What’s your favourite psychological approach?

Nicola O'Donnell answered on 10 Nov 2021:

I like to draw on a mixture of psychological approaches in my work. But if I had to choose one, I really enjoy working systemically. This means that when thinking about a difficulty that someone is having, you consider how their relationships and interactions with others might be playing a part (this could be with a partner, with their family, with friends, with colleagues, or in wider society). Thinking systemically helps to think about a problem in a different way, and I like it because it takes any ‘blame’ away from the person.

Hannah Slack answered on 10 Nov 2021:

I like developmental psychology! Specifically, I research teenagers. Often research has focused on children and adults. But the teenage years are a really interesting period of development. It’s a time of puberty, increased responsibility, and self-reflection. There is so much that we still need to find out!

James Bartlett answered on 10 Nov 2021:

I don’t normally think of them as isolated, but my favourite is the biological approach. My interests have always been how drugs affect people’s behaviour, such as when you drink alcohol your reaction times get slower. The effects of brain injuries are also interesting as they show if you damage certain areas of the brain, it affects specific parts of your behaviour. These kind of things show how biology affects human behaviour.

Alex Baxendale answered on 10 Nov 2021:

I’m a big fan of the cognitive approach. Figuring out how we receive information from our surroundings and process them in different ways to produce all sorts of behavior is amazing. Comparing our brains to computers can really help understand how we work. I specifically look at how we look at, and process math, and how our anxieties can cause the processing to get all messed up

Natali Bozhilova answered on 10 Nov 2021:

My favourite approach is the experimental approach (i.e., testing a hypothesis during a well-designed experiment). I like working with computerised tasks (i.e., games, which aim to test a specific cognitive skills such as attention or memory) and neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) and electroencephalography (EEG). These techniques allow you to understand what happens in the participant’s brain while they are performing the computerised task. These techniques are very useful because they allow the researcher to understand the relationship between cognitive skills and brain function.

Clare Wood answered on 10 Nov 2021:

I am a developmental psychologist but within that I really appreciate socio-cultural approaches to understanding developmental questions.

Emily McDougal answered on 10 Nov 2021:

Most of my research is grounded in cognitive psychology, but I prefer to try and see things from different perspectives. No single approach can explain all human behaviour and by taking different approaches we can better understand the whole picture. For example, some of my research has involved conducting experiments to find out whether attention differences can impact how much children learn. I have also conducted interviews with children and their teachers to ask them about what they think is important for learning. Taking the findings of both studies together can tell us a lot more than looking at one of these studies in isolation.

Caitlin Sorrell answered on 11 Nov 2021:

Hi DanV! I’m sorry, I can’t pick one. It’s more of a case of what approach is best to use in this situation / for this research project. But if you really pushed, me I would agree with Nicola that it is really important to consider the systems as well as the individual. Health Psychology often looks at behaviour change, and the Behaviour Change Wheel is a great tool that helps remind us that behaviour change is never just about the individual, but also about the system around them and how the individual and the system interact.

Natalie Butcher answered on 11 Nov 2021: last edited 11 Nov 2021 9:07 pm

In my research my preference is to use an experimental approach, but like Caitlin has said, the approach we take will be driven by the research question we are trying to answer. The questions I try to answer in my research (e.g. can we recognise a persons face better from a photo or a video?) lend themselves to an experimental approach and a cognitive approach. So, I wouldn’t really say it’s my favourite approach, more my appropriate approach. I do enjoy designing experiments though. At the planning stage I feel a bit like a detective trying to spot all the potential confounding variables in the design and finding ways to stop them influencing my findings

Laura Joyner answered on 12 Nov 2021:

If I had to be specific, probably social-cognition. My main interests currently are about how things like our social identity can influence the decisions and judgements that we make.

But my favourite thing right now is moral judgement and decision making which falls under the social-cognition approach. It refers to how we make decisions about what is “right” and “wrong” and make ethical decisions.

For example, you might have heard about a moral dilemma called ‘The Trolley Problem”:

A trolley (like a tram / train) is racing towards five people and if you push a lever you can save those five people. BUT the trolley will hit one person instead.

What you choose to do in this scenario may not only be influenced by things like time pressure, but also your relationship with the people on the track, their age, whether they’ve broken any rules, etc. By incorporating the social elements we’re better able to understand how people make these decisions in the first place.

Emma Sullivan answered on 12 Nov 2021:

I use a range of psychological approaches in my research. I would say that sleep research draws on behavioural, cognitive and physiological approaches. I think my favourite is the cognitive approach though in terms of digging deep into what brain regions/processes are important. For example, what brain regions are important when we think about how we consolidate memories during sleep. However, these approaches often don’t occur in isolation and are influenced by each other.

Question: What's your favourite psychological approach?

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