39 Interesting Psychology Dissertation Topics and Ideas

Psychology can be an interesting area to explore in your dissertation assignment provided you choose the right topic. That’s why in this guide, we give you a list of 30+ psychology dissertation topics from which you can pick one interesting topic to investigate.

There are many areas to explore as a psychology student, including personality, social, biological, cognitive, behavioral, industrial, psychosocial, and personality psychology. So it should be easy to find an interesting topic that you can investigate provided it falls within the scope of the project.

Our guide to choosing topics for dissertation remains unchanged. That means the topic you choose to investigate has a gap in existing literature that your research can fill. With that said, let’s look at some of the psychology dissertation topics that you can explore right now.

Psychology Dissertation Topics: 30+ Examples

The following is a list of 30+ psychology dissertation topics. You can use them as inspiration to help you come up with a unique topic of your own. Or you can pick one topic idea from the list, improve it, talk to your supervisor about the topic, and then begin your investigation.  

Developmental Psychology Dissertation Topics

Development psychology explores how behaviors change from time to time based on motor skills, language, and intelligence.

Researchers develop a number of theories and models to explain how these changes take place, making this an interesting area to explore. Some of the topics that may be interesting to explore under this category of study include:

1. Explaining cognitive development change: one sort of learning mechanism or several learning paradigms for various problems
2. The extent to which knowing neuro development mechanisms can provide insight into how early cognition happens.
3. Conversational comprehension as a domain-wide enhancement in processing speed and working-memory capacity in cognitive effort.
4. The acquisition of culture and biological growth is critical for the development of a kid.
5. Are children with dyscalculia’s talents unrelated to numeracy affected by the disorder, or are they largely independent?
6. How the concept of plasticity in child development may account for a kid’s capacity to alter in response to both positive and bad life experiences.

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Abnormal Psychology Dissertation Topics

This area of study focuses on analyzing abnormal behavior with an effort to establish a positive change.

Ideally, this area of study suits students interested in studying psychological traits that go against what we consider to be normal and goes further into exploring uncommon conditions.

Some topics that may be worth exploring in this area of study are as follows:

1. Subtypes of drug dependency are linked to dissociable networks of disturbance in the limbic brain.
2. The efficacy of the DSM-V as a tool for categorizing aberrant psychiatric symptoms is being questioned.
3. How do the cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia vary from those of those with conventional cognitive processes?
4. What distinguishes Intellectual Development Disorders (IDD) from Autism Spectrum Disorders?
5. The relevance of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies in evaluating neurobiological ideas that schizophrenia is caused by aberrant fronto-temporal lobe connections.
6. Schizophrenia is studied as a multi-dimensional condition.
7. Is it possible that the fact that some autistics have isolated skills might assist explain the syndrome’s cause?
8. A malfunctioning amygdale and ventromedial prefrontal cortex have a role in psychopathology.

Evolutionary Psychology Dissertation Topics

In evolutionary psychology, the focus is on explaining psychological characteristics by applying evolutionary behavior with an effort to derive and explain adaptation and natural selection.

With this respect, researchers hold that humans’ psychological mechanisms are ancestral inheritance, which has played a major role in solving problems throughout human’s history.

Evolutionary psychology is an interesting area of study that lets you dig deeper into human history and explain the impact if evolutionary psychology on the modern society. Some interesting topics to explore here are: 

1. The relative relevance of face symmetry, averageness, and secondary sex features as valid predictors of mate selection.
2. The application of evolutionary psychology to group behavior helps explain how humans act in organizations, whether that behavior is logical or irrational.
3. Examining if artificially produced instances of evolutionary game theory may be used to evaluate human behavior in the actual world.
4. Why individual features and cognitive modules can’t account for the intricacies of human social behavior.
5. Understanding the evolution of the human brain through human cognitive growth.
6. Investigating if reciprocal altruism is sufficient to explain altruism in various social circumstances.
7. What role does evolutionary psychology play in explaining anomalies in human decision-making?

Social Psychology Dissertation Topics

Social psychology is an interesting area of study that focuses on how people in groups interact through influential behavior.

You may study behavioral factors such as social influence, non-verbal communication, and attitudes in controlled situations to investigate how the behavior of individuals influences each other in groups.

Here are some suggestions of dissertation topics that you can explore under this category:

1. Behavioral game theory: How players learn from and influence others in strategic thinking.
2. The impact of priming’s automatic effects on complicated behavior in real-life circumstances.
3. Nature or nurture? The early development of nonverbal communication in infants: nature or nurture?
4. Assessing the amount and duration of factors affecting automatic priming effects in relation to social behavior.
5. The social intuitionist paradigm is used to assess the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment.
6. Demonstrating how cognitive neuroscience may inform social psychology by merging social cognition and understanding of brain networks and systems

Cognitive Psychology Dissertation Topics

If you’re interested in learning how the human brain perceives and represents information, then you should immerse yourself in studying cognitive psychology.

You’ll be studying the processes involved information presentation through computer modelling, neuropsychology, and experimentation to understand the encoding of information in the human brand at both micro and macro levels.

Some of the most interesting dissertation topics to explore in this area include the following:

1. Is MRI testing an accurate predictor of brain function?
2. The idea of “grandmother cells” is important for explaining neuronal selectivity to high-level information processing, such as during facial recognition.
3. Effective cognition entails picking the right information at the right moment and in the proper order.
4. Changes in brain processing in response to event segmentation: distinguishing between cause and effect in boundary recognition
5. Bias in visual working memory and attention: a study of the link between working memory and attention.
6. The connection between poor social cognition, emotion, and anxiety disorders.
7. The cerebellum’s contribution to higher-order cortical activities.
8. The dependability, validity, and applicability of cognitive psychology study findings to real-life behavior and cognition.
9. Evaluating Gibson’s theory of direct perception in comparison to constructivist explanations and more modern cognitive theories.
10. The concept that the right and left hemispheres of the brain have different processing methods is critical to understanding how the brain works.
11. The mature human brain’s adaptability is limited.
12. Is there really a thing as subliminal perception, or is it part of a more complicated phenomenon?

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