University College London

This course consists of a selection of key topics in psychology, with emphasis on biological aspects of psychology and on cognitive psychology. The course also includes an introduction to psychological experiments.

This course examines the evolution of primate social systems, specifically the ways in which environmental conditions influence behavior and an individual's social and reproductive strategies.

This course introduces students to the history of Latin America in the 20th century. Students examine processes common to the region, the experiences of specific countries, and Latin America's relations with the rest of the world. Students also consider how Latin America can help them to think about the history of wider world.

During this course, students learn basic Norwegian. They learn to understand Norwegian registers used in many different practical everyday situations. Aspects of Norwegian life and society are also covered through different media.

Looking for meaning in the world and making value judgments is an inescapable part of being human. It is through language that ideas of value are articulated. But the degree to which words are able to give precise meanings is open to dispute. Feelings, emotions, and pre-conceptual thought exist independently of language. Attempts to quantify and measure come up against particular problems when dealing with human society and everyday life, rather than the rest of the natural world. This course introduces qualitative methods, cultural analysis, and value judgment by studying a variety of phenomena such as taste, literature, design, beauty, language, food, art, and photography.

This course examines developments across Christendom between the First Crusaders' seizure of Jerusalem in 1099 and the demographic shocks of the earlier 14th century. Students think about the nature of Christendom; however, not only on “European” terms, but also through the many cultures which interacted and sometimes conflicted with it: Byzantine, Mongol, Mamluk, and Kurdish. They look at and use a wide range of political, religious, visual, and literary sources to rethink the period. It is oddly in need of reinterpretation given the number of “emblematic” medieval institutions, which developed during it (crusades, inquisitions, gothic art, the rise of universities, and the coming of the friars).

This course focuses on pharmacology of the central nervous system. It is an ideal course for students whose main field is not pharmacology but who require knowledge on how drugs modulate the actions of the central nervous system. Students gain a basic knowledge of the roles, effects, and actions of transmitter function in the CNS, the symptoms and characteristics of diseases and disorders of the brain, the pharmacological treatment of these problems, and the use and effects of recreational drugs.

In this course, students test the significance of Britain's “insularity” and separation from the rest of medieval Europe against its integral role in the world of the medieval North Sea. They compare conversions religious, linguistic, and historical; explore changing ideas of identity in northern Europe, and how repeated invasion impacted them; and learn to identify perspective and bias in primary source accounts.

This is a course for non-economists. It explores topics of general interests through the lens of an economist. It is an introduction to the way economists think and analyze problems. Topics range from comparative advantage in international trade and exchange rate determination in international finance to income disparities between rich and poor countries, health and education, and the environment. The course familiarizes non-economists with simple ideas around the notion of scarcity and opportunity cost, and helps students understand how economists view trade in an increasingly globalized world economy, financial crises, economic growth in poor and emerging market economies, income distribution, impact evaluations on investments in health and education, and externalities.

This course familiarizes students with normative and descriptive theories of types of decision making, teaches them basic processes of memory encoding, organization, and retrieval. The inter-dependence between decision making and memory is highlighted by covering memory-based processes in decision making such as direct retrieval of previously effective decision strategies and the availability heuristic, and decision processes in memory such as confidence assessments and signal detection models of recognition.