Applied Psychology

Directions

The PSYC 26 essay will require you to use your critical thinking skills and your writing ability to address a question of primary importance: How will you use applied psychology in your life? In order to be able to successfully answer this question, you must be able to analyze and synthesize psychological concepts and be able to apply them to your speculations concerning your life. In your essay, you will need to clearly identify why you have chosen this topic and then explain how what you have learned from the articles will enhance your life.

Your paper will make use of two types of sources:

The first source are your PSYC 26 textbooks. You will select One – Two PSYCHOLOGY concepts/topics from at least two different chapters to focus on in your paper.
The second sources should be a minimum of 3 articles from a scholarly / refereed (peer-reviewed) journal (preferably an American Psychological Association journal published within the last 10 years) which addresses one of the psychological concepts or topics relevant to the course. You will want to find articles which are research (data-driven) based and which use the experimental or correlational method. Article reviews or meta-analysis articles should be avoided. The articles must have the traditional sections associated with a research study (abstract, introduction (literature review), methods, results, discussion, references). That means no reviews of literature or other types of articles. If you are not sure, check with Professor Tinson before proceeding with your paper.
In discussing information from your text, you must reference the appropriate chapters, identify and define each relevant concept, and explain why the psychological concepts you focus on are or will be relevant to your life now and your future. You will be expected to use specific examples of how the concepts will be relevant to your goals. Merely saying a concept is important is not sufficient. You must be specific about how you believe it will benefit you in the long run.

For the journal articles, you will be integrating the article and its content into your paper. You will be using the journal articles to discuss its relationship to one of the concepts or topics you have selected as important to your life. Note that you will be discussing the article and the implication of its findings for your life in some detail, not merely mentioning it in passing.

Your paper must be done using APA formatting style (Links to an external site.) which includes:

A title page with the title in the middle of the page, your name on the next line, City College of San Francisco and the date
Page numbering in the upper right corner beginning with #1 on the title page
In-text citations in APA format (that means the citation follows either the “quote” or the paraphrase of the information provided)
A reference page at the end (called References) in APA format