Psychology

This course introduces the main theories of career development and consulting and its research (e.g. job matching theory, career development and construction theory, social cognitive theory, theory of career decision-making, etc.), and cultivates professional skills (e.g. professional psychological evaluation, professional information resources, etc.).

This course introduces fundamental ideas and principles in the study of cognitive development and its neural basis. The course delves into the innate developmental origins of domain-specific cognitive abilities and examines how they change over the course of brain maturation, experience, individual differences, and neurological dysfunction.

This course offers a study of the psychological foundations of learning, motivation, and emotions. Topics covered: provoked behavior, habituation, and sensitization; classical conditioning; instrumental conditioning; stimulus control of behavior; motivation; emotion.

This course introduces mindfulness as a psychological construct, presenting and discussing ways to understand and describe the concept. It presents theoretical perspectives that seek to illuminate the origin, development, potential, and limitations of mindfulness. The course examines clinical and cognitive empirical studies that demonstrate various operationalizations and effects of mindfulness interventions. It also contains a smaller practical part where select mindfulness exercises are exemplified to provide a practice-based understanding of the concept of mindfulness. Assessment is based on an individual or group written assignment of 8-14 pages. 

This course introduces advanced issues of the Psychology of Music. Whenever possible, the course introduces the application of the concepts of psychology of music in the everyday life. The course highlights the positive aspects of music listening (e.g., inducing a positive mood, relaxation, etc.) and the positive aspects connected to musical practice (e.g. better memory skills, spatial skills, etc.). The course is divided in two parts. The first part of the course includes an overview of acoustics, music theory, methodology, and physiology as linked to music psychology. The first part of the course provides the necessary tools to understand the literature of auditory perception and psychology of music. The course discusses topics including basic concepts such as sound, sound waves, acoustics, sound in music and music theory, methods of psychology of music, anatomy and physiology of the auditory system, and loudness and absolute threshold; as well as psychology of music topics including music training in hearing loss and aphasia; psychoacoustics and mp3; music and cognition: Mozart effect, background music and cognition, music talent and cognition, and the cognitive abilities of musicians and non-musicians; pitch: illusions, pitch coding of simple and complex tones, musical intervals, harmonic, melodic, consonance, the representation of pitch, amusia, and absolute pitch; and music as a universal language: music perception in infants and animals. The course requires a strong background in the main concepts of cognitive psychology such as perception, attention, memory, learning, and intelligence, and a solid methodological background as a prerequisite.

This course examines the fundamentals of cognition. Topics include key cognitive domains and operations such as attention, memory, language, problem solving and decision making. The course requires students to take Introduction to Psychology as a prerequisite.