This is a writing-intensive course that fulfills the University's Junior Writing requirement. Each section focuses on a particular aspect of current issues in psychology. The topic is selected based on the expertise of the teaching staff. All sections share similar writing assignments, ranging from in-class short writing assignments to lengthy papers that include literature review. Classes emphasize discussion and extensive peer review of written work. Topics for individual sections will not be available until shortly before the start of the semester.

Students in this course will explore psychological theory and research pertaining to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Topics include sexual orientation, sexual identity development, stigma management, heterosexism & homonegativity, gender roles, same-sex relationships, LGB families, LGB diversity, and LGB mental health

An introduction to the "other" dual diagnosis. People with intellectual disabilities are more likely than the general population to develop a mental illness at some point in their lives. Students will be introduced to how mental illness is manifested in this population and the medical, behavioral, and psychotherapeutic options for treatment. This course will be helpful to those going into such fields as human services, special education, medicine, and communications disorders. This is a core course for the DDHS certificate program.

The focus of the course is stress and disease. Students will learn about the neural circuits and biochemical mechanisms underlying the body's response to stress and how stress impacts disease. The bulk of the reading material for this course will consist of primary (peer-reviewed) research and review articles on stress and disease in animal models (some clinical papers in humans may also be covered). Students are expected to actively participate during class, give presentations, and write a research project proposal.

Advances in the field of neuroscience have generated ethical questions regarding the implications of brain research. Neuroethics evaluates concerns related to how this research can be used to identify, predict, and change the neural correlates of human behavior. Topics to be covered may include lifetime drug therapy, the use of drugs to "normalize" behavior in atypical populations, the use of cognitive enhancing drugs in healthy populations, implications of brain imaging, and memory manipulation.

Moral psychology has received a great deal of attention in recent years; researchers from diverse areas of psychology have contributed to a new understanding of morality. In this seminar, we will explore the nature of morality from these diverse psychological perspectives, including neuroscience, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology and psychopathology. Among other investigations, we will examine the relationship of both cognition and emotion to moral judgment and behavior, and we will try to understand when and why people act (im)morally.

This seminar will examine how we make sense of ourselves, of other people, and of our social world, in general. This course will apply the theories used in a variety of areas in cognitive psychology (e.g. attention, memory and decision making) to questions and issues typically examined in social psychology. These questions include: How do we form impressions of others? Why are we attracted to certain people but not others? What kinds of information about people are important to us, and why? How do we explain our behavior; and how do we explain others' behavior?

This course will examine children's development and socialization in the context of families, communities, and the larger social context. An ecological perspective will be used that highlights the multiple levels of influence that shape a child's life and which recognizes the active role of the individual in shaping, as well as being shaped by, social contexts. The complex interactions among families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, government, and historical time period will be explored as they serve to provide opportunities and risks for the developing child.

This course will explore episodic (event) memory in both theoretical and ecological terms. We will cover theories of recognition memory and empirical results from the laboratory that have been used to advance these theories. We will also cover research on the brain areas and mechanisms that support event memory. Finally, we will explore the fallibility of memory in real-world settings, especially eyewitness testimony in court cases.

Obesity is a big and growing problem that threatens to overwhelm the US health delivery system. This course looks at the many facets that contribute substantially to the obesity epidemic. They include--poor decisions by individuals, overeating as an epidemic, exercise, addiction, USDA policies against individuals and for corporate advancement. We will identify how each factor contributes to the obesity explosion and discuss how each source can be remedied.