--Original published at Chey's Blog

I have always been interested in psychology. I intend to be an art therapist after I graduate. My research question is associated with that. Would a patient making art help to bring forth repressed memories more than talk therapy? My hypothesis is that both art and talk therapy would have relatively similar outcomes without one surpassing the other. I think that types of therapy work better depending on the individual, but I would like to find out if that is true or not. I would start by finding trauma patients. In that pool of patients I would have a random selection. I think that the outcome would be better if I had a random selection of those patients. I would then do four tests with each patient. I suppose I could do more tests, but I feel that four tests would provide me with a good amount of information to form a conclusion. Two of those tests would be with talk therapy and two of them would be with art therapy. If these patients already have a psychologist I would have their psychologist conduct a session while I sat and observed. I think comfort levels of the patients would also help with collecting correct data. I would then observe the patient’s ability to recall repressed memories when using both types of therapy. Observing the behavior of the patients as well as how they respond when questioned about their memories would be the way that I collect my data. I would then record the results and come to my conclusion. Then I would have my work peer reviewed to insure that my data is correct.