Psychology

This course explores the psychology behind entrepreneurship and innovation. The topics include the personality of entrepreneurs and exploring whether entrepreneurs are born or made; how entrepreneurs make decisions about risk and manage uncertainty; what drives entrepreneurs and what "returns" they can expect (in terms of income and well-being); what success means to entrepreneurs and what the ingredients are of an ‘entrepreneurial culture’. The course also reflects on how each one of us can act in an entrepreneurial manner and adopt an entrepreneurial leadership style. The course examines the psychological underpinnings of the entrepreneurial process and innovative behaviors within established business. 

This course is essentially a course in what is known as cultural (or cross-cultural) psychology. Cultural psychology is a subfield of psychology that emerged in the late 20th century as a response to the historic dominance of the Western--primarily, American--perspective in psychology. Of note, Japanese researchers played and continue to play a critical role in this field, as strong Japan-America ("Nichi-Bei") academic cooperation allows for easy comparisons and collaborations. But cultural psychology is much bigger than any two particular countries or cultures. Each and every society, and the societies within those societies, all contain powerful cultures that affect the very fabric of our thoughts, emotions, behaviors. In other words, we will look at the cultural roots of our beautiful and indispensable human diversity--the whole world over.

In addition to the topics mentioned in the basic description of the curriculum (perceptual and cognitive processes, human development, language, gender, social behavior, intercultural relations, and applied cultural psychology), we will examine the nature of culture itself. Throughout the course, we try to keep in mind big questions such as "What really is culture?" and "Why do human beings even have culture in the first place?" For more information on the kind of topics we will cover, please see the course textbook, "Cultural Psychology" by Steven Heine. Note, however, that topics will be organically updated to reflect current cultural issues and student interests.

Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that regards humans as information processing systems and aims to study its mechanism by the scientific method of measurement and observation. This course instructs on how basic human cognitive activities (e.g. perception, memory, learning, language comprehension, attention, etc.) are examined, from classic research methods to the latest research technology, such as functional magnetic resonance brain imaging.

This course explores the ultimate influences on the human mind and behavior by taking an evolutionary psychological perspective to study (modern) cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior. The course revisits cognitive, clinical, and social psychology – and topics, however, the type of questions asked to uncover psychological mechanisms and processes is different. Evolutionary psychologists focus on the ‘why’ question, and the adaptive functions of modern-day cognition, emotion, and behavior. Topics range from psychopathology to human mating and sexual conflict, and from parenting and kin selection to aggression. During the discussion of these topics, prominent assumptions – and misunderstandings – about evolutionary psychology are critically assessed.

Psychology Now! introduces students to a variety of contemporary topics in psychology and a variety of ways in which psychological knowledge is applied to understand and solve everyday problems. The course covers topics related to well-being, mental health, the psychology of work and rest, hypnosis, gender differences, educational psychology, and how the presence of others affects our behavior.

This course introduces general theories of happiness psychology, existing foreign and domestic methods for happiness measurement, and basic skills at applying happiness psychology to building up mental health and society.

This course examines the development of human cognitive function in terms of elements like perception, representation, reasoning, social cognition, memory, and language, and to comprehend the process of human cognitive ability based on existing cognitive theories and a number of recent research findings.

This in-depth seminar on the general methodology of psychotherapy focuses on child and adolescent psychotherapy with a focus on the consequences of trauma and child protection. The heart of the seminar is the dream-focused behavioral therapy, a modular and component-based therapy with about 16 sessions with the children and a caregiver. In addition, further methods of trauma therapy with children and adolescents and other trauma-related topics such as experiences of racism and discrimination and their consideration in psychotherapy are examined in more detail.

Students review and apply research on social behavior and collaborative practices from the broad range of social sciences to the context of online social interaction and computer-mediated collaboration. They explore how social identity theory, network theory, actor-network theory, and research on communities of practice, public formation and computer-supported cooperative work explain online and digitally-mediated social interaction. Research frameworks and methods such as text-based qualitative analyses are introduced and applied. The challenges in working collaboratively in online distributed teams is examined critically.

The themes, methods, and ideas in the fields of social psychology and individual differences is introduced in this course. Students focus on social psychology and individual differences as scientific disciplines that uses experimental methods for data collection to formulate and empirically test theories of human nature.