Psychology

This course introduces the study of human development through the life-course. It considers biological, psychological, and social domains of concern, viewing development as a product of genetic maturational, self-directed, and social factors. A psychosocial perspective provides the orienting framework for the course, emphasizing the continuous interaction of person and social environment. The framework helps students identify essential tasks, concerns, and sources of vulnerability and resilience in development and functioning through the life course.  

The course encompasses a range of perspectives, drawing on recent lines of inquiry in neuroscience and neuropsychology; psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and social learning theories; ecological models; stress and coping studies; and concepts of culture, race, and ethnicity related to growth and behavior. Lecture and discussion seek to bridge theoretical perspectives, social policy considerations, and direct practice issues with particular attention to diverse and vulnerable populations. 

Advanced statistical techniques for the analysis of psychometric data, focusing on reliability analysis, principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and various regression techniques. Students lean how to evaluate psychometric scales and use them for prediction and measurement.

This course discusses the main neuropsychological syndromes and the neuropsychological profile of the main neurological and psychiatric diseases. The course explores topics including an introduction to clinical neuropsychology and neuropsychological assessment; neurology and neuroradiology for neuropsychologists; cognitive deficits and neuropsychological syndromes in neurological disorders; neurodegenerative diseases, dementia, and its risk and protective factors; and neuropsychological profile in psychiatric disorders. The course requires students to have a basic understanding of concepts from psychobiology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology as a prerequisite.

This course discusses the most relevant experimental paradigms for the investigation of conscious perception and its failures. The course discusses topics including notions concerning how the sensory apparatus in human adults selects and organizes the flood of information into coherent and perceivable objects; notions concerning the lively debate about the role of attention as a gate to consciousness; notions about extant functional, neural, and computational models of consciousness; and notions about human error as resulting from a failure at one of more processing stages underlying the generation of a conscious percept, considering a subset of situations in which such errors may engender in particularly problematic situations. The course requires students to have the basic notions typically delivered in classes such as Experimental/General Psychology, and the basic principles for the use of experimental methodologies in the psychological field as a prerequisite.

This course provides a broad understanding of how our brain works. The course structure is focused on active learning with a balance of lectures and hands-on activities. Topics include perception, reasoning, memory, attention, emotions, and decision-making, among other cognitive traits. The course is accessible to students with different backgrounds and provides important new insights into how our brain gives rise to our abilities to perceive, act, and think.

When external stressors happen to individuals, their coping occurs with their family involved as a unit. This course covers diverse types of stressors, including immigration and health condition, and investigates how families cope with the stressors. Contemporarily, whereas diverse forms of families exist, the cultural expectations towards families do not seem to have changed accordingly. Thus, the discussions in this course will cover the context of diversity and the diversity of contexts.  

In our daily life, people often tell friends, peers, family of their distress before they tell professional counselors. Peer counseling is such a special kind of psychological counseling, conducted by trained or supervised unprofessional people, providing helps having some counseling effects. In this process, through the use of active listening and problem solving skills combining knowledge about human development and mental health, peer counselors instruct their companions and provide them with psychological and emotional support In this course, the basic concept, skills and ethic of peer counseling will be introduced, as well as some practical problems such as culture, race, sexual orientation and romantic relationship. As a general course, these goals are to reach: Students can have basic knowledge of peer counseling; Some basic peer counseling skills can be mastered and used in practical situations; This course also helps student in viewing their own mental health and improving it with related knowledge.

The course covers human psychological development from childhood to old age and methods used in research in development psychology. It describes theoretical perspectives on personality and related fields of application. The course consists of four modules, this is the first module: Child Psychology. This module studies the psychological and biological development during childhood and how this development is affected by genetic factors and different living conditions. Some of the topics addressed are self-regulation, emotional attachment, social understanding, and friendship. Furthermore, the module covers the research methods used to generate knowledge of child development.