The psychology section of any bookstore, from the online superstores to your favorite neighborhood nook, covers an enormously wide range of topics and interests. You’ve undoubtedly got your own top 10 list of best books in psychology, but if you’re looking to expand your knowledge of the area, see how mine compares with yours.
Michelle, a secretary for a huge law firm, gets into a huge fight with her boss, Tom. She’s angry, so she begins to raise her voice. In an instant, he’s screaming back at her. Tom starts insulting her, and eventually she gets so nervous that she spills her cup of coffee on herself. Humiliated, Michelle takes the rest of the day off, unsure of how to handle the issue.
Famous psychologist Sigmund Freud identified the ego as the part of the mind responsible for balancing selfish wants with selfless morality. Not only is the ego the brain’s referee, but it also serves as a bodyguard for the sensitive parts of the mind. Freud believed that when a person experiences trauma, ego defense mechanisms kick into gear to prevent the person from acting in socially unacceptable ways.
One course of action that Michelle’s ego can take is removing the pressing memory of the event from her conscious memory. This is called repression, and it goes further than simply refusing to talk about an issue. Repression would prevent Michelle from acting on her feelings of anger by locking the memory away to a place where she would be unable to access it without therapy.
The humiliation of the fight at work may cause Michelle’s ego to seek to return her mind to a simpler, less traumatic state. Regression causes the mind to go back to childhood, so Michelle may feel the urge to call her mother to whine about her problems or curl up into the fetal position and cry.
Michelle’s ego may alternatively cause her to act in a way that is on the polar opposite of her original feelings of anger and humiliation. This is called reaction formation, and such a response may lead Michelle to act very friendly towards her boss the next day. Forming the opposite reaction towards Tom and being overly kind to her rude boss could help stop Michelle from being aggressive towards him, the latter of which could get her fired.
Another route Michelle’s handy dandy little mental bodyguard could take isprojection. Because it’s not likely for Michelle to keep her job if she openly hates her boss, she may begin to believe that everyone else in the office hates Tom, too— even if they all like him perfectly well.
While Michelle cannot act on her feelings of rage against her boss, there are other people in her life over whom she does have power. Her ego may use displacement and cause Michelle to express her feelings of rage in other parts of her life. She may get into unnecessary fights with her best friend or scream at her boyfriend to get out her anger.
Michelle may also try to rationalize the anger she feels from her traumatic experience by looking for small reasons to justify her rage. It’s dangerous for her to accept that she still feels angry about the humiliating incident weeks after its occurrence, but she may feel less crazy if her fury is directed at the fact that Tom always takes too long making his coffee or the recurring number of times that he accidentally knocks pencils off of her desk as he passes by.
All of the above options may make Michelle feel a little better, but they’d ultimately make things even worse for her. Feeling like a child or getting into a fight with her best friend won’t help Michelle get over her humiliating experience. So instead, her ego decides to do her a favor and deal with her bubbling emotions through sublimation. Sublimation, like displacement, involves taking the unacceptable feelings and putting them somewhere else, but unlike displacement, sublimation turns bad impulses into something socially sublime and beneficial.
Michelle sits down with a pen and paper and writes down all of her feelings, and when she eventually invites Tom to see her perform her piece at a Slam Poetry night, she smiles at him, able to move on.
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“Your child is bright. He could grow up to become the President of the United States.” I was in the fifth grade when I heard those words from my teacher. Because my parents spoke only Spanish, I was asked to be the translator at my own parent-teacher conference. I relayed the words to my parents with mixed emotions. I was proud hearing them, but also troubled. I knew at an early age I could never become the President of the United States—I was an undocumented immigrant. Yes, I was bright and I had goals and ambitions, but I was uncertain whether I could ever reach them. Through hard work and perseverance, my family earned our permanent resident card and, in 2009, we became U.S. citizens.
I have seen first-hand how policy initiatives can represent both obstacles and opportunities for disadvantaged and diverse individuals. Fortunately for me, my early experiences sparked an enduring passion to help these groups, both on an individual and societal level.
Over the past two years I’ve had the privilege of participating in visits to “the Hill” (Capitol Hill) where I’ve spoken about the benefits of the Graduate Psychology Education (GPE) Program. The GPE Program is the nation’s primary federal program dedicated to funding the training of doctoral-level psychologists. Graduate students and interns are trained in interprofessional collaboration and learn how to provide behavioral and mental health services to vulnerable and underserved populations. The GPE program is a great fit with my personal and career goals of helping underrepresented groups receive cost-effective, evidence-based health care services.
I distinctly remember my first Hill visit, mainly because I was a ball of nerves! Though I had the passion to be involved in policy work, I wasn’t sure where to begin. As a graduate student in clinical psychology, I was taught about the science and practice of psychology, but here I was treading new waters, trying to connect my knowledge base to policy issues and efforts. Before I got involved in this kind of work, I found advocacy intimidating. I thought, “Can I contribute to these discussions? Will Senators and Representatives listen to what I have to say? Can I make a meaningful difference?” Fortunately, the answer to all three questions was YES.
Prior to the Hill visits, Sheila Lane Forsyth and Alexandra Ginsberg from APA’s Education Government Relations Office provided excellent training on how to translate my knowledge and experience into a story that can connect with congressional staffers, Senators, and Representatives. After training, I was more confident that I had something to contribute to these discussions. Most importantly, I learned that my lived experiences and my work as a behavioral health consultant were compelling talking points.
When we arrived at the Hill, I felt a mix of emotions. I felt grateful to have the opportunity and I felt excited to meet my state’s congress people. I was in awe as I walked through the corridors and hallways where history has been made. I also felt, once more, a bit terrified. I was worried that I would not be an effective advocate, but those fears and worries disappeared after my first meeting. It was affirming (and cool!) to see that congressional staffers and congress people were interested in my message. Staffers were very cordial and had many questions about the GPE program and how it affected lives in my local community. The in-person meeting helped me develop a personal relationship with each office we visited and helped put a face to each request we made. In fact, I have continued to have follow-up contact with congressional offices even after my visit to DC.
Of course, I was ecstatic to learn later that Congress supported APA’s request for additional GPE funding! I know that I was just one small part of this effort, but my experience with advocacy taught me we can make a meaningful difference!
It was quite the lesson: That we psychologists can have an impact on a much larger, societal level. We can advance the science and practice of psychology by informing key policy makers about ways to have a positive impact on human welfare.
On my latest visit to the Hill, I had a chance to tour the Smithsonian, in particular the National Portrait Gallery. I was drawn to an exhibit on Dolores Huerta, a Latina civil rights activist who was a strong advocate for the rights of farm workers, labor unions, and women. It was a marvelous exhibit and featured this quote, which has had a profound effect on me:
“Don’t be a marshmallow.
Walk the street with us into history.
Get off the sidewalk.
Work for justice.”
This is a call for all of us to be engaged in advocacy. As psychologists, helping people should also include promoting human rights and calling for social justice. I will never be the President of the United States, but I can do my part to help raise awareness about the value of psychology as a science and how it can be used improve the lives of those who are often overlooked and in need.
Words of wisdom: grad school edition.
I remember graduate school quite well, partly because the memories are still fresh (I got my doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Miami in 2012), partly because it was such a tremendous experience and partly because it has no comparison to anything before or after it. What I learned in graduate school was of course a lot about how to become a better clinician, scientist and community steward.
An undergraduate education will prepare you for several careers. And, for many of you, graduate school is the intended step forward from the bachelor’s degree. If that is your intention, as it is mine, possibly the most essential part of your graduate school application is being able to share your research experience. For scientific fields like psychology that continually adapt to new information, a demonstration of your ability to conceptualize, theorize, test and analyze critical information is crucial. But sometimes, the most difficult part of this axiom is finding the research position. Having entirely redirected my career path halfway through my undergraduate study, I was forced to find a research job that not only fit my new interest but was also readily available in order to make up for two years of “lost” time.
My recent blog titled Why Your Freshman Year in College Will NOT Be 13th Grade must have struck a particularly sensitive nerve in a very large group of people because it has received over 19,000 views.
Psychology majors are both blessed and cursed.
Your ability to prepare yourself for a remarkably wide variety of careers because the psychology curriculum provides so many opportunities to develop the seven crucial sustainable job-related skills (i.e., communication, collaboration, critical thinking, professional, self-management, technological, and ethical reasoning) that employers value most during the hiring process. These same seven skills also help new hires gain positive on-the-job outcomes (e.g., new responsibilities and promotions) and avoid negative on-the-job outcomes (e.g., reprimands, discipline, and termination). This blessing is the reason why “students who complete a baccalaureate degree in psychology will have completed an almost ideal workforce preparation”.
The knowledge you acquire as you learn about the causes and consequences of human behaviors and mental processes, which are perhaps the most interesting, complex, and important topics addressed in higher education today. The captivating nature of psychological knowledge attracts huge numbers of students to the major, produces more than 117,000 bachelor’s degrees in psychology each year, and prepares you to enter a remarkably wide range of careers that deal with people and their interactions with each other and their environments.
Unfortunately, there are downsides (i.e., curses) to these blessings.
The prospect of making a decision from such a massive set of career choices is a daunting task for many psychology majors. Unlike your education-, accounting-, and nursing-major peers who know exactly what they will become when they graduate (i.e., teachers, accountants, and nurses), only a small percentage of psychology majors continue their education, earn graduate degrees, and become psychologists (Hettich & Landrum, 2014). The rest enter the workforce immediately after graduation in diverse fields such as business, advertising, human resources, social services, health care, law enforcement, technology, education, fitness, recreation, and the military.
Psychology is a very popular major. This may initially appear to be a blessing, but it also means that a bachelor’s degree in psychology places you at risk in the job market simply because so many are competing with one another for jobs. If you lack the ability to prove the possession of a strong set of job-related skills, you risk job dissatisfaction, the disturbing belief that your jobs are not related to your major (Borden & Rajecki, 2000), and the very real possibility of having to accept a job that does not require a bachelor’s degree (Rajecki & Borden, 2009), or—worse yet—that presidential candidate Jeb Bush was correct when he stated that psychology majors end up “working at Chick-fil-A”.
The experience of teaching, advising, and mentoring thousands of psychology majors during my 40-year academic career has led me to conclude that this group is composed of two subgroups:
These subgroups approach their professional futures in profoundly different ways.
Savvy students adopt a proactive, two-stage approach to the collegiate experience by deliberately using it as an opportunity to explore, identify, and refine their career goals. You create and follow a well-crafted plan to acquire the skills you will need—and the evidence that you have acquired them—to attain your post-baccalaureate aspirations. In other words, you intentionally use your undergraduate educations to decide who you want to become and then begin a systematic process to construct yourself in the image of that person.
On the other hand, if you are a not-so-savvy student, you will live your undergraduate life under the ill-fated illusion that you are entitled to, and will acquire, a good job after you graduate simply because you possess a college diploma certifying that you have accumulated enough credit hours to graduate. You will take courses to “get them out of the way,” avoid challenging classes in which you could strengthen important career-enhancing skills (e.g., writing, public speaking, and math), choose easy rather than skill-building electives, and spurn extracurricular opportunities because you believe them to be a waste of time, rather than opportunities to develop valuable collaboration and leadership skills. These unfortunate strategies, paired with the misconception that the work required as an undergraduate student cannot be applied to the “real world” of work, can produce very negative consequences.
Case in point is the extreme disgruntlement one of my former students described several years ago in The Huffington Post who, in debt and without a steady job, attempted to sell his diploma on eBay® for $36,000 plus $3.50 shipping and handling. Perhaps as a result of living out a self-fulfilling prophecy, he was quoted as saying, “Universities are handing out too many degrees that have zero real-world application.”
From “How to Maximize the Blessings and Minimize the Curses of Being a Psychology Major,” by D. C. Appleby, 2015, Eye on Psi Chi, 20(1), pp. 16–19. Copyright 2015 by Psi Chi,the International Honor Society in Psychology. Adapted with permission.
Additional References:
Borden, V. M. H., & Rajecki, D. W. (2000). First-year employment outcomes of psychology baccalaureates: Relatedness, preparedness, and prospects. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 164–168. doi:10.1207/S15328023TOP2703_01
Hettich, P. I., & Landrum, R. E. (2014). Your undergraduate degree in psychology: From college to career. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Rajecki, D. W., & Borden, V. M. H. (2009). First-year employment outcomes of U.S. psychology graduates revisited: Need for a degree, salary, and relatedness to the major. Psychology of Learning and Teaching, 8, 23–29. doi:10.2304/plat.2009.8.2.23