This course examines the social, historical, cultural, and political construction of categories of disability. Through a wide variety of texts and cultural examples, students will study various meanings of disability.

This course covers the neural circuits and biochemical mechanisms underlying the body's response to stress and the impact of stress on mental health. In place of a textbook, assigned readings include peer-reviewed research and review articles, with the primary focus on preclinical studies using animal models.

We will be exploring sociality -the various types of social organization, cohesion and communication found in the animal kingdom, including humans. For example, some species have social structures that change with the seasons. By exploring different facets of sociality, we can illuminate different evolution advantages and motivations for research approaches, and understand how communication facilitates sociality. We also will examine how sociality affects the body and how contextual influences can disrupt sociality.

This course will examine core issues in social and emotional development from birth through adolescence. Emphasis will be on the key concepts and theoretical approaches that guide our understanding of emotion processing and its impact on social behavior. Biological and contextual factors that influence trajectories of social and emotional development will be considered across typical and atypical populations of children.

The subject of this course is the neuroscience of reward, motivation, and addiction. The course will cover a number of topics including neural systems controlling motivation and reward-seeking, how natural reinforcers and drugs of abuse influence brain function, and the neural and behavioral plasticity underlying addiction. Course structure will consist partly of lectures and partly of student presentations and interactive discussion in a guided journal-club style format.

The goal of this seminar is to provide an introduction to animal cognition. We will examine cognitive abilities in a variety of species, from invertebrates to nonhuman primates. Major topics to be discussed include: perception and attention, learning and memory, spatial representation, social cognition, tool-use, imitation and culture, communication and language, theory of mind, and the evolution of cognition.

This seminar course will introduce the study of traumatic stress and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Students in this course will learn about the history of PTSD, as well as theoretical frameworks for understanding the effects of traumatic stress on individual psychological functioning. We will also cover the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of individuals who have experienced traumatic stress. Careful attention will be paid to the various contextual factors that influence both exposure and responses to violence, including developmental stage, gender, and race/ethnicity.

This course offers an introduction to the field of clinical child psychology. We will review contemporary approaches to understanding the clinical features, diagnosis, causes, developmental course, prevention, and treatment of major psychological disorders in childhood and adolescence.

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