but what may interest most people is memory. Memory is somewhat the 'anchor' of everything in Cognitive Psychology - it is virtually impossible to discuss any concept in Cognitive Psychology without some reference to memory - thus my focus on memory in this section.

I can't remember the point of this comic.

Here's my 1 minute crash course on memory (possibly oversimplified):
There are 3 types of memory, long-term (LT), short-term (ST) and working memory.

• As the name implies, long-term memory refers to information that is stored for longer periods in our brain, such as memories of events we've experienced (also known as episodic knowledge), factual knowledge/concepts (e.g. everything I'm writing here), set patterns of doing things (also known as behavioral schemas; e.g. morning routine : get out of bed, wash your face, brush your teeth), etc etc. Think of LT memory as things being stored (or encoded) on a hard drive.
• The opposite would be short-term memory, phenomena that we only hold for very short time (seconds). If we don't commit things in the ST memory to our LT memory, they are forgotten/lost. For instance, if you hear or see the number 21837, there are the few seconds that follows where the audio/visual imprint stays in your ST memory and you can recite it easily. But if you don't commit it to LT memory, you may not be able to recite it later on.
• The two big differences between ST and LT memory are capacity and time. LT memory lasts longer and has (arguably) unlimited capacity; ST memory is brief and has very limited capacity (e.g. most people find it difficult to memorize more than 7-9 numbers)
• The working memory is where the magic happens. If ST memory is a book and LT memory is the library, working memory is the librarian who takes the book and stores it in the right place in the library. The working memory is responsible for the integrating and manipulating of information, and when we say we are directing our attention to a task, it more or less means we are employing our working memory to perform that task.
• To give an example of all three systems working in tandem: Our friend asks us "Hey, where did you leave your keys?" - the ST memory holds on to this verbal utterance for the working memory to interpret what it means, then decide on the next step - which is to retrieve from our LT memory when we last had our keys.

There are a whole lot of other exciting cognitive concepts that I wish I had the luxury of space to elaborate on here, such as spreading activation, learning and conditioning, and metacognition, but I will conclude this section for now and move on to the ever-popular realm of Social Psychology.

Social Psychology

"Humans are irrational beings"

Social Psychology is the study of how our thoughts, beliefs and actions influence/are influenced by other's (or our own) thoughts, beliefs and actions. Most laymen like Social Psychology as it is easily relatable and observable in our everyday lives, versus something like the blood-brain barrier.

In fact, social psychologists basically observe everyday occurrences, give them a fancy term, and try to explain it. Note that even though they are everyday occurrences, they may often be counterintuitive. One of the most famous examples is the bystander effect. When you someone on the street is in need of help, is it more likely he receives help when more people are around? While common sense says 'Yes', studies have repeatedly shown that the more people are around, the less likely anyone is to help at all.

He's probably been dead for a week.

Why is this so? Researchers argue that this is due to diffusion of responsibility, where it's easier to think 'Someone else will help him' when there are more people around versus when you're the only person there. This phenomenon has been observed in real-life scenarios, such as the tragic case of Yue Yue, the two-year-old girl who was run over not once but TWICE and no less than 18 passers-by walked past but offered no help.

The realm of Social Psychology is so large that is hard to decide which to share here - attitudes, persuasion, group dynamics, and unconscious thought are all fascinating issues. After some consideration, I'll elaborate on one of the most influential concepts in Social Psychology - cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) states that we don't like to have conflicting cognitions (thoughts/beliefs). When we do have conflicting cognitions, we experience cognitive dissonance, or an uneasiness in our minds, and we try to resolve this in often strange and irrational ways. For example, researchers had participants perform extremely boring and tedious tasks, such as drawing circles for an hour. After this, they were told to persuade a second participant (actually an actor) that the task was interesting and engaging. One group of participants were then paid $1 for their efforts; another group was paid $20. Who do you think would like the tasks more? Those who were paid more right?

Writing with this pencil is a pointless task.

Wrong. It was found that the $1 group rated the boring tasks as more interesting than the $20 group! This is because those in the $1 group had the conflicting thoughts of 'I told someone the tasks were interesting' and 'I found the tasks really boring', and in order to resolve this conflict, they modified their own attitudes to favor the tasks more. The $20 group was able to resolve this conflict by justifying their persuasion of someone else with the large amount of money they received.

The main thrust of CDT (i.e. we try to reduce cognitive dissonance) can be seen in our lives without us realising it: for example, when you're choosing between a $5 Giordano shirt or a $50 H&M shirt. When you eventually buy the H&M one, you may subsequently believe you like it more (even if you don't), simply to rationalize the hefty price you've paid. 

While this theory has been challenged by some other alternatives (e.g. self-perception theory, balance theory), it remains largely influential in explaining many phenomena, such as the fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, and other cognitive biases (for a longer list, click here). Regardless of which theory you subscribe to, the bottom line remains - we often behave in irrational ways to protect ourselves, whether it is to reduce cognitive dissonance or to protect our self-concepts.

Developmental Psychology
"Early influences have a huge impact"

This field teaches about how humans change over time, typically with a focus on toddlers, children, and adolescents. You may learn about how we acquire each of our core skills (e.g. language, cognition, social skills, etc) at each stage of development.

'Hi! I am here because people love babies!'

Laymen may be most interested in the development of babies - at what age are they able to crawl, walk, babble (i.e. say 'ba ba ba' or 'ma ma' - monosyllabic sounds), talk, have theory of mind, etc. But personally, my main takeaway from this field is that early influences have a huge impact on the rest of our lives.

Research has shown that there are sensitive periods of development - periods in which you need to be exposed to or acquire a particular ability - after which it becomes more difficult to learn that skill. A simple example is language - it's easier to acquire a language(s) up till about 6 years old, after which learning a language is generally slower and more difficult.

'What happens if you deprive me of vision?'

There are also critical periods - if deprived of learning that ability during the critical period, subsequent attempts will only result in impaired acquisition. A simple but chilling example is vision - researchers deprived a kitten of vision by sewing one eye shut. When it became an adult cat, this eye was unsewn, but visual acuity was never able to develop to normal levels. Sewing an adult cat's eye shut and later unsewing it had no such permanent effect on the cat's vision.

The concept of sensitive periods lead to certain scary possibilities - research on antisocial children have found certain correlations with a lack of parental warmth in early childhood. It is hypothesized that this is because the child was deprived of loving, social contact during certain sensitive periods of social skills acquisition. (Note that such hypotheses are only made based on observations of antisocial kids - reverse engineering the problem in a sense - thus we cannot make a causal conclusion).

Developmental Psychology has made me appreciate the value of exposing my future children to a wide range of stimulating activities to facilitate development, and to provide parental care and warmth from young, as early influences do have a huge impact.

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I have chosen to avoid some of the more well-known ideas such as Freud and Positive Psychology and instead focus on what people may not have heard of before. This is only a snippet of the large world of Psychology, and if you truly want to learn more, perhaps you should pursue an undergraduate (and further) education in Psychology.