Psychology

The module includes a literature review but can also consist of a short empirical-oriented project. This course is part of PSYCHOLOGY: COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE (30 ECTS).

This course provides a study of artificial systems capable of generating, coding, storing and transmitting knowledge. Topics covered include perception and artificial vision; data and text mining; codification of knowledge and expert systems; usability; virtual and augmented reality; artificial learning.

The module provides students with basic knowledge of neuroanatomy, brain development and change, cellular function and communication, and basic brain functions, such as sensory processing, perception, motor function, and motivation. Important methods to study cognitive functions, mental processes, the activity of the brain, and functional anatomy are described. This course is part of PSYCHOLOGY: COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE (30 ECTS).

This course examines the recent psychological literature on the antecedents and consequences of economic inequality, which develop and have an impact very early in childhood, and analyzes social class differences in personality, motivation, and cognition. The course also identifies the reasons why people often don’t engage in collective action to change the situation and why some redistribution strategies are more likely to be endorsed than others. The course is organized around four broad themes: 1) The social and psychological consequences of economic inequality; 2) Beyond possessions: psychological differences between social classes; 3) Perceiving and understanding wealth and income distribution; and 4) Collective action and redistributive strategies The course requires students to have basic knowledge of experimental methods in psychology as a prerequisite.

This course covers the basic theory of psychological test. Students develop and evaluate psychological scales from a scientific perspective and interpret common psychological scales. The course content can be divided into three parts. The first covers the basic theory of psychological tests, introduction of standard scores, norm theory, reliability and validity test, and item analysis. The second part covers intelligence theory and its commonly used scale. The third part covers personality theory and common scale.

Mental experience is not always anchored to the present moment; instead, when the constraints of cognitive control are released, the mind is free to transition from one mental state to the next. Spontaneous thought encompasses a range of mental phenomena that are an intrinsic part of the human experience. These include mind-wandering, daydreams, vivid fantasy, inner speech, creative insights and the nightly manifestations of dreaming. There are also negative ramifications of an excessively wandering mind including distractibility in disorders of attention, obsessive thoughts in OCD, uncontrolled ruminations in depression, and disinhibited traumatic imagery in PTSD. This course asks, what are these various unconstrained modes of thought? How are they generated and instantiated in the brain? Why does the mind and brain devote time and energy to generating these spontaneous mental states? Moreover, this course considers how we can guard against unwarranted mind-wandering by reflecting on techniques such as meditation, mindfulness and their philosophical origins, and how altered states of consciousness can shed light on the content and dynamics of spontaneous thought.

The course is interdisciplinary and introduces commonly used models of work-related stress, as well as broadly applicable methods for measuring the physiological effects of stress on the body.