Psychology

This course focuses on how social context influences human cognition, including shared memory, interpersonal action coordination, social perception, learning, and decision making. A central part of this course is about measuring cognition in social interaction, such as how to make the cognitive processes in social context visible and observable. The course provides the tools to understand social processes from a cognitive perspective. The course includes designing an empirical study or project in the area of social interaction.

The course provides in-depth analyses of scientific knowledge (classical and recent, theoretical and empirical) about the relations between cognition, emotion, and language from the perspectives of psychological and developmental sciences. A large range of cognitive, emotional and language phenomena (typical and abnormal) as well as scientific theories and methods are examined.

This course covers mental disorders. Students learn about mental and behavioral distress and/or dysfunction and how to promote subjective well-being and personal adaptation.  Case studies on different anxiety disorders, eating disorders, addictions, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, and personality disorders are used. Questions continually raised during the course are: what is the clinical picture?  where is the boundary between no need for care and need for care? what causes such a disorder? what can be done about the disorder?  the gap between theory and practice, between scientific thinking and clinical treatment are evaluated. Different theoretical schools are examined. 

This course examines modern theories and empirical research findings on the structure and development of personality across a lifespan, using a combined perspective of developmental and personality psychology. This course provides an overview of the structure of human personality and its developmental milestones from early childhood to adulthood. It examines the big five factors of personality and various influences (e.g., genetics, temperament, parenting) that shape the development of personality over time. It also discusses correlates of different personality characteristics across multiple domains of development (e.g., self-esteem, achievement, morality).