Psychology

This course examines theories and principles from across psychology to explain the causes of environmentally destructive behavior, and generate solutions for a sustainable future. It examines principles of behavior change, and how students can apply them in their home, workplace, and community. 

This course covers foundational bio-psycho-social theories of adjustment process and reaction patterns to stressors, with a focus on mental health outcomes. It discusses methods of preventing mental disorders and promoting mental health in individual, group and community settings while emphasizing cultural, spiritual, and local perspectives.

Prerequisite: Introduction to Contemporary Psychology. 
  

This course provides a comprehensive understanding of psychoanalytic theory, including the structural model, object relations theory, and self-psychology. The course develops knowledge of psychic conflict, unconscious processes, and the interpretation of dreams. The course provides skills in understanding transference and countertransference and analyzing contemporary applications of psychoanalysis. The course includes an introduction to psychoanalysis including an overview of psychanalytic model and its historical development. The course reviews the Topographic model including an analysis of unconscious processes and their influence on thoughts, emotions, and behavior; working on dreams; and the Oedipus Complex. The course discusses the Structural model including an understanding the structure of the mind, including the id, ego, and superego, and the stages of psychosexual development; psychic conflict and compromise; and an introduction to defense mechanisms and their role in psychological processes. The course reviews the object relations theory including an introduction to object relations theory and its contribution to psychoanalytic understanding, and an analysis of the role of attachment, separation-individuation processes. The course also discusses self-psychology and narcissistic personality with a focus on Heinz Kohut perspective, and the contemporary application of psychoanalysis, and its use in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field.

This course focuses on the basic psychological processes, functions, and mechanisms involved in communication processes. It examines human nature and the mind from a historical-cultural perspective; the interrelations between the neuropsychological system and the cultural system; and the evolutionary, ontogenetic and historical developmental effects of communication and culture on the human mind. 

This course introduces the principles of human factors psychology and examines how they are applied to entrepreneurship. It explores how perceptual and cognitive theories can be applied to diverse systems, from personal computers to complex systems such as air-traffic control, aircraft cockpits, and nuclear power plants. It also covers theories and findings on human performance and their implications for efficient and safe designs.

This course examines the cultural dimensions of emotion in everyday life. It will focus on how emotions are experienced, represented and understood in individual and social contexts. Drawing on different media and cultural sites, this course will examine a range of emotional states such as (but not limited to) love, happiness, fear, hate, terror and ideas of hope, trust, belief and faith in the (re)making of individual and social life. It will also consider how emotions are deployed in current social and political debates.

This course examines neurochemical and physiological bases of the body, as well as the anatomical-functional organization of the endocrine system and its relation to the nervous system. It identifies the anatomical structure and studies the principles of analysis, coding, and representation of sensory information in the sensory systems: taste, smell, balance, hearing, vision, somesthesia, and pain. Other topics include: general principles of anatomical-functional organization of motor control; brain mechanisms of attention; characteristics of the states of dream and vigilance; main characteristics of motor disorders, perception, sleep and attention.

This course examines the various individual and social values and ethics related to sex, looks at how various conflicts are expressed and resolved in the concrete reality of relationships and marriage from a psychological perspective, and considers how individuals with various values and ethics of love and marriage live together beyond the traditional concept of sex. It also examines how happiness in romantic relationships and marriages can be predicted by personality factors and situational (environmental) factors.