Psychology: What Do You Really Study?
How people think, feel and behave - from research to the treatment room.
What Do You Study in Psychology? Core Subjects, Year by Year
What do the degree courses cover?
Open a course to learn about its main topics and see what the work looks like in practice.
What do you learn in the course?Introduction to Psychology?
A broad mapping course of the field: how the brain receives information, how we learn and remember, what shapes personality and emotion, and how the social environment affects behavior. Next to the theories, you will encounter central experiments and learn to distinguish between scientific explanation and intuition.
Main topics
- Learning, memory and perception
- Emotion, motivation and personality
- Development and social behavior
- Mental health and research methods
What does it look like in practice?
For example, comparing biological, cognitive and social explanations for the same behavior and checking which evidence supports each explanation.
What do you learn in the course?Statistics in psychology?
Learn to turn observations of people into data that can be analyzed responsibly. The course deals with the description of distributions and relationships, with sampling, uncertainty and hypothesis testing, in order to assess whether a research finding reflects a real phenomenon or a random fluctuation.
Main topics
- Mean, Variance and Distribution
- Correlation and regression
- Sampling and confidence intervals
- Hypothesis testing and effect size
What does it look like in practice?
For example, we check whether a difference in memory scores between two groups is large enough to be unlikely to have occurred by chance.
What do you learn in the course?Social psychology?
The course examines how the real or imagined presence of others changes thoughts, feelings and decisions. Dealing with attitudes, persuasion, conformity, relations between groups, prejudices, attraction and help, while critically reading studies and experiments.
Main topics
- attitudes and persuasion
- Conformity and obedience
- Stereotypes and intergroup relations
- Attraction, aggression and prosocial behavior
What does it look like in practice?
For example, analyze why a person might agree with a wrong answer of a group even when he sees that the solution is different.
What do you learn in the course?Research methods in psychology?
You learn to translate a question about behavior into research that can be carried out and interpreted. Formulate a hypothesis, define variables, choose between an experiment, survey or observation, deal with intervening variables and assess validity, reliability and ethics.
Main topics
- Formulating questions and hypotheses
- Experimental design and correlations
- Validity, reliability and biases
- Sampling and ethics in research
What does it look like in practice?
For example, planning an experiment that tests whether lack of sleep impairs attention, including a comparison group and a measure that can be reproduced.
What do you learn in the course?Cognition?
The course explores the mechanisms of thinking: how we direct attention, recognize objects and language, retain information in memory, solve problems and make decisions. Models of information processing are examined and compared to results from behavioral experiments and brain studies.
Main topics
- Attention and perception
- working memory and long-term memory
- Language and knowledge representation
- Judgment, decisions and problem solving
What does it look like in practice?
For example, reaction times are measured to infer what mental stages occur during word recognition.
Frequently Asked Questions About Psychology
Is a degree in Psychology difficult?
There is no single answer — difficulty depends on your background, the institution, and your chosen study pace. According to this site's estimate, The degree has a relatively small quantitative component, so mathematics is usually not the main obstacle, and a large share of the reading material is in English. A good way to assess fit is to review the course map on this page: if most of the subjects interest you, the effort will usually feel worthwhile.
How long does a degree in Psychology take?
Usually 3–4 years (Single-major or double-major). Exact duration varies by institution and depends on course load and the track you choose.
Psychology or Occupational Therapy — which is right for me?
The degrees most closely related to Psychology are Occupational Therapy, Social Work, and Sociology and Anthropology. Their differences are usually in emphasis rather than the overall subject, so the fastest way to decide is to compare their course maps — what you actually study in each program, year by year. You can also open the degree comparison tool to view the differences side by side.
Is a bachelor's degree enough to become a psychologist?
No. Practicing psychology in Israel requires a master's degree (clinical, educational, organizational and more), a supervised internship, and registration in the psychologists' registry. The bachelor's degree is the first step of a longer path — plan it as such.
What are the admission requirements for psychology?
The field is in demand and competitive. Universities usually require a high weighted score — a psychometric score of roughly 600–680 and up combined with matriculation grades — while colleges are more accessible. Requirements vary by institution and year.
What can you do with a bachelor's in psychology without a master's?
Human resources, recruitment and training, market research and UX, education and group facilitation, and supportive care roles. Admission to clinical master's programs is highly competitive, so it is worth planning an alternative path you find interesting.
How many years does it take to become a licensed specialist?
The bachelor's degree takes three years. Together with a master's, internship and licensing exams, the full path to specialist status usually takes 9–12 years from the start of studies.
Where can you study this?
Psychology is offered at all research universities and many colleges, including Reichman, the Academic College of Tel Aviv–Yaffo, Tel-Hai, Sapir, Yezreel Valley and the College of Management. Admission thresholds vary widely.