Psychology

This course covers topics in contemporary issues of psychology, health, and public health, including clinical, institutional, historical, and public policy aspects. Prerequisite: a course in public health.

This course teaches the psychiatric and neurological disorders that predispose to criminal offences. Most of this course pertains to neurocognitive processes of criminal offenders. Contextual factors, such as the history and current state of neuropsychology and psychiatry are discussed to provide the desired background knowledge of this topic. A considerable part of the course is devoted to neuropsychological abnormalities in offenders who are affected by a psychiatric disorder. Another substantial part of the course pertains to offenders with acquired brain injury. The connection between neural abnormalities and criminal offences are critically evaluated for each psychiatric or neurological disorder. A completely different side of neuropsychology and law, the effect of neurocognitive disorders in victims/witnesses of crimes on their eyewitness testimony, are also dealt with.

This course introduces students to learning about, practicing, and discussing the most effective science-backed methods for improving psychological well-being and building resilience. The course also places these often Millenia-old practices into their historical and cultural contexts. Students participate in and critically reflect on personal experiences with wellness practices and apply Thematic Analysis to qualitative data derived from journaling.  Topics include What is learned optimism, Resilience and positivity ratio, Mindfulness and science. e.g. Evolutionary psychology, plasticity, cognitive science, Thematic Analysis and its applications.

This course explores questions of memory, remembering, and time as these are refracted and represented via a range of verbal, literary, and cultural forms. The course considers the making of collective and public memory (e.g. the creation of national pasts; cultures of commemoration; oral history; testimonial forms; displacement, exile and global conflict; literatures of war) but also the question of individual and personal memory (e.g. language and identity; narrative and subjectivity; literature and psychoanalytic theory). As such, the course opens onto a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: the relation between the literary text and the history text; life-writing, autobiography and memoir; representations of childhood and ageing; engagements with the archive; the question of silenced, repressed or invisible histories; the historical, post-colonial and post-apartheid novel; discourses of trauma, truth and reconciliation; old age and forgetting; death and commemoration. Course entry requirements: At least second-year status.

This course introduces major topics in social psychology, including the social self, decision-making, attitudes and persuasion, conformity, helping and aggression, prejudice, and interpersonal relationships. It aims to deepen students’ understanding of social psychological phenomena and provide meaningful opportunities to apply these principles to personal experiences, everyday environments, and broader social contexts.

Health psychology is the scientific study of how biological, psychological, and social factors affect health promotion as well as the prevention and treatment of illness. The course looks at how people stay healthy, why they become ill, and how they cope and recover when they are ill. This course introduces students to the theoretical models, research methodology, empirical findings, and current issues in health psychology.

This course introduces and discusses recent theories and studies on the linguistic information processing process from the perspectives of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Students examine the characteristics of language information processing, acquiring effective neuroscience-based learning principles to overcome difficulties in foreign language acquisition, and the specific features of Korean language processing. 

Topics include Introduction to language, Speech production and comprehension, Word processing, Semantic processing, Sentence processing, Discourse/dialogue, Language development in infancy and early childhood, Bilingual language processing, Aphasia, Korean language processing: lexical processing, sentence processing, discourse. 

This course provides students with an opportunity to become a sophisticated, critical, and creative user of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).  

Through this course students gain a practical mastery of current AI tools, but are also challenged and prepared to move beyond basic AI use to develop skills in prompt engineering, tool comparison, and critical output evaluation and to design and implement effective AI-powered workflows to solve complex academic and professional tasks related to research, writing, data analysis, and communication. 

Students also critically analyze the ethical responsibilities of AI use (bias, privacy, integrity) and articulate the broader philosophical implications for your work, your mind, and your identity.  

Topics include Introduction to the course's Syllabus and lab-based philosophy; What is Generative AI?; Understanding our own "mental models" of AI; The principles of effective prompt engineering; The landscape of major LLMs (open vs. closed source); Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a tool against hallucination; Overview of specialized AI tools for academic reading and writing; AI capabilities beyond text: Vision, Voice, and Code; Integrating multiple AI tools into a single workflow; Understanding AI "agents," APIs, and the role of local LLMs; The FOCUS Method for AI-assisted research; Finding and organizing information effectively; AI as a writing partner and coding assistant; Ethical considerations in AI-assisted writing; Designing AI-powered workflows for personal productivity, email management, and lifelong learning; Key limitations of AI (bias, privacy, hallucinations); Principles of ethical AI use; University policies on academic integrity; The broader societal impact of AI on science, equity, and the future of work; and The nature of intelligence, creativity, and consciousness in the age of AI. 

This course examines major systems of the brain from the perspective of clinical neuroscience and covers behavior, cognition, emotion and development. It looks at theoretical models of the aetiology and neural mechanisms of clinical pathologies (such as anxiety, depression, psychosis), as well as considers wellbeing and cognition, and the research evidence supporting them. Research methods in clinical and cognitive neuroscience, including experimental, analogue, genetic, imaging, longitudinal and epidemiological studies will be covered to outline the strengths and limitations of these techniques. 

This course introduces students to key topics, theories and methods in the field of social psychology. Social psychology is the scientific study of how individuals’ thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the actual or imagined presence of other people. This course covers such topics as attitudes, social influence, groups, prejudice, attraction, gender and altruism. The course critically evaluates seminal and contemporary studies in social psychology and considers the insights they offer into the psychological processes that underlie human relationships, culture and society.