The basic understanding of each subject depends on the correct familiarity with the subject's key terminologies. Psychology is an enormous sea of mind-boggling data and there exist terms that one is used to overlook as similar or related merely because of habitual practice.
In psychology, many words are incorrectly interpreted not just by first-year students but also by graduate-degree students, psychology professors, and scientists writers. These misunderstandings can prevent one from comprehending other psychology concepts. The majority of people including on social media do not pay attention to details when writing about psychology. Therefore, we have here the most confused or homonymic words in psychology that we ignore.
Although both the professions share similar educational needs and practices, however, they are dissimilar from each other. The majority of them use the terms psychiatrist and psychologist as synonyms without becoming engaged with the subject. Psychology is the study of mind, feelings, and human behavior, a philosophical aspect of mental health that developed into a distinct profession in the mid-1800s. Psychologists apply various methods of therapy to recover their patients from mental illnesses and ensure healthy mental lives. Psychiatry, however, is a medical profession that deals solely with the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Though psychiatrists also work as psychotherapists to help their patients, they are mostly educated to prescribe medications to treat the biological component of one's mental well-being. To become a psychologist, you must get a bachelor's degree, master's degree and if necessary, further studies up to doctorate in the field of psychology. In order to become a psychiatrist, the applicants must undergo medical school and study topics like anatomy, biology, neurology, and disease to equip themselves with the knowledge needed to prescribe medication for mental disorders. In real life, psychiatrists prescribe medicines mostly while psychologists employ talk or behavior therapy.
The terms guidance and counseling are employed extremely frequently interchangeably in our everyday life. But technically these two psychological terms have wholly different meanings. Guidance is to advice or to supply a relevant piece of information to a person who wants to overcome trouble or problem. Counseling, however, is a little bit of professional guidance given by a counsellor to his client for helping him/her to overcome psychological or personal problems. The mere act of providing guidance is preventive and counseling is corrective with the objective of curative development. One of the fundamental differences is that in counseling the decision-making power rests with the one counseling, while in guidance the client makes decisions so that he will not be dependent on the assistance of anyone else and will have faith in his or her own abilities. In counseling, the client wants to choose the best option but in guidance, the aim is to change the mindset of the person so that he himself can find a solution.
These two words are mostly misused and mixed up most of the time by not only non-professionals but also by most practitioners. In simple terms, both methods are used to treat emotional and psychological problems in a person. Counseling is conducted by a professional therapist who conducts a one-to-one conversation with an individual or a group that allows you to explore deeper into your problems in order to identify unwanted behaviors and resolve mental health concerns such as anxiety depression, etc. That is, counseling is only recommended for specific situations or issues that are troubling and should be resolved. Psychotherapy, however, attempts to determine the underlying reasons for the issues that occurred in the past, which might be causing the current issues. Psychotherapy is more of an art than a simple session of counseling. These sessions are visited by qualified personnel who not only provide counseling but are competent enough to provide psychotherapy as well. Despite when it comes to duration of treatment, psychotherapy is a longer term therapy focused on enhancing insight into long-term physical and emotional problems.
It is a seemingly trivial concept to understand but the significance and power of these terms is in their differentiation. To say it plainly, sympathy is being emotionally invested and empathy is being mentally invested towards someone or a situation. Most authors define empathy as the capacity to share or feel the sentiments of other people. Practically, when you are empathizing you experience the same emotions like sadness, unhappiness, or distress as is the object of empathy. However, sympathy would typically refer to your sympathy or empathy for the other person. It is merely "feeling sorry" for the other person without really knowing his frame of reference.
However, in speaking of suppression, it is merely a defense mechanism marked by conscious forgetting of unwanted material. The surprise here is that in repression your conscious self never realizes you are employing the defense mechanism but in suppression you purposely try to forget or not think about painful or unwanted thoughts. Subconscious v Unconscious
Most of you are no doubt familiar with consciousness and unconsciousness but few will probably be aware of the actual definition of the subconscious.
Is it similar to the unconscious? Far from it. To use the term subconscious instead of the term unconscious is a common and important mistake. The majority define the unconscious as a more profound mental process that goes on automatically that the human mind is not capable of accessing. Unconscious actions would be referring to a spouse's name out loud as your ex or the use of a wrong word to describe something. Subconscious is part of our mind which isn't in focused awareness at the moment. A kind of barrier our mind puts up can be termed subconscious in the sense that it doesn't stop everything but keeps the information stored within the brain to be retrieved later. The best example of subconscious activity is breathing. While unconscious is an automatic process that happens and is not accessible to introspection, the subconscious is part of our consciousness process but is not currently in focal awareness. Working Memory v Short Term Memory
Memory is again a very significant area of psychology and it is worth acquainting oneself with the difference between working memory and short-term memory.
Though the terms have been interchanged, contemporary cognitive psychologists have separated them with a new perspective. Working memory is an ordinarily linked system of information for temporary storage and administration. Short-term memory is most often regarded as one specific system within the working memory domain that serves as a 'scratchpad' for keeping the memory within the active state for several seconds before transferring to the subsequent level of processing. Want to learn more about psychology? Read all our blog posts here (https://www.counselindia.com/blog) At CounselIndia is India's fastest-growing network of counsellors and psychologists. The vision of CounselIndia is to provide you with practical and simple psychology courses with psychological support platform. Contact us for any question about psychology and we will respond back within < 24 hours>.
