What are the most prominent schools or trends in psychology today and in the past decades?

So far, you’ve been introduced to a few “schools” in psychology (structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, gestalt psychology, and cognitive psychology). But what are the most prominent trends in psychology today?

A Historiometric Approach

One way to identify the main schools or trends in psychology is to operationalize key terms associated with specific schools and conduct a quantitative assessment of their prevalence in the academic discourse; for example, in the form of publications or dissertation topics. Alternatively, one can obtain an overview of the educational programs in psychology in select or representative samples of higher-education institutions.

Spear (2007) offers such an overview of psychology (core reading) going up until the early 2000s.

Questions on the texts

Read Spear (2007) to obtain a recent overview of psychology and try to answer the following questions:

1. What are the flagship journals in psychology and what topics do they focus on?
2. Are top psychology departments in the US dedicated to a particular school or topic?
3. In which area of psychology are most doctoral dissertations conducted?

This is the website of the Faculty of Psychology. What are the main areas or topics that students of psychology can learn about? Are these similar or different from the ones at other universities, such as the top psychology departments in the US that you learned about in Spear (2007)?

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References

Spear, J. H. (2007). Prominent schools or other active specialties? A fresh look at some trends in psychology. Review of General Psychology, 11(4), 363–380. https://www.jmu.edu/socanth/sociology/wm_library/Spear_gpr-11-4-363.pdf

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