Psychology

This course explores how culture shapes cognition and mind. By learning how culture shapes one's mental processes, sense of self, worldview, and behavior in daily life, one can develop a more "intercultural mind". This course is good for anyone interested in travel, cultural identity, cultural difference or living abroad.

This course provides an overview of key concepts, models, and strategies for effective teaching and learning from contemporary psychological perspectives. Students are expected to identify and address relevant “Big Ideas in Education” for promoting effective teaching and learning in today’s educational scene in Japan and beyond.  It focuses on various issues in school education and the theoretical knowledge to solve them. Furthermore, the students examine specific case studies, learning the necessary ways of thinking in education and schools.  

This course focuses on childhood cognitive development, a field of study within developmental psychology focusing on how the ability to think and reason develops throughout childhood. The course discusses how children learn to do many of the tasks we accomplish on a daily basis, including speaking language, understanding other people’s thoughts, inhibiting impulses, memorizing and recalling information, and problem-solving.

Students learn about the science of wellbeing, including wellbeing as a measure of welfare and its different conceptualizations such as evaluations and experiences of happiness; behavioral scientific phenomena uniquely captured by wellbeing such as adaptation to changing life circumstances, our tendency to make mistakes and mispredict what actually makes us happy, and relative comparisons (or jealousy); and how happiness differs between individuals and societies. Importantly, students then learn how to apply these insights to policy-making, including policy design, appraisal, and evaluation. Students are being familiarized with wellbeing theories and frameworks; data, measurement, and survey design; methods for wellbeing policy appraisal, including cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis; wellbeing policy evaluation; social welfare; and wellbeing interventions.

This course examines clinical psychology (also known as abnormal psychology). The main emphasis is on current views, perspectives, and research in this field. Clinical psychology draws upon most basic areas of psychological knowledge (e.g., social, developmental, physiological, cognitive, learning theory).

This course uses PS1001 and PS1002 as the foundation for a more advanced treatment of a number of areas in psychology. The course involves advanced treatment of the following areas of psychology: the relations between brain and behavior, cognition, perception, comparative aspects of behavior, and social and health psychology. It also contains a methodology component covering laboratory and field techniques; grounding in the methodological skills of PS2001 will be assumed.

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span.

Social psychology studies the psychology and behavior of individuals and groups in social situations and their development patterns. This course will cover the important concepts and theories in mainstream social psychology,including how individuals look at themselves and others,critical thinking about social phenomena, human aggression and helping behavior, attitude formation and change, social influence and its performance, the foundation of interpersonal relationships and intimacy, group psychology and behavior, how culture affects people, the psychosocial factors that affect human health, and the latest positive psychology. This course focuses on the application of social psychology in social life, the formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships, principles of interpersonal communication and conflict resolution, and a smooth team work.This course will also focus on contemporary scholars' researches on human psychology and behavior under different cultural backgrounds. Through this course, students will master the research contents, research methods and major research results of social psychology and better understand social life and events.

Educational psychology is an advanced freshman/sophomore-level course in the field of education. It is the study of classroom learning and teaching. This course provides an introduction to the concepts and theories of educational psychology and explains how they can be applied to actual situations. Topics include characteristics of learners, principles of learning, and principles of teaching. This course aims to construct students’ general knowledge and skills on learning and teaching activities, and to demonstrate the practical educational implications derived from each theory. It is expected that students will be able to become efficient learners in their future study.