Art and Psychology

Art and psychology might seem to occupy different intellectual worlds, but they share a deep concern with human experience, perception, and meaning-making. Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behaviour, using empirical methods to understand cognition, emotion, development, social life, and the biological bases of mental processes. Art practice, meanwhile, involves sustained creative inquiry through visual and material means, developing your capacity to think through making and to communicate ideas and experiences that resist reduction to words alone.

Combining the two gives you analytical tools from both science and art, a relatively unusual profile that supports understanding of creativity, visual perception, wellbeing, and the therapeutic dimensions of art-making.

At the University of Reading, this four-year full-time programme allows you to develop genuinely in both disciplines without either becoming merely a minor adjunct of the other. In psychology you will study core areas of the discipline, including cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, biological psychology, and research methods, developing a scientific understanding of mind and behaviour. In art you will build your practical skills and conceptual range through studio work, developing a body of creative work and the critical vocabulary to discuss and situate it.

The combination is enriched by the ways each discipline informs the other, whether through psychological research on visual perception that illuminates artistic practice, or art's capacity to explore subjective and emotional dimensions of experience that quantitative methods struggle to capture.

Graduates move into a range of careers that draw on this distinctive combination. Art therapy and other forms of creative therapies, often with additional postgraduate training, are one direction. Clinical and counselling psychology, with further study, is another for those who wish to pursue the psychological side of the degree.

Art education, arts management, and community arts work draw on both strands, as do roles in user experience design, where understanding of perception and behaviour meets creative and visual practice. Some graduates go on to postgraduate study in either art or psychology, deepening their expertise in one direction.