• Question: Do you see any current development in modern psychology and any changes being recently made?

    Asked by anon-315986 on 1 Apr 2022.
    • Photo: Jamie Chan

      Jamie Chan answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      In terms of social psychology, the field is definitely changing – people are starting to think more about being more gender inclusive and more ethnically diverse. There is also a push for decolonialisation, which means that social psychologists are purposely moving away from only teaching about White psychologists but also give credit to ethnically diverse psychologists that have made contributions in the past to the subject. We are also becoming more aware of the way we conduct research and there is a movement called the ‘Open Science’ movement that pushes for researchers to be more transparent about their work.

      If you have any further questions, please ask! I realise that these terms might not be familiar to you 🙂

    • Photo: Hannah Howman

      Hannah Howman answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      I agree with Jamie in that there has definitely been a shift in psychology in terms of gender inclusivity and decolonisation. I think there has definitely been a push in EDI (equality, diversity, and inclusion) and ‘open science’ which was definitely needed.

    • Photo: Reece Bush-Evans

      Reece Bush-Evans answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      Great question, I agree with Jamie and Hannah. I would also add that a lot of change is happening with regards to science being more open and how there are different ways in which researchers can identify if a finding is significant or not. Lots of statistical discussion has occurred relating to changing traditional ways of saying something is statistically significant.

    • Photo: Emily Hutchinson

      Emily Hutchinson answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      I think there is a movement to practical application. There is a huge benefit of applying psychology to the way we live and work, but it needs to be done more! The positive psychology approach is also still fairly new and having a huge impact – this is about what helps people to flourish.

    • Photo: Keri Wong

      Keri Wong answered on 16 Mar 2022:

      Yes – there is a huge shift in mental health research in our diagnostic manual from DSM4 to DSM5 – where we now look at each symptom of a disorder on a dimension. This means, rather than ‘checking off’ all the symptoms that someone is exhibiting, we now say, but what degree of severity are they experiencing this symptom? This gives assessments more precision and accuracy. This impacts treatment as well because people experiencing different severity of symptoms might need different levels of support. A second shift is in the co-production of treatment/solutions with patients/target populations to ensure that the solution meets the needs of the users – sounds obvious now but it wasn’t something we always did! Hence treatment efficacy also wasn’t 100%.

    • Photo: Michelle Newman

      Michelle Newman answered on 18 Mar 2022:

      Psychology is constantly changing, so it is a really interesting area to work in as it does evolve. More recently I have seen a lot of research being focused on how technology is used within therapeutic psychology. This was happening before the covid pandemic, but there has been a real explosion in research the last couple of years thinking about how we can see and support patients virtually, when this used to always happen in person. This is a really important advancement for people who might live a long way from specialists, or who attending a large medical facility may be potentially more risky for their health than not attending.

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