Psychology

Apart from offering sensory feedback for object manipulation and movement, the somatosensory system also provides signals that are intrinsically rewarding or punishing. The behavioral drive to seek pleasure and to avoid pain is of crucial importance for survival and partly relies on the same neurochemical circuitry. This course discusses the neurobiological basis of aversive and pleasant somatosensory processing. Brain circuits involved in nociception and analgesia as well as theories and treatments of chronic pain are discussed.

Decision making is a central aspect of any business activity. The ability to understand how decisions are made, and to predict, guide, and improve those decisions is an invaluable part of every change maker's toolbox. In this course, students develop this ability, and they are introduced to insights from behavioral science and decision analytics and its application to management and policy making.

This course will cover the basic and advanced counseling, psychotherapeutic, and behavior management skills used by professionals in health sciences working with individuals with communication disorders.

This course examines everyday ethical questions through the lens of different scales of human relationships. It will examine five key relationships through cross-cultural perspectives: (1) with oneself—including self-care, self-forgiveness, and conscience; (2) with friendship and dating; (3) with one’s immediate community—including family and professional life; (4) the larger society in which one lives—including social media and the politics of respect; and (5) with the transcendence of mystery, the divine, and the sacred—including urban space and the ecological other with which we participate.

This class covers the field of judgment and decision-making, which is the collection of cognitive, social, and emotion studies that analyze how people make decisions and evaluate the alternatives available. In particular, the class covers dual-process models of thinking, which distinguish between automatic information processing and conscious, deliberative processing. Related to these theories is the understanding of the pivotal role emotions have in driving our everyday actions. Finally, the class covers a series of applications of judgment and decision-making in different economic fields.

The course describes some of the key models, concepts and applications of clinical psychology. The course discusses topics including theories and models in clinical psychology; multidimensional assessment in clinical psychology; clinical features and etiopathogenetic mechanisms of some of the most prevalent mental disorders; description of the main interventions and their mechanisms in clinical psychology; and examples of clinical formulation and discussion of clinical cases. The course requires students to have completed at least one year of study in the field, specifically on courses in General Psychology, Brain and Behavior, and Developmental Psychology across Cultures, as a prerequisite.

This course provides an overview of key debates within moral psychology, such as the definition of morality, rationalism, emotionism, and nativism. Students consider multiple theories and research which provides insight about how moral judgements are related to cognitions, emotions, and social identities. The consequences of the moral emotions will be discussed, considering implications for mental health, interpersonal relationships, and social equalities.

Stress is a major determinant of global public health. Stress has been called a “health epidemic of the twenty-first century” by the World Health Organization and is associated with massive humanitarian, medical, and economic costs. This course introduces the basic principles of how our body's health is threatened by psychosocial stressors as diverse as daily worries, work stress, low social economic status, discrimination, and natural disasters. A major role is played by psychological factors such as perceived control, and conscious and unconscious thoughts, and emotions. The lectures cover the many ways in which the mind influences the body during stress, including the cardiovascular, hormonal and immune systems, metabolism, sleep, growth, ageing, reproduction, and sex. The course discusses stress management and recent contributions from the field of emotion regulation. Stress is not a “luxury problem” of the industrialized countries; it is also, and perhaps even more so, a leading health risk in less developed countries. Therefore, the course also explores the global relevance of stress and health. There is hardly a concept that is so ill defined in and outside science and at the same time so important for our health as stress. Not surprisingly the media are teeming with erroneous information about its effect on health. Students learn how to systematically gather information about stress and health thereby training the essential academic skill of distinguishing scientific knowledge from omnipresent unsupported claims in the rapidly accumulating information volume in the media (especially internet), and evaluating this knowledge in terms of its meaning for public health. This course requires students to have completed an introduction to psychology course as a prerequisite.