Psychology

Mental disorders, e.g. schizophrenia, dementia, depression, are common across all countries and constitute about 14% of the global burden of disease. Many people with a mental disorder - and the majority of those living in low income countries - still have no access to the treatments they need. This course offers students from a range of backgrounds, e.g. social sciences, medicine, psychology, an understanding of basic principles of how mental disorders present, the impact on individuals and the advances in treatment and recovery. The course addresses general aspects of the aetiology of mental disorders, the setting within which such disorders are managed in the UK and globally, and finally brings the students in touch with people with lived experience of a mental disorder in order to elucidate aspects of stigma and health and social inequalities. 

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the basic constructs of general psychology and the main methods in the study of human behavior. The course discusses on the basic skills necessary in analyzing cognitive and emotional processes. The course includes an experimental part linked to a laboratory that focuses on emotion and perception. Specific topics include: perception-attention, learning, memory, and emotion. Students participate actively in class discussions and carry out group work on specific topics. The course includes slides and power point presentations.

This course examines the successful self including the rational self, veridical self knowledge, the transcendent self, the socially intelligent self, the loved self, the multicultural self, and the global self. It also covers concepts and practical skills that would enable students to more effectively attain their valued goal, and feel competent and accepted.

This course examines major mental health conditions and significant social, philosophical, and historical influences on health care service delivery and reform to provide a context for contemporary rehabilitation practice. It covers the goals, values and guiding principles of psychiatric rehabilitation and practices that aim to address the culture of stigma and low expectations by society of people with mental health conditions. Rehabilitation interventions that have demonstrated efficacy in promoting recovery by reducing obstacles to participation for people with mental health conditions will also be examined. Local and international research underpinning best practice in rehabilitation management and service delivery will be reviewed and consumer perspectives and experiences explored.

This course introduces tools from cognitive sciences to study human behavior. It presents classical and more recent experimental measures used in cognitive sciences to study social and individual behavior, as well as the constraints to consider while designing such experiments. It also presents general concepts in cognitive sciences that are key for studying the psychological underpinnings of human behavior.

In the first part of the course, students become familiar with the basic elements of psychoanalysis (Freud) and analytical psychology (Jung). Special attention is paid to depth psychological theories on art and literature. In the second part, students read a number of widely diverging depth psychological interpretations of literary texts, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus rex, Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Hoffmann’s The Sandman, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, several fairy tales, myths, poems, and short stories. The last part of the course is devoted to some epistemological aspects of depth psychological literary criticism. There are three main questions in this course: What types of rules are to be observed when interpreting literary texts? To what extent does depth psychological literary criticism qualify as an academic discipline? And, finally, to what extent do depth psychological theories like psychoanalysis and analytical psychology qualify as academic disciplines?

Long before Western people in the sixties and seventies tried out psychedelics for recreational and therapeutic purposes, other cultures had already been using them for ages because of their therapeutic potential. This “psychedelic wave” in the West scared off politicians leading to a scheduling of these substances and a halt to scientific research into the effects of those substances. In the nineties, placebo-controlled studies emerged looking into the negative effects of these drugs due to reports that these users might be cognitively impaired after abundant use of a number of these substances. Two decades later however, after the negative effects had been demonstrated to be limited, when used in moderate amounts, and after the substances appeared to be relatively safe, research into the positive effects started rising and it is blossoming today. While previously only a handful of labs investigated these effects, new research labs in other countries are emerging. The therapeutic potential of psychedelics is now being widely investigated and two companies are now setting up trials in psychiatric patients in order to demonstrate the therapeutic potential of these compounds. Their aim is to have those substances approved as a psychiatric medicine within a few years. While psychedelic research is experiencing a renaissance, it is still treated as the “bad daughter” in psychiatric settings and frowned upon by the general public. From the patient side however, there is a large demand for effective and alternative treatments since treatment is not a “one-size-fits-all” thing and many of those patients fail to benefit from current treatments, leaving them in distress and despair with a pessimistic view on their future. This course educates students about the positive and negative effects of these substances. Through the course students are able to communicate to the lay audience and to patients in an objective way what the current state of affairs is.