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Spring 2014
Instructor Room No. Office Hours Email Telephone Secretary/TA TA Office Hours Course URL (if any)
Course Basics Credit Hours Lecture(s) Recitation/Lab (per week) Tutorial (per week)
4 Nbr of Lec(s) Per Week Nbr of Lec(s) Per Week Nbr of Lec(s) Per Week
COURSE DESCRIPTION For the lay public psychology is synonymous with the analysis of personality and treatment of mental disorders and with the armchair fantasies of Freud and his epigones, when in fact its purview extends over a very broad range of human behavior and the best it has to offer is well-grounded in empirical research conducted by tens of thousands of psychologists from all over the world. Contemporary psychology is concerned with every conceivable aspect of human behavior, from birth (and even before that) to death (but not beyond), from the nitty-gritty details of genetics and neurobiology of behavior to the larger questions of love and hate, prejudice and aggression, altruism and morality, and in between with the mysteries of perception, language and cognition, will and consciousness, and, yes, also with mental disorders, their etiology, and treatment (with no help from Freud). COURSE OBJECTIVES Students will become acquainted with the broad range of concerns of contemporary psychology. Students will learn the use of empirical methods in psychological research. Students will gain an appreciation of the reciprocal relationship between biology and psychology of behaviorhow biology influences behavior and how experience and behavior affect the brain. Students will gain an appreciation of how psychology can help us understand complex social and political issues. Students will learn to think critically about the material they encounter and be able to distinguish between sense and nonsense in psychology. Grading Quizzes (4) Midterm Final Term paper CLASS SCHEDULE Lecture 1 Introduction to the course; what is psychology? Critical thinking in psychology (Chapter 1) Lecture 2 How psychologists do research: Descriptive, correlational, and experimental methods in psychology; research ethics (Chapter 2) Lectures 3-4 Genes, evolution, and environment: Genetics of behavior; environmental influences on behavior; nature and nurture (Chapter 3)