University of Manchester

This course explores the career path of a health psychologist and the work health psychologists are likely to be engaged in. Students learn about the relationship between lifestyle behaviors and health, and they evaluate and discuss the application of psychology to  choices regarding lifestyle behaviors. The course also provides several different health psychology models and explains their use in the prediction of lifestyle behaviors; highlights the real-life application of psychology to behavior change interventions for unhealthy lifestyle behaviors; and applies theoretical models in health psychology to developing real-world interventions.

This course focuses on four specific aspects of child language development in depth: the acquisition of syntax, the role of the environment and interaction in language development, language development and education, and atypical language development. It discusses and evaluates competing theories of language development and critically evaluate current research within the four areas outlined above. The course contains a practical component in which students use child language research tools to conduct their own research on corpus data. The analysis involves quantitative data and statistical analysis.

In this course, students consider the democratic process and address the central question of why electors behave the way they do. The course provides students with an analysis of the nature of British and American psephological trends to help them understand national and comparative theories about voting behavior. This involves the exploration of models of voting behavior, and the analysis of the impact of contextual factors such as the existing democratic culture and election campaigning. Students work to achieve an understanding of modern psephology. They analyze the impact of social cleavages - such as class, geography, ethnicity, gender, and age - upon electoral behavior. They also learn to assess the utility of social psychological and issue-based approaches to voting behavior. Students scrutinize the structural impact of the electoral environment, including the media, the established rules of the game, campaigning, polling, and party organizations, and consider how all these factors shape our political landscape.

In this course, students are expected to be familiar with ideas and concepts covered in the Adaptability and Wellbeing course units at first and second year levels at the University of Manchester. Topics to be covered include the role of illness and treatment beliefs in health care encounters, how medically unexplained conditions can be explained and managed, ways of improving how health care professionals and patients interact, and risk and decision making. Cutting across these topic areas are the themes of theoretical underpinnings, measurement, and application.