psych research and animals

[izza]

I'm looking into psychology graduate programs, primarily cognitive with the goal of being a researcher rather than a clinician.

This may be a silly question, but are there programs that don't use animals as research subjects?

Or is it possible to make it through a program's worth of research without any animal testing?

 

Many thanks!

[lewin]

Programs that use animals for research are the exception rather than the rule. You won't have problems.

[Jay's Brain]

For the most part, unless you're working in a field that studies animals, you're safe with almost any field in psychology! Fields like behavioural and cognitive neuroscience may use animals for testing, but, for the most part, you'll have to worry about humans rather than animals! Of course, that may or may not be easier to handle 

[Rose Tyler]

My undergrad program may have been an outlier. We had two animal labs: behavioral neuroscience (rats) and learning (pigeons). Although we also had multiple labs that studied people and they only intermixed if students wanted to study in both labs. As long as you're working in a lab that conducts studies with human participants, you'll be all right. Whether or not they do is pretty obvious from their research interests and papers.