Psychology

This course introduces students to the field of perception with a special emphasis on vision. Perception is central to our daily interactions with the world: we can effortlessly navigate through a city, comprehend fast movie trailers, and find a friend in a crowd through visual and auditory perception. While we take the rich perceptual experience for granted, visual perception involves a series of complicated cognitive processes beyond just opening our eyes. The course covers both existing theoretical frameworks and recent research findings in the field of visual perception. We will explore questions such as: How do we see the visual world? Do we see and remember correctly what’s in the physical world? How many items can we keep track of and remember at a time? How is the visual system structured and what are the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception?  

Prerequisites: Intro Psychology & Experimental Methods in Psychology. Knowledge of experimental design is necessary for this course 

This course provides an introduction to cross-cultural psychology and the main challenges and advantages of the scientific study of culture. Topics include methods in cultural psychology; cultural conception of self and agency; motivation; emotion; and cognition and perception.

This course introduces students to the key findings and theories concerning how people think, feel, and behave in organizations. It is equally relevant to students wishing to gain an understanding of business psychology at the university level as it is to students keen on developing hands-on skills that can be applied in organizational settings. The course focuses on topics such as motivation, negotiations, group and network dynamics, social status, influence, and individual personality. The course features interactive lectures, research exercises, and experiential activities, including individual negotiations, group problem-solving, and using data analysis to make strategic business decisions.

This course studies human society and introduces students to the field of sociology. Although the module provides theoretical perspectives of sociology, students are encouraged to explore a wide variety of empirical situations. Korean examples of relevant social issues are discussed. 

This course examines how mental processes such as attention, memory, language, and problem solving form the basis of our creative human cognitive abilities. An understanding of these cognitive abilities and the methods used by cognitive psychologists to study them provides an essential foundation for ongoing study in psychology. Classic and current research findings are discussed in this course to reveal what is known about the workings of the human mind. Specific topics covered in this course include: perceptual processes and their role in cognition; the nature and function of selective attention; categorization and the mental representation of knowledge; the structure, function and organization of the human memory system; human linguistic ability, including language acquisition, language disorders, and models of spoken and written language processes; and higher order cognitive processes such as problem solving, decision making, and musical ability.

This course examines current discussions and evidence about the psychological significance of media. It encompasses analyses of the psychological impacts of media content and presentation; how individuals process media content as well as how the media affects individuals' knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. Topics include: psychological processing of media; media violence; media realism; sexual content; stereotyping; media effects on collective opinion, and the effects of new communication technologies. 

It is commonly known that the experiences of pain help both humans and animals to avoid potentially harmful situations. In recent two decades, progress in research techniques substantially helps researchers to investigate the neural mechanisms of pain. The perception and expression of pain engages the whole neural axis from the peripheral to central nervous system, and an interdisciplinary approach is needed to elucidate the whole picture of pain. How animals and humans process pain and what the influence of emotions and cognitions on pain remain largely unknown. As for the aspect of investigation, how researchers approach pain in animals and humans is a critical issue. What is even more challenging is the neural basis for chronic pain, which results from the aberrant interactions among the bottom-up pain transmission, descending pain inhibition and top-down emotional and cognitive modulations. In this course, we will discuss the neural mechanisms responsible for both physiological and pathological pain and discuss future research ideas, which would provide a promising direction for conquering pain in the future.