The 6 Main Functions Of The Psychologist (and Their Role In Society)
It is mistakenly thought that the main mission of psychologists is to provide answers or advice to people who are in a suffering situation. However, since psychology is a science with a great history and development, The functions of the psychologist are as varied as they are important.
Taking this into consideration, we will see below what exactly the main functions of the psychologist are.
The functions of the psychologist depend largely on the subdiscipline or specialized branch of psychology that is applied. These may be, for example, clinical psychology, educational psychology, social psychology or organizational psychology. In turn, these disciplines have been created with one main objective: that of solve problems related to human behavior.
That is, they have been generated to offer answers to different problems in also different environments. Although the theoretical and practical foundations are the same, psychology is not applied in the same way in a clinical space as in a school or in a company.
1. Provide emotional support
Most of us psychologists are trained to “help others.” This claim can be presented and resolved in many different ways, because the need for help is not always the same in all people.
Thus, the psychologist also has the function of detecting which are the most appropriate tools for each case. Some use diagnostic manuals, others use therapies based on different theoretical models, others resort to referral when the case is beyond their possibilities of action.
It is even often thought that emotional support is limited to clinical or diagnostic spaces, this emotional support It doesn’t just happen inside offices, and it is not exclusive to manuals either. For example, there are group interventions in workshops or therapies for more than one person and even in public spaces.
In any case, the psychologist’s job is to generate an empathetic and responsible space for the suffering of others, so that the construction of tools that mitigate it can be encouraged.
2. Understand how we create and are affected by society
This function is more or less recent in the history of psychology, and corresponds to the social specialty of this. It is more recent because psychology initially emerged as a way of studying the individual and their mental processes.
But there was a group of intellectuals who realized that this psyche did not exist in isolation, but was influenced by other psyches, or by “society.” In fact, sometimes it is thought that society is one thing, and individuals are something completely different. In fact, much of the traditional development of social psychology has been based on this idea.
However, there are also branches of social psychology that consider that society is nothing other than the collective activity of individuals, with which it not only “affects us,” but at the same time we produce it. This is part of the curiosities that a psychologist can have and try to develop. in the form of theories and interventions.
3. Offer strategies for human development
While psychology is offered as a tool to understand the human being, it has also developed as an objective to favor or encourage that being to develop in positive conditions for itself.
Thus, one of the most recent functions of the psychologist is no longer only responsible for understanding and accompanying (or even “curing”) discomfort, but also for understand and promote well-being
For example, a part of humanistic psychology was dedicated to studying the conditions that are most favorable for our development, with the aim of providing both individual and social tools to promote it. And, more recently, we can find the branch of positive psychology, in which the psychologist It has precisely the function of understanding and benefiting personal growth.
4. Know and promote cognitive development
Another of the most characteristic functions of the psychologist has been to study, describe and understand how intelligence, reasoning, future planning, memory, attention, and learning act among other activities that constitute our cognitive processes.
Through this understanding and the proposals that have been generated in cognitive psychology, the psychologist has gained one more function: creating the necessary strategies to favor these processes.
This can be applied in different spaces, for example in schools to encourage children’s learning, or in clinical therapy to modify thought patterns that cause suffering.
In fact, the word psychology means “study of the psyche,” and “psyche” is a term that refers to the processes of the human mind. The latter can be studied independently of behavior, or in relation to it, as would be the case of a cognitive-behavioral psychologist.
5. Advise recruitment and personnel management processes
During its development, psychology has had to adapt to different social and individual needs. At the current moment of our civilization, Industrial or organizational relationships are fundamental to our daily lives.
In this context, a psychologist (which would be, for example, an organizational psychologist), has the main function of knowing and advising a specific business context. The latter includes everything from understanding which professional profiles are best suited to said context, to favoring the work relationships established there.
6. Develop knowledge about the relationship between biology and behavior
One of the main tasks of a psychologist has always been to know the relationship between behavior and our biological composition. That is, knowing how our actions and even our feelings They connect with our physiology or with the activity of our brain.
Thus, recently even specialties have emerged in training and research in psychology (which in turn have provided tools for the clinic and to promote cognition), known as behavioral physiology, or neuropsychology.
The psychologist specializing in these areas can have important functions when diagnosing, studying and treating, for example, Alzheimer’s, some types of depression and anxiety, aphasia, among other diversities of neurological development.
