Composing Good Topics for a Winning Psychology Research Paper

The search for a stunning topic for your psychology paper can take a long time and be very frustrating if you don’t know where to start. Finding the perfect topic idea for your paper can actually be a bigger challenge than writing the paper itself. The good news is there are lots of good places to find inspiration. The following list can give you a good start.

1. Choose a famous psychologist and do a profile on his or her theories, life, and career.
2. Take a well-known psychology experiment and explore it in your paper.
3. Choose an issue in current psychology and elucidate on the subject.
4. A topic within abnormal psychology could be about an eating disorder, phobias, depression, schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder etc.
5. You could write a profile on a specific type of therapy such as group therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy or psychoanalysis.
6. A topic within social psychology which is the scientific study of human social behavior. This could include social control and cults, attraction, romance and love, prosocial behavior, nonverbal communication or leadership.
7. There are different career paths within psychology. Your research paper could explore one of these careers or compare two of them.
8. Choose a group of people or a well-known individual to research and write about.
9. Critique a famous psychology publication such as one of Sigmund Freud’s. Or evaluate a recent book. Make sure that a book evaluation will be accepted before you begin.
10. Use online sources, journal and newspaper articles, books and class textbooks to look for topic ideas.

Whether you use one of the general ideas above to start with or you find a highly focused topic idea to use, remember your topic needs to be narrow enough that you can make a detailed research paper with a specific thesis. Your research phase will last forever and never come to a conclusion if your topic is so broad that it doesn’t have boundaries.

Another way you can look for good topic ideas is by conducting a literature review within a broad topic within psychology. For example, you might be interested in eating disorders. By itself it’s too broad and general. You must narrow it down significantly. As you search the literature you will find ideas to spark your imagination. For example you might find an article on eating disorders within the college population. From there, you can narrow it even further.