This course is open to qualified students who desire to engage in independent reading on selected topics or conduct research projects. Preference will be given to those students who have done good work in one or more departmental courses beyond the introductory level. A full course.
Open to juniors and seniors with consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters.
(Offered as PSYC 356 and NEUR 356.) This course will explore in detail the neurophysiological underpinnings of basic motivational systems such as feeding, fear, and sex. Students will read original articles in the neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and behavioral scientific literature. Key goals of this course will be to make students conversant with the most recent scientific findings and adept at research design and hypothesis testing.
Requisite: PSYC 212 or 226 and consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Baird.
In this course we will examine how to apply psychological theories and methods to understand the lives of political leaders. We begin this course with a consideration the role of personality in political leadership.
In this course we will examine adolescent behavior from the perspective of psychologists, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists. We will look at theories of adolescent development, empirical research studies, first person accounts written by adolescents, and narratives about adolescents written by journalists and novelists. We will cover the psychological and social changes that accompany and follow the physiological changes of puberty and the acquisition of new cognitive capacities.
(Offered as PSYC 325 and NEUR 325.) In this course we will examine the ways in which drugs act on the brain to alter behavior. We will review basic principles of brain function and mechanisms of drug action in the brain. We will discuss a variety of legal and illegal recreational drugs as well as the use of psychotherapeutic drugs to treat mental illness.
This course will take an empirical approach to the study of human attraction from the perspective of multiple subfields within psychology including cognitive (facial symmetry), social (the influence of attractiveness on perception of other traits), personality (psychodynamic processes), developmental (attachment theory), and biological (sexual orientation) psychology. The beginning of the semester will be devoted to familiarizing ourselves with questions and methodologies from the relevant literatures.
This course will provide a comprehensive overview of the study of memory. We will begin by examining empirical research on memory for different kinds of content: factual information vs. personal events vs. cognitive skills. This research will be used to evaluate several contemporary models of memory. From there, we will examine how memory theories have been applied to understanding “real world” issues such as eyewitness testimony, and the false/recovered memory debate. We will also discuss developmental changes in memory-from infancy to old age.
A review of various forms of psychopathology including addictive, adjustment, anxiety, childhood, dissociative, impulse control, mood, organic, personality, psychophysiological, schizophrenic, and sexual disorders. Based on a review of contemporary research findings, lectures and discussion will focus on the most relevant approaches for understanding, diagnosing, and treating psychological disorders.
This course examines how psychologists understand the patterns of experiencing and behaving that constitute an individual’s personality. Personality psychologists are concerned with the ways in which a person is like all other people in these patterns (common psychological processes), like some others (individual differences), and like no one else (uniqueness). In examining these questions, we study the “grand theories” of Freud, Skinner, and Rogers, as well as the contemporary models of traits and scripts.
The individual’s behavior as it is influenced by other people and by the social environment. The major aim of the course is to provide an overview of the wide-ranging concerns characterizing social psychology from both a substantive and a methodological perspective. Topics include person perception, attitude change, interpersonal attraction, conformity, altruism, group dynamics, and prejudice. In addition to substantive issues, the course is designed to introduce students to the appropriate research data analysis procedures.
