Psychology

This course presents a theoretical and practical analysis of the human personality from a social, evolutionary, biological, and health perspective. 

This course examines a general introduction to the physical and physiological bases and principles of fMRI, MRI related safety issues, and design and analysis of fMRI experiments.

The course develops students’ psychological literacy through the cycle of enquiry and evidence. Students are introduced to key conceptual issues, methodological approaches, and significant findings in scientific psychology, their historical background, and the kinds of empirical evidence on which these findings are based. Students take simple questions, and cut across traditional disciplines looking for answers.

This course examines various aspects of the relation between music and the mind and emotions, including how humans came to be musical; how people listen to, understand, and perform music; why we listen to and make music.

The first part of this course studies the theoretical background of language processing and how it received empirical support from psycholinguistics – mainly based on behavioral experiments. More recent insights are added from cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on information transfer within the language network. During reading and open discussion, students consider the following: problems that need to be solved by the cognitive language system; how the brain solves problems; the consequences if the network is not functioning well – as in Aphasia after stroke, or in developmental dyslexia. Papers covered in the course bring answers using methods such as RT, EEG, fMRI, and analysis teaching techniques. From the readings, each participant selects the topic of interest for the proposal, extracts open questions, formulates research questions, presents the ideas to peers, and writes the proposals on how to investigate this selected topic of interest.

This course covers the recent developments in experimental and behavioral economics as well as their extension into neuroeconomics. It demonstrates how developments in cognitive psychology and neural exploration in the subjective representations of the stakeholders have enriched the discipline at the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels. The course investigates several iterations of this young sector which is being shaped by a never-before-seen cooperation between the hard sciences and the social sciences by showcasing several applications: monetary incentivization, entrepreneurship behavior and attention control, behavioral finances, risk attitudes, the rules of cooperation, the role of knowledge and belief in decision making, the mechanisms of coordination, et cetera.