Introduction

On my blog, I write a lot about my English major because it is so central to who I am and who I aspire to become. Hidden beneath the surface of many of my blog posts is my minor in psychology. Since middle school, I have been fascinated by psychology. So much so that I thought that I would become a psychiatrist one day! While I do not have plans right now to go to medical school, my love of psychology is still going strong! In fact, I finished my psychology minor in about a year and a half because I was so passionate about the subject. In those two years, I have learned so many personal and professional lessons, and today, I want to share some of them with you all. I am taking these lessons from three classes I have taken at WashU for my psychology minor, and if you are a WashU student reading this, I would recommend all three of these classes to someone studying psychology!

Introduction to Psychology

In April, I was in a fellowship interview where someone asked me, “Why study both English and Psychology? How do those two fields work together?”. While it might not seem obvious to most people, I believe that psychology is vital to every single major or minor. No matter what you are studying at university, I recommend that you take Introduction to Psychology. You might think that it is a waste of your time, and you should be focusing on major requirements. You might think that psychology is only about Freud’s strange therapeutic efforts or the horrific use of lobotomies or the dense (yet helpful!) DSM-5. While I agree that these things are all important to the study of psychology, they are not the end-all be-all of the field. In this class, I learned that psychology impacts every single discipline. If you are in the health field, psychology can help you understand why a patient is not taking their life-saving medication. If you are in education, psychology can help you design a curriculum that meets students where they are developmentally. If you work with technology, you can develop better apps that rely on human-computer interaction (and yes, I argue that even AI relies on psychological insight about human cognition). For my English majors out there, I think that psychology acts as a way for us to write more compelling pieces of literature or dive deeper into our favorite pieces of text. There is something special about psychology falling under a “social science”. It allows us to implement in ways that straight STEM fields or straight humanities fields cannot. Introduction to Psychology teaches you so much about people and the way that they work. I think that everyone could benefit both personally and professionally from taking an introductory course in psychology. 

Biological Psychology

I was one of the only people in the classroom for my Biological Psychology class who was not required to be there. I took this class because (1) it seemed super interesting to me to learn about the biological mechanisms that are a part of so many psychological phenomena, and (2) out of stubbornness, since someone told me that I should not take the class because I could not “handle” it. Contrary to their opinion, I ended up absolutely loving this class, and Dr. Cooper has probably been one of my favorite professors at WashU. I am so glad that I took this class with her since she shared about the work she did with patients suffering from brain damage, especially traumatic brain injury (TBI). Brain damage is what it sounds like; it is damage to brain cells (also known as neurons). TBI is brain damage that is caused by an external force. This series of lessons on brain damage taught me that we need to protect our brains! TBI can impact a person’s ability to work, study, or simply live a full life. Our brains are precious resources that are extremely difficult to fix if they are injured. You can protect your brain in small ways every day. I always wear my seatbelt, and I force any passengers in my car to do the same. I do not smoke or drink excessive amounts of alcohol since both have been found to damage or kill neurons. I regularly go to annual doctor appointments (and bombard my mom with a million medical questions any time I am worried about something). There are so many small steps that everyone can take to prevent brain damage. I know that our health can sometimes be out of our control; however, I believe that we have control over a series of choices that can benefit ourselves and our brains in the long run. 

P.S. If you want to learn more about control, you can read about it in one of my past blog posts!

Psychology of Personality

Personality is something that is extremely difficult to study and research because it is difficult to quantify. There are certain principles that researchers have gathered more evidence for than others. For example, people tend to believe that the bad actions of others are reflections of their personality (or some inner psychological phenomena), although people tend to believe that their bad actions are reflections of extraneous circumstances and not a direct reflection of themselves. My dad calls this “character versus context”. We tend to excuse our actions because we understand the context behind them, while we do not necessarily do this for other people. I think that there are two lessons here: inner reflection and empathy. First, we need to have the ability to reflect in order to learn if something inside of us is a part of our character. We tend to make excuses for ourselves because we want to avoid cognitive dissonance (the psychological discomfort felt when holding two or more conflicting beliefs, like our actions not matching up with our self-concepts). Now, there is some debate about whether or not people can change their personality into adulthood. However, I do believe in people’s ability to evolve and the brain’s ability to change. Empathy – the ability to understand and share another person’s emotions and experiences – is one such thing that I think people can develop to become a part of their personality. People who are good at empathy can see context well. I think that we should all strive to find a balance between context and character. So, the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, maybe try to have a bit of empathy and reflect on the fact that maybe that person has a context unknown to you. 

Conclusion

While these might be my lessons, they should also be yours! I hope that you learned something about yourself along the way, since psychology impacts every single person. With so many differences in the world, psychology is one of the few things that all people share. Of course, there are differences in everyone’s psychology (which is what makes people unique!); however, there are some psychological traits that we all share. While the field might have some horrible origins, that does not mean that psychology does not have a role now or in the future. My wish is that psychology can become a tool that we can utilize to highlight our similarities as well as our differences.