Many psychologists are researchers, and many others are practicing clinicians. But there is literally no limit to how the study of psychology can be utilized in the workforce. For instance, three of the ten “hot” jobs for 2007 utilize a degree in psychology:

• School Psychologist. This hot job in psychology has risen to the top thanks to the combined facts of the latest federal education legislation, a retiring workforce, and an increased focus on children’s mental heath. School psychologists are desperately needed across the country, making this a top psychology career. In fact, colleges with programs to train school psychologists cannot keep up with the demand. A typical program consists of two years of graduate courses and a one-year internship. Students from these programs, however, have no problem getting jobs and usually find their work extremely rewarding. Many school psychologists feel that they have an opportunity to tackle society’s problems early on, making them feel deep satisfaction in their work.

• Genetics Counselor. The psychologists that have this hot job in psychology help families understand genetic disorders and to provide information and support to those families. They may also serve as patient advocates by referring individuals or families to local services that can be of assistance. Genetic research is a powerful tool for treating medical conditions, but it is still a new tool. Many people whose families are affected by genetics disorders don’t understand how it will affect their lives. Even genetic researchers and doctors don’t fully understand how genes cause all genetic disorders. Genetic counselors work with doctors and families to help families get the information they need to understand the disorder. While genetics counselors often require a Masters degree in genetics, a Bachelors degree in the psychology field is preferred. Demand is high for this position, making it a top psychology career.

• Animal-Assisted Therapist. This hot job in psychology is a type of therapy that involves using pets to help treat patients. Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is designed to improve the physical, social, emotional, and/or cognitive functioning of the patient, as well as provide education and motivation. AAT is provided on both an individual or group basis. Many kinds of animals are used in therapy, including dogs, cats, birds, dolphins, rabbits, lizards, and other small animals (although AAT with horses is known as equine-assisted therapy or therapeutic horseback riding). AAT has been found to be especially helpful with children suffering with autism spectrum disorders, and demand is very high, making this a top psychology career.

But there are many other fascinating careers available to anyone in the psychology field. There are a variety of different jobs available to therapists—being a clinical psychologist, a cognitive psychologist, or working as counselors. Here are just a few of the more unusual psychology careers available according to the American Psychological Association:

• Engineering psychologists conduct research on how people work best with machines. For example, how can a computer be designed to prevent fatigue and eye strain? What arrangement of an assembly line makes production most efficient? What is a reasonable workload? While still in the psychology field, most engineering psychologists work in industry.

• Evolutionary psychologists study how evolutionary principles such as mutation, adaptation, and selective fitness influence human thought, feeling, and behavior. Because of their focus on genetically shaped behaviors that influence an organism’s chances of survival, evolutionary psychologists study mating, aggression, helping behavior, and communication. Evolutionary psychologists are becoming increasingly interested in aging, especially in researching and problems of evolution. In the current political climate, this might be a hot job in psychology for a variety of reasons.

• Forensic psychologists apply psychological principles to legal issues. Their expertise is often essential in court. They can, for example, help a judge decide which parent should have custody of a child or evaluate a defendant’s mental competence to stand trial. Forensic psychologists also conduct research on jury behavior or eyewitness testimony. Some forensic psychologists are trained in both psychology and the law. Demand is particularly high for this psychology field.

• Sports psychologists help athletes refine their focus on competition and winning. They help athletes become more motivated and learn to deal with the anxiety and fear of failure that can often come with sports. This psychology field is becoming more and more popular as sports become more competitive and attracts younger children.

Job and Salary Outlook

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual earnings of clinical, counseling, and school psychologists is $54,950. The earnings of psychologists working in other areas are:

•Offices of other health practitioners $64,460
•Elementary and secondary schools $58,360
•Outpatient care centers $46,850
•Individual and family services $42,640
•Industrial-organization psychologists $71,400

The need for those with a psychology degree is expected to grow faster than average over the next decade, thanks to the continued growth of the psychology field. Luckily, because the field is so diverse, almost anyone can find something fascinating to do with their psychology degree!

Psychology Careers: A Wide Open Field

Though we must do our best to guard our children from unhappy & frightening incidences, we know that as a child grows up he/she needs to experience certain fears.

This is useful for maturation and emotional survival.

Psychologists have found that certain fears are very common to certain ages of development. We can help our children cope with their fears by knowing more about these fears. By knowing more about these fears, we can help reassure a frightened child.

Age Typical Fears:

- 6 Years: Very fearful age – auditory fears; doorbell, telephone, ugly voice tones, fear of ghosts, witches, someone hiding under the bed, fear of being lost, fear of the elements fire, water, thunder, lightening, fear of something happening to parents.

- First 2 Years: Separation anxiety (especially at bedtime), fear of strangers, auditory fears, noises, animals, doctors, change in routine, etc.

- 3 Years: Stranger anxiety, doctors, visual fears (masks, beards, etc.), images, fear of the dark, animals, monsters, first worries about death.

- 4 Years: Fear of the dark, fear of abandonment, separation, animals, monsters, ghosts, witches, new situations, auditory fears, etc.

- 5 Years: Not a typical fearful age – fears are more based in reality. Examples: bodily harm, losing a parent, parent will not return home.

- 7 Years: Visual fears – shadows, ghosts, heights, burglars, social rejection, entering new situations, being late for school.

- 8-9 Years: Fear of criticism, not being liked, failure (especially school failure), apt to deliberately repeat fearful situation as a means to resolve it.

- 10 Years: Very fearful, fear of snakes and wild animals, fires, burglars, “killers”, etc.

Parental Influence:

Some children’s fears stem from imitating parents. Studies have shown that when parents fear thunderstorms, insects, animals, doctors, burglars, their children will likely develop the same fears.

Parent-induced fears are usually long lasting for it’s difficult to rid oneself of a fear that is exhibited by one’s parent. – If my parent is afraid, there must be something that I need to be concerned with.

Parents, set an example by rationally coping with dangers yourself:

What To Do To Help Children Cope With Fears:

- We should encourage our children to communicate their fears. Just talking about fears can alleviate them and make them less threatening.

- Communicating their fears prevents that they are alone in their fears and worries.

- Communicating also reinforces the parent-child relationship and builds the foundation of trust.

DO’s:

- Listen carefully to what your child is saying. Formulate in your own mind what child is expressing.

- Mirror back in your own words what your child has expressed. (These three effective steps are referred to as active listening, mirroring, or the feedback technique).

- Build the child’s faith in himself/herself and in his/her own abilities.

- Give the child the opportunity to overcome his/her fears actively (do NOT overprotect).

- Make the child feel you will always love and protect him/her whenever necessary.

DON’Ts:

- Say things like “That is silly”, “There’s no such things as monsters”, “You’re just trying to avoid going to bed”.

- Ridicule or punish the fearful child.

- Threaten the child with abandonment or irrational tales.

The woman was asked if there was anything that made her feel angry or defensive on an ongoing basis in her waking life. The woman at first said that there wasn’t but after further consideration said that sometimes her mother-in-law would visit on a Sunday (‘sunny day’ of the dream). Furthermore when these visits occurred they were always unannounced and uninvited (the attacks in the dream always occurred without warning).

Her mother in law was always polite to her but she knew that she had made many derogatory remarks about her to her husband and was therefore rather ‘two faced’.
(The witch in the dream always has two heads). On these visits the mother in law would try and ‘take over’ what the woman was doing in the house and with the children (the witch in the dream is set on taking over the steering of the ship so it goes off course). The woman would feel she was under attack and be relieved when her husband’s mother finally left. She felt unable to say anything (her hands were tied).

However, subfields of psychology, such as neuropsychology, combine the study of the actual neural processes with the study of the mental effects they have intuitively produced. Psychology in literal terms means the study of the human mind. It illustrates and attempts to explain awareness, behavior, and social interaction. This study can be structured purely in terms of phenomenological descriptions of internal experiences or as a result of behavior, which includes social conduct. Empirical psychology is mainly dedicated to describing human experience and behavior as it actually occurs.

The study of the correlation between consciousness and the brain or nervous system has been undertaken only recently. However, it is still not clear in what ways they interact.

Psychology is a particularly extensive field, which includes various approaches to the study of mental processes and behavior. An understanding of brain function is gradually being included in psychological theory and practice, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, neuropsychological, and cognitive neuroscience. Mechanical and electronic computing has played an important role in developing the information-processing hypothesis of the mind

How many times have I heard: “Where’s your swinging watch?” or “Can you make me eat onions?” So anyway, this friend of a friend asks: “Can hypnosis make me more confident? And how does it work?” Bearing in mind that I was off duty!

Well, firstly, how it works is pretty easy once we clear away all the piercing eyes, swinging watches and black-caped mumbo jumbo. Hypnosis is a natural state akin to night time dreaming, which happens during the Rapid Eye Movement phase of sleep, otherwise known as REM.

REM sleep is called ‘paradoxical sleep’ because brain wave patterns are similar to how they are during wak-ing hours. During the last three months in the womb, the human neonate experiences more REM than at any other time during its life. It’s during this time that many human instincts are ‘programmed’ – such as empathy, fear of heights and the ability to learn language.

By this time my new friend was looking glazed – quite trance-like, in fact. But by now I was warming to my subject and continued…

So if instincts are laid down through the REM state before birth, then it makes sense, during life outside the womb, to go back into the REM state in order to change your responses to things. Which is what hypnosis does.

Your instincts try to help you out, but sometimes they’ve just learned the wrong response. So your instincts may have learned to produce anxiety when it’s not actually helpful – such as during public speaking, dating or socializing.

I’ve never heard anyone say they consciously decided to bring on a panic attack or a blush – these things just get switched on instinctively. So for ‘hypnosis’, think ‘instinctive programming’. You can understand why you have a problem, but if you want the problem to disappear, it’s your unconscious responses that ultimately need to change.

When hypnosis has done its job we hear things like: “I didn’t even expect to feel different but, you know, as soon as I got into that interview room I just felt so much more relaxed!” When people talk like this what they are telling me is that their instincts have updated. This is not the same as consciously learning something. And this is why we use hypnosis.

Gamely trying to keep up and perhaps wishing he hadn’t asked, my new friend’s next question was: “Is this why hypnotists used the swinging watch method – so they can artificially induce the REM state in their subjects?”

“Yes, I replied – now you’re beginning to understand what most people never do, what hypnosis is and why it works.” But you know the watch swingers hadn’t made the connection between the REM state and the eye movement caused by the watch swinging induction – they just knew that somehow it worked.

The first step to being confident within a situation is to truly imagine being confident in that time and place. Your imagination is aligned to your instincts, and so can program them. People can imagine something scary, sexy or annoying, and their instincts can produce emotional responses – even when those these things aren’t actually happening in reality.

The more dream like and rich this imaginative experience is, the more fixed the new hypnotic blueprint or ‘template’ will be for actually being more confident in those times in the future.

Using hypnosis for confidence means that you no longer have to try to be confident, because the confidence starts to become and feel natural.

But my new friend hadn’t finished yet. “What about problems? Can people cause them by doing negative self hypnosis?”

“Sure they can,” I said. If you think about an upcoming event at the same time as feeling nervous, then you are priming your instincts to feel anxious in that future event. But we use hypnosis to get people performing to the best of their potential.

You know the rest of the party was a bit of a blur, but I recall thinking that all truly successful people have learned to use hypnosis positively whether they realize it or not.

In summary

So to sum up, hypnosis mimics the REM state to help you program your instincts to create the sort of re-sponses you require.