Did you know that everything we do in life is related to our minds? We use our brains all the time, even when we’re sleeping! We also use our nervous systems in everything we do. People called psychologists study how our minds and nervous systems work and function. There are many types of psychology which can be applied in almost every field of study. There are many fields that branch off of it, but the overarching study is called psychology.


I have been researching the topic of psychology for our 8th grade culminating project. Some key things I’ve learned about it are how often we use psychology. Think about it, we use clinical psychology to form new ideas and test our theories about our lives and the lives of other animals.. We use school psychology in, you guessed it, school. School psychology helps counselors solve problems between students and can help teachers keep students attentive. We use political psychology to examine and even predict the moves of politicians. We use social psychology to examine how individuals interact in a group and what factors lead them to do so.


It’s really incredible how much we use psychology in our daily lives. We use it to figure out how our friends are feeling to how closely we are related to chimpanzees. We also use psychology to train our pets! Training is also known as conditioning; the process where an action in associated with a response. One psychologist, John B. Watson, believed that conditioning could be applied to form the perfect society.

One other impactful aspect of the topic I explored described how being kind to others could help a person overcome social anxiety. Social anxiety is when a person is so afraid of new situations or embarrassing themselves that they will go to great lengths to avoid social situations. The study showed that patients who were kind to others and went out of their way to do so had an easier time going into social situations.

I am starting to realize that psychology is a very influential subject, which can be used frequently and with a good effect. I think that people disregard the importance of our behavior. We like to learn about ourselves, so psychology is a good study to learn.

I think the way I want this project to impact me is by realizing how important our minds are to us. I also think that we can learn a lot about other animals and apply that knowledge to our lives. Overall, I believe that everyone should learn psychology in school so that we can continue to discover more about ourselves and others.