Psychology revolves around understanding human behavior and the mind, and therefore, it is a discipline that embraces every aspect of human experience. The field has been concentrated on the brain’s functionality through human behavior and mind, from child development to care for the aged. With the association, the understanding of human behavior has been conceived from a scientific research center to a mental health service spectrum, and thus far, that is what constitutes psychology (Myers &DeWall, 2021). However, moving into the future, what shapes our association with the field is continuously shifting, which has an associated impact on human behavior. The issue of interest in the year 2050 would be technology integration to help better understand human behavior. Moreover, with the issue of climate change, psychology will be profoundly associated with establishing a relationship between the human mind and the effect of global warming (Maryville University, 2022). The other significant issue will be human diversity since the world will have been more integrated into a single community than it is now.
Currently, psychology has three significant strengths for an undergraduate student. The psychology departments in the university currently have human behavior, psychology-based professionals, and self-critical departments. Based on the established future issues in psychology, psychology departments in universities will develop to incorporate associated departments to study the emerging problems. Borrowing from Kolassa Iris, head of biological and clinical psychology at the University of Ulm, Germany, future changes will result in the omics science department to a better understanding of the molecular processes in the human body.
Even with the omics science department incorporated in future universities, the associated departments will include different sub-departments to address the emergent issues in the field. For example, some of the sub-departments that will be incorporated will consist of the global warming, technology, and human diversity sections that will address the associated impact on human behavior. Based on Castel Alan, an associate psychology professor at the University of California, the technology subtopic will facilitate understanding how people remember and decide from a personal and a digital perspective. Oh In-Sue, an associate human resource management professor at Temple University, argues that in the next 25 years, social scientists will possibly address an account of employee personal characteristics. By 2050, the researchers will incorporate the argument into a human diversity sub-topic that will help better understand issues like relationships with gender-diverse individuals, among other related diversity issues. A global warming topic or sub-topic will address potential stressors among urban living people and the associated effects on health, a topic that will be critical in future psychology.
With the rapid inclusion of technology in understanding human relations and behavior, scientists in this field are forced to shift their research approaches to incorporate big data in learning human characteristics. Such inclusion and the shift will eventually result in reliance on artificial intelligence in gathering information through smartphones, tablets, and computers. Therefore, the direct interaction with human subjects might be discarded from present psychology practices when gathering research information. Technology inclusion ensures that social science researchers collect patient information by observing online human interactions, which is fast replacing face-to-face interactions, which the scientists will entirely replace.
The topic that will be new will be omics science. Kolassa Iris shows that treatment of psychological disorders will encounter changes in how the students approach them. Through omics science, psychiatrists will incorporate a more profound knowledge about an individual’s body molecular processes to develop new treatment approaches for psychological disorders. Kolassa argues the unique technology approach will allow specialists in the field to revolutionize the diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorders.
For an undergraduate student majoring in psychology, future psychology will be interesting. The field will offer a deeper understanding of human relations by observing behavior using technology. Therefore, science will give more attention to technology in looking for problems and solving them. Moreover, with technology being used to perform nearly every task, it will also influence how undergraduates learn. Through technology, future psychology students will have ease of information availability, which will greatly facilitate the learning process, general knowledge acquisition, and how they write their papers. Technology will also enable future psychology students to potentially illustrate and provide specific answers to the questions, translating to spending less time to search for information. How the students will also conduct their research and later practice their profession will be subject to technology.
The future of human behavior will rely on the ability to measure how people text, video, or take images. The new ways will help psychologists predict what to expect and go back in time to understand an individual’s characteristics. Future psychologists will have learned how to predict human behaviors using technology. It will be possible to make plans to counter any potential consequences resulting from people’s behavior. Moreover, teamwork will also be improved in terms of how psychologists will predict human behavior ensuring that cooperation among professionals in joint projects in different and same locations, which will not only involve communication.
References
Maryville University. (2022). The Future of Psychology: New Methods for Helping People. Maryville Online. Web.
Myers, D. G., & DeWall, C. N. (2021). Psychology. Worth Publishers.