It is erroneously thought that the main mission of psychologists is to give answers or advice to people who are in a situation of suffering. Nevertheless, and while 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 now see exactly what the main functions of the psychologist are.

The 6 main functions of the psychologist

The functions of the psychologist depend largely on the sub-discipline or specialized branch of psychology 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 solving problems related to human behaviour .

That is, they have been generated to provide answers to different problems in 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 a company.

1. Provide emotional support

Most psychologists are trained to “help others”. This demand can be presented and solved 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 escapes their possibilities of action.

It is even thought that emotional accompaniment is limited to clinical or diagnostic spaces, this emotional accompaniment does not only occur within the offices , nor is it exclusive to the manuals. For example, there are group interventions in workshops or therapies of more than one person and even in public spaces.

In any case, the task of the psychologist is to generate an empathic and responsible space before the suffering of others, so that the construction of tools that mitigate it can be favoured.

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 its social speciality . It is more recent because psychology emerged initially as a way of studying the individual and his or her 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, it is sometimes thought that society is one thing, and individuals are something else entirely. 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, which not only “affects” us, but at the same time we produce it. This is part of the curiosities that a psychologist may have and try to develop in the form of theories and interventions .

3. Offering strategies for human development

While psychology offers itself 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 to understand and accompany (or even “cure”) discomforts, but to understand and promote well-being.

For example, a part of humanist 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 foster it. And, more recently, we can find the branch of positive psychology, in which the psychologist has precisely the function of understanding and benefiting personal growth .

4. Knowing and promoting 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: to create the necessary strategies to favor such processes.

This can be applied in different spaces, for example in schools to promote 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 with a cognitive-behavioral psychologist.

  • You might be interested. “Cognitive restructuring: what is this therapeutic strategy like?”

5. Advise on recruitment and management processes

During its development, psychology has had to adapt to different social and individual needs. At the present time of our civilization, industrial or organizational relationships are fundamental to our daily life .

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, from understanding which are the professional profiles that best fit that context, to favoring the labor relations that are 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 behaviour and our biological make-up. That is, to know how our actions and even our feelings are connected 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 for promoting cognition), known as behavioral physiology, or neuropsychology.

The psychologist who specializes in these areas may have important functions when diagnosing, studying and treating, for example, Alzheimer’s, some types of depression and anxiety, aphasias, among other diversities of neurological development.