What do you thing about the division between Experimental Psychology and Clinical Psychology? Do you take sides? Are there benefits/weaknesses to each?
Experimental as in Parapsychology, Therapy.. etc ...or radical new ideas and approaches in Traditional psychology??Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Experimental like LSD man Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! What I mean is Experimental Psychology is the labwork portion of psychology, setting up experiments to see what makes things tick - drilling holes into monkey's brains, shocking people, drugs, you know that kind of stuff. Clinical psychology is more therapy oriented. Psychologists, therapists, having clients, etc. This tends to be non-lab oriented, information coming from the clients rather than experiments. For instance about any well-known psychologist you've heard of - Freud, Rogers, Perls, Jung, etc.
Both techniques have come under fire. Experimental - There's your classic complaints of the experimental group faking results to please the Scientists. Also some forget to add the control group all together in their studies. The scientists can themselves exert too much influence on the experiment group and any little thing they do can change the outcome of the study. Double blind and blind studies offer a hope against these outcomes. Though, i suspect for many, it maybe be a better solution then clinical psychology. Clinical - Again many faults here. Confabulation can be a problem here with interviwed patients and also the same problem as experimental patients; they can fake results in order to please the psychologist. Clinical psychology has produced some shoddy results though it has it benefits. Hypnotism has been experimented a lot in clinical psychology with unconsistent results...but then again ESP has been heavily studied in experimental psychology with about only 13% consistent results at best, the rest of the studies on ESP didn't even have that. I have just repeated everything you knew already so forgive mePlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Sarge, you brought up some good points. Here's what I see. I see that the Experimental side comes up with a lot of info about how humans work. From this information we can form some good general rules to help people. However, the Experimental side does very little in helping individuals directly. The Clinical side tends to be a lot of guess work. They attempt to apply the theories made by the Experimental side and try to apply them to actuality. However, each person, on an individual level, is quite different, and so a lot of trial and error goes on. Although the technique appears quite shoddy, the Clinical side of psychology directly helps many individuals, but needs the experimental side as a general basis to help them.
Yes True. Did Freud ever incorporate experimental Psychology info in his Clinical research? Anyway, Clinical is a lot of guess work like you mentioned but i see it this way...it really comes down to the subjects used for the studies and to much extent the scientists who heads the study. Unlike other sciences Psychology has a lot of hurdles to pass because little to nothing is absolute in Psychology as opposed to Biology, Astronomy, Geology etc etc where a lot of what is learned is objective. Psychology can be victim to many uneducated and unfunded claims. My whole thread on blunders of psychologyPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ......Our memory and mental functions are very fragile and soooo diverse that anyone with a sensible enough claims can gain support...(hence Phrenology). Also Psychology can also be burdened by popular opinion....(so can be Biology to some extent)...I mean drapetomania was such a pathetic excuse for Psychological finds. It really depends on the bias the study head holds. Experimental also comes under fire from this....my Biology teacher gave a good example for this... Again pardon me for repeating what you already know...Psychology is a tricky little thing i guessPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Oh the observations of groups of people takes ages! Very interesting well-paying job, but so tedious and annoying. Whatever one comes up with will have more exceptions than in any other science, so no theory is ever fixed or easily proven. Freud did make his conclusions based on observations of his patients. Sarge, you should look through writings by him, eventhough you'll fall asleep after two sentences (this is not a dark humor remark, it is a sharing of experience! Freud is a boring writer. No skills in connecting to reader, really.)
Freud was a physician before he was a psychologist. He has a physiological basis. As whitewolf said, a lot of his theories came from observations of his patients, which is partially scientific. However he comes under fire for this because his models for healthy individual come from his observations of unhealthy patients.
speaking of experimental ... This seems the most relevant place to ask this ... I'm looking for someone in the DC area conducting psychological experiments in hypnosis, but all my internet searches have turned up thusfar are clinical hypnotherapists or people specializing in past-life regression (whose pictures have led me superficially to keep on lookin'). I think that it's possible to, say, learn French through hypnosis -- by tapping into a universal conscious. I've thought about this a lot (by which I mean more than just watching the first Matrix movie and wishing I could learn French like they learn to fly a helicopter), but I need to find someone who's curious enough and open-minded enough (not to mention skilled enough yet cheap enough) to give it a shot. Any suggestions? Anyone?
there need not be any comparisons, nor any strict dichotomy, both have their merits and puroses(although i fail to understand why most people here have highlighted the weaknesses) there are goof ups and vested digressions in all disciplines and methodologies, equally so in psych.-experimental as well as clinical but that is not to undermine the spirit of the enquiry.
No there's no rigid dichotomy, but there is a fairly clear division line. Would you care to talk about the merits of each soull?
