Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [403]
So, too, with psychology. Of its many applications, some improve individual and collective life while others benefit their practitioners but harm those they are used on. Knowledge, once gained, cannot be expunged from our collective consciousness, nor would we want it to be, but as a society we have not yet learned to encourage the uses of psychology and at the same time recognize and limit or even prevent its misuses.
What follows is not an overview of the broad range of applied psychology (which would require a book as thick as this one) but a series of brief sketches of a few of its beneficial and harmful influences on our lives today.
Improving the Human Use of the Human Equipment
A number of applications of psychology enable human beings to make more efficient or more salutary use of their capabilities and responses. Among them:
Health psychology: Some of these applications ameliorate or cure mental and physical illnesses linked to psychological factors. Psychotherapy,of course, is the major example. Others include diagnostic procedures and situational or social interventions. A few instances:
—The Type A Behavior Pattern (TABP), that of people who are unusually ambitious and aggressive, tense, given to rapid speech and quick action, and easily irritated and provoked to hostility, was suspected for many years to be a cause of coronary heart disease. By 1981, a number of studies offered enough evidence for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to conclude that TABP was associated with increased risk of CHD. Since then, however, further research has modified this conclusion; recent studies have found that it is the “Anger/Hostility” dimension—only a part of TAPB—that is most predictive of CHD. While TABP and its anger-hostility component seem to be an innate personality tendency, stress reduction training can mitigate it greatly. Also, the situational factors that provoke it can be minimized or avoided. Informed parents, for instance, can consciously play down their emphasis on a child’s need to achieve; they can also select schools that minimize competition. Adults with TABP can change to a less competitive work environment or even, if necessary, a less competitive career.7
—Social psychologists and epidemiologists have found a statistical connection between the disruption of social ties and networks by events like migration, divorce, or death and a number of physical and psychological illnesses. For instance, depression and a concomitant weakening of immune response are markedly more common among divorced and widowed people than married ones. The antidote recommended by psychologists is social support, which, much recent research has shown, moderates the vulnerability to stress. Accordingly, support groups of many kinds have proliferated throughout the country. There are groups for the elderly, impaired, families of substance abusers, and cancer patients (particularly women who have undergone mastectomy), and hospice programs that tend to the needs of the terminally ill and their family members.8
—The normal decline of memory in the aging is often a cause of severe distress, lowered self-esteem, depression, and withdrawal from social situations. Lately, clinics in a number of universities and other centers have been offering training in mnemonic and other associative techniques that compensate. One leading clinic has reported that after a two-week course, middle-aged and older trainees could recall the names that went with faces as well as or better than they could when young.9 Research-based methods of memory improvement are now also available in books, on the Web, and on CD-ROMs.
—Many health maintenance organizations and medical clinics use methods derived from the psychology of motivation to get patients to take their prescribed drugs and carry out recommended activities. Among the techniques: presenting patients with indisputable