Self-focus among psychology and non-psychology undergraduate students

Psychology students are expected to have high introspective needs which may be one of the reasons for their choice of subject as psychology at college and higher education levels. It is not known whether there are any differences in self focus of undergraduate students depending on their choice of majors. The present study was conducted to investigate the differences in self-focus across disciplines in undergraduate students. The data was collected from 120 participants, 66 males and 54 females, with mean age of 19.65 years. The disciplines included Psychology, Medical, Education, Engineering, Biotechnology, and Forensic Science. The data was collected using Self-focus Sentence Completion Test (SFSC) and was scored by two raters. The results indicated that Psychology students had higher self-focus than all the other disciplines, Engineering students had significantly higher negative self-focus and affective external focus, while students of medical had higher external focus. The study concludes that self-focus varies across students of different disciplines. It is difficult to suggest the causal relations here. Students from engineering were found to have most affective responses to self and tend to invalidate their own experiences. This may be due to being engaged in too mechanistic pursuits. Students of psychology are more oriented towards self-focusing behaviors.