Abnormal Psychology Professor

The American Philosopher William James once said, “To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.” As an Abnormal Psychology Professor, therefore, it’s your job to help college students better understand humanity by studying peculiar human behaviors.

At once a Teacher and a Psychologist, an Abnormal Psychology Professor accomplishes that by teaching courses at a college or university in the area of “abnormal psychology.” This is a branch of psychology that deals with “abnormal” behaviors, thoughts, and emotions, including psychological phenomena like dreams, altered mental states, and hypnosis. You also examine conditions like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, bipolar disorder, dementia, and schizophrenia.

Like other Professors, your daily duties as an Abnormal Psychology Professor include advising students, planning curriculums, choosing textbooks, giving lectures, assigning homework, and grading exams. However, you’re also expected to perform original psychological research. When you’re not in the classroom, therefore, you’re designing and executing studies of abnormal psychology, which typically involves observing, surveying, interviewing, and counseling patients who suffer from psychological disorders, then reporting your findings in the form of scholarly articles published in industry journals, and presentations and demonstrations given at industry meetings, conventions, and conferences.

If humanity is shaped like a bell curve, “normal” people make up the highest point of the curve, or the “average.” Your job, basically, is studying the people at extreme ends of the bell curve in order to find out (and teach) why they are the way they are.