Psychology Dissertation Topics: For Those Who Ran Out of New Ideas
After so many years working towards your PhD in Psychology, you might feel that there aren’t enough good new ideas out there to write your dissertation on. It might feel like coming up with a good topic is more challenging than the actual research and writing that follows it.
Here’s a list of some psychology dissertation topics that might inspire you when you’ve run out of all other ideas:
- Abnormal Psychology:
This is a segment of psychology that deals with abnormal behavior and psychotherapy. How can bridging behavioral, medical, and cognitive perspectives help redefine our understanding of abnormal psychology? How would this affect how disorders are identified and diagnosed? Would we need an entire new branch of psychology if we combined approaches?
- Seasonal Affective Disorder:
This mood disorder is associated with the seasonal changes in daylight and is often identified by periods of fatigue, depression and social avoidance. Changes in patterns of sleep also greatly affect other aspects such as eating habits and weight gain. Can focus on promoting a healthier lifestyle and better dietary habits combat or prevent this disorder naturally without the use of medications?
- Dreams:
For many years a clinical basis of dream interpretation has largely been debunked as a sort of pseudoscience. But there is still no explanation of some of the common aspects or figures that appear in dreams and how they relate to some event or emotion occurring in our lives. What kind of approach in dream interpretation would help generate more clinically based study on this aspect of dreaming?
- Nonverbal Communication:
Many experts say that a large part of our communication between one another is nonverbal. Every day, we respond and react to thousands of behaviors such as postures, eye gaze, facial expressions, gestures and more. What can the study of one of these behaviors—e.g., eye gaze—clue us in to how we communicate with other species? What does this say about the development of language?
- Leadership:
One aspect of psychology that has studied leadership suggests that people with leadership characteristics will choose the best course of action based upon a number of situational variables. But is there more to it than this? Do certain personality traits make individuals better suited for leadership roles? What exactly makes a great leader? Do characteristics of the situation make it more likely that certain people will take charge?
Clearly, these are just general topics with dozens of sub-topics for you to focus on and consider for your own dissertation. Ask yourself a few questions about the topics above and see for yourself if you aren’t inspired to take these topics into new directions.