Psychology

In this course, students explore mental health issues and how disorders impact people throughout their lives. Students learn how psychologists make diagnoses and use theory to guide treatment. Topics include anxiety, depression, dementia, and modern evidence-based treatments, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

The course "Psychology of Happiness" starts from the question “what happiness is,” and based on the relevant theories and research results of positive psychology on happiness, combing with practical cases, analyzes and explains the factors that affect happiness. Through real case analysis, this course guides students to view and deal with problems from a positive perspective. At the same time, this course introduces and expounds that "mindfulness" can effectively help people to improve their sense of happiness, and is supplemented by the preliminary study of meditation (mindfulness). It is hoped that students can strengthen their hearts, maintain positive knowledge and positive emotions about external things, and improve their subjective well-being by learning the practical methods of regulating emotions.

This course provides a systematic introduction to the key concepts and theoretical frameworks of tourism psychology. It focuses on the psychological and behavioral characteristics of tourists, tourism practitioners, and destination residents. By integrating theory with case-based practice, students will gain a deeper understanding of psychological mechanisms in tourism and learn how to apply them in areas such as product development, service enhancement, and organizational management.

This course uses an application-oriented approach to introduce students to the core concepts of psychometrics, a rigorous, scientific discipline of psychological testing and measurement. Students are provided with hands-on experiences to apply statistical methods for constructing and developing psychological measurement scales empirically as well as introductory exposure to instruments used by psychologists to assess intelligence, personality, and occupationally relevant attributes. Topics covered include: the context of testing and measurement; the testing process; test standardization; reliability and validity; intelligence and its appraisal; personality assessment; special domain testing; occupational applications; large-scale measurements; ethics and prospects.

In this course, students focus on how children learn to communicate in the real world, with a particular emphasis on the communicative skills needed for survival and success in educational settings. In the first half of the course, students consider how children learn to use the kinds of complex language needed in the classroom; to what extent language learning is impacted in atypical populations (e.g. autism, DLD); how language interventions can support children’s learning; how cross-linguistic differences might impact children’s use of the language of the classroom. In the second half of this course, students consider the challenges and benefits of bilingual language development; how children engage in mind-reading for successful communication; and how children reason with one another, collaboratively think and solve problems with other individuals such as peers.

Humans and other group-living species, such as bees, songbirds, nonhuman primates and dolphins (to name a few) face a number of challenges. Sociality provides benefits to individuals, but also exposes them to conflicts and competition. Understanding how these challenges are resolved is one of the most dynamic areas of research in evolutionary biology and comparative and developmental psychology. This course looks at sociality from an evolutionary perspective and focuses on how animals - humans included - use communication to live and cooperate with others (as well as deceive and manipulate them). Content includes: How language has evolved in humans, how non-linguistic communication evolved in humans and other species, the role of gesturing in communication, the flexibility of vocal signalling in nonhuman animals, the role of language for cognition and communication, the evolution of sociality, and game theoretical approaches to social interactions.

The focus of the course is on what the concepts of risk and risk perception mean from various theoretical standpoints. Students explore people's responses to risks such as AIDS, Ebola, Covid, Climate Change and Earthquakes. Beyond gaining an understanding of the nature of these responses, students examine health and safety campaigns and methods of communicating to change health and safety behaviors. Analysis of how media portray risks is central to this course.

This course focuses on social inclusion, utilizing social psychology to learn and think about the reasons one is unable to tolerate diverse others.

The course provides an introduction to the key neuroscience concepts and research techniques relevant to psychology.  Topics include the basics of neural function, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, sensorimotor processing, and research methods used.