Faculty of Arts & Sciences

How do our brains give rise to our minds? Specifically, how are mental processes related to neural activity? This course will explore these questions, as well as the methods by which cognitive neuroscience seeks to answer them. We will focus on processes within perception, attention, memory, language, action, emotion, and social cognition, and methods including neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and electrophysiology.

Introduction to the study of psychological dysfunction. Focuses on abnormal behavior as it relates to the definition, etiology, and treatment of major symptom domains. This course will emphasize critical evaluation of the causes and mechanisms of mental illness, with special attention paid to recent neuroscientific and genetic research on the neurobiology of psychopathology.

Faculty will each lecture about their main area of research: its history, methods, and discoveries, focusing on contemporary research topics including perception, memory, cognitive development, animal cognition, social cognition, moral decision-making, consciousness, language, and psychopathology. Includes a view of methods to study the mind, brain and behavior involving neuroscientific techniques, evolutionary psychology, web-based experimentation, traditional laboratory experiments, and field studies. Emphasis is primarily human, as well as nonhuman primates.

Examines selected issues of relevance to social and cognitive neuroscience addressed in contemporary psychological research, and is normally required for students in the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience track of Psychology. Special attention to examining topics from a variety of perspectives, to reading primary sources in the field, and to developing thinking, writing, research, and discussion skills. This tutorial, or Psychology 971, is required of concentrators upon entering the concentration, normally in the sophomore year. Letter-graded.

Conflicts begin in human minds -therefore understanding conflict requires the understanding of the influence of social-psychological dynamics-. In this course we will focus on social psychological concepts of intergroup conflict, such as identity, collective memory and stereotypes, and inquire how they propel groups towards conflict. We will also consider how understanding these processes can help prevent and resolve conflicts. For example, we will ask, how individuals reform as one identity group. What role does collective memory play in sustaining conflicts? Can contact and dialogue help to overcome conflict? Which specific circumstances are required for a successful conflict resolution?

This course will review the role social factors (social support, social interactions, social functioning, and the broader social context of communities) relate to the development and maintenance of psychopathology. In the context of disorders such as schizophrenia, depression (including suicide), eating disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder, this course will look at how social factors might contribute to the development of mental illness, as well as how social factors might be indicators of mental illness, and finally how social factors might mediate the severity of or even prevent the development of mental illness.

How do you draw the line between bluish green and greenish blue? A coat and a jacket? Your own race and another race? How can people judge baseball pitches or facial emotions in fractions of a second? How do we boil down complex mixes of emotional information to make binary decisions, like whether to go on a second date? We face a world full of subtle gradations, but effortlessly place people and things into discrete categories. This course will explore how these categories form, as well as the consequences that arise from the ways we categorize objects, people, and ideas.

Supervised reading and research with a faculty supervisor normally resulting in a thesis prospectus. Required, supplemental group meetings to discuss topic and supervisor selection, study methodology, prospectus writing, and the prospectus meeting. Graded SAT/UNS. Full prospectus or term paper required.

Individual supervised thesis research supplemented with occasional group meetings to discuss major aspects of the thesis process (e.g., organizing, conducting, and presenting research). Graded Sat/Unsat. Prospectus meeting required for fall term credit, as well as a paper for students who divide course at mid-year. Submission of thesis required for full year credit.

A capstone course aimed at an integrated review of the field through seminar discussions, oral reports, field experience, practitioner interviews, and independent research projects. Focus is upon the perspectives and prescriptions in contemporary psychology.

This course will examine psychological and physical health from the perspective of Positive Psychology. A major focus will be on mindfulness theory and its relationship to stress/coping; illness/wellness; decision-making; placebos. The medical model, the bio social model, and a unified mind/body model will be compared to examine their relationship to achieving resilience.

The purpose of the course is to understand the effects of social threat, ostracism, anxiety, and choking on performance, and how to overcome them. This includes understanding the different types of impediments to excelling, how these impediments influence performance, and ultimately, how understanding these impediments lead to interventions to overcome them. Past and present empirical research and theory will be examined.

This course will introduce students to the basics of the MATLAB user interface and programming language, for the purpose of using MATLAB to conduct behavioral research. In the first half of the course, you will learn about MATLAB syntax, general programming concepts such as functions, loops, and conditional statements, and how to analyze and visualize data in MATLAB. In the second half of the course, you will learn to program psychology experiments with the Psychophysics toolbox (a set of MATLAB functions), including displaying stimuli (visual and auditory), and collecting responses from participants.

An introduction to how drugs affect mood, sensation, consciousness, and other psychological and behavioral functions in both healthy and disease states. Introduces concepts in neuroscience and pharmacology to understand how drugs are used to treat drug abuse, psychiatric disorders and why individuals use recreational drugs. Covers all CNS drugs, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, alcohol, and both licit and illicit drugs of abuse. Debates controversial topics such as research with psychiatric populations, diagnosing ADHD, teenage suicide, marijuana legalization, and needle exchange programs.

This course will explore the "mismatch" between our ancestral brain and the modern world. After covering the evolution of the human brain, the bulk of the course will focus on case studies including how drugs hijack the normal function of brain systems, how the Facebook age places stresses on social systems that evolved to handle close-knit groups of 25 or so individuals, and how the brain degenerates as we live unexpectedly long.

The goal of this course is for students to master the foundational logic and theory of evolutionary psychology. Students are exposed to and consider topics covering the range of human experience, including cooperation, mating, friendship, aggression, warfare, collective action, kinship, parenting, social learning, dietary choice, spatial cognition, reasoning, emotions, morality, personality and individual differences, predator avoidance, hazard management, and culture.

Intended for undergraduates or those with limited background in cognitive neuroscience. Students will attend and participate in laboratory research and in a seminar that includes discussion of active scientific projects, recent important journal articles, and didactic lecture on technical aspects of methods central to cognitive neuroscience research. Readings will be assigned that survey basic principles of system neuroscience, cognitive science, and methods including functional MRI, MEG, and single unit physiology.

This course will introduce students to the dynamics of brain development during the second decade of life. This course will examine key changes in structural, functional, connectivity, and neurochemical changes that take place in the brain during adolescence. We will assess how these changes influence several domains of the adolescent mind, including self-control, risky decision making, changes in daily emotions and moods, the onset of psychiatric illnesses (such as mood and anxiety disorders), and sensitivity to social evaluation.

Knowledge of objects and actions encompasses their perceptual and motor properties as well as more abstract properties such as information about their function (e.g., what they are used for, the goal of an action). In this seminar, we will explore the relationship between the sensory-motor processes involved in the perception of objects and the execution of actions and the organization and representation of the conceptual knowledge associated with objects and actions. We will review critically the relevant behavioral, neuroimaging and neuropsychological research.

Your face contains a hidden code that instantly communicates who you are, how you're feeling, and what your intentions may be. Whether accurate or inaccurate, human brains extract information in a fraction of a second from faces and use it to make simple and complex judgments about people. Perceived facial attractiveness can be hugely consequential in real world encounters. The media surrounds us with images of faces and hidden cameras record our own faces many times a day. We will explore "decoding" the human face from computational, psychological and biological perspectives, providing comprehensive review of this highly interdisciplinary field

Film and television shows often capture the cutting edge of science, and they sometimes even anticipate future scientific advances. We'll use examples from film and television as an introduction to several hot topics in the field of neuroscience, such as Mind Control, Mind Reading, Smart Pills, and Brain Machine Interfaces, which are all getting closer to reality. Will neuroscientists ever be able to control a person's thoughts, or to know what a person is thinking? Can taking a pill really awaken untapped brain power? Will you ever be able to drive a car without touching a steering wheel? In this course, we will cover the state of the art and the future of these exciting areas of neuroscience (and entertainment). Because these are not textbook topics, this is an advanced course that will focus on reading and discussing the primary literature.

How does your nationally, social class, race/ethnicity, gender, faith and politics change the way you think, feel and behave? This course explores how your cultural background shapes your sense of self, emotions, motivation, decision-making and relationships. We will talk about God, sex, politics, violence and how our culture impacts the names we give our children. The goal of this course is to help you gain a better understanding of the ways in which human culture and the human psyche interact while enhancing your ability to promote greater intercultural harmony and to thrive in our increasingly multicultural and globalized world.

As a social species, a significant proportion of our everyday thoughts are devoted to social cognition - thinking about other people and comprehending what they are thinking about us. In this course we will merge theories from social and cognitive psychology to examine how people make sense of each other, social groups, and the surrounding social world. Throughout the course, we will draw on neuroscientific findings to uncover the neural basis of these abilities, as well as examine deficits in these social skills in autism and related disorders.

This course seeks to understand the psychological dynamics of groups in work settings. This includes understanding the cohesion and development of groups (e.g., learning, satisfaction, commitment), interpersonal processes and relationships that occur between group members as they work together (e.g., information sharing, competition and conflict, conformity) and motivational factors that influence group performance (e.g., groupthink, social facilitation). Past and present empirical research and theory will be examined.

An introduction to research on implicit social cognition, with special focus on attitudes, beliefs, and identity and in some cases its applications to law, business, medicine, and government. Students will be paired with individual researchers to work on ongoing projects that can turn into more independent projects. In addition to weekly work in the laboratory, students are expected to attend biweekly discussion groups focusing on current issues and directions in the laboratory as a whole.

Many believe that the human brain evolved to support the complex demands of interacting with other people. In this class, we will explore how our brains are wired to allow us to know ourselves, to know what other people are thinking, and predict what they might do, and to regulate our actions to most effectively interact with others. We will combine theories and findings from social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience to work towards an understanding of the brainin a social context.

This course is designed to heighten your understanding of social and economic inequality using a psychological perspective. We will discuss psychological processes and theories related to inequality, as well as relevant programs and policies. We will also discuss perceptions and consequences of social, gender, and race inequalities, and how economic inequality divides us and undermines our well-being. Promising interventions and strategies to assuage the negative effects of inequality will also be explored.

How do we develop as social beings from infancy to adulthood? What are the biological, cultural, and individual factors that influence this development? How does human social development differ from that of other primates? In exploring these and other questions, this course will take a developmental and evolutionary approach to topics that include: attachment; cultural learning; cooperation and competition; theory of mind; social categorization; moral reasoning; friendship; peers; parent-child interaction.

Students participate in research on language acquisition, language comprehension, and language production. Each student has responsibility for a project. Weekly meeting to discuss student projects and readings that are relevant to them. Ten hours a week commitment (includes lab meeting).

Students participate in research on conceptual development and language acquisition. Each student has responsibility for a project. Weekly lab meeting to discuss student projects and readings relevant to them. Ten hours a week commitment (includes lab meeting).

Examines the issues of free will and responsibility from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives, with special attention paid to potential legal applications.

Extends the material covered in Psychology 18 in a more clinical direction. Provides students with an opportunity to approach issues in clinical psychology from a scientist-practitioner perspective. Focuses on how research-based approaches to the study and treatment of psychopathology can translate into high quality ethical care for patients with major psychiatric problems.

Why do some individuals intentionally engage in behaviors that cause themselves direct bodily harm, such as suicide and self-mutilation? We explore past and current models for understanding self-harm behaviors. We consider the classification, etiology, assessment, and treatment of self-harm behaviors from psychological, developmental, contextual, and biological perspectives.

The goal of this course is to give an overview of the major research findings across mood disorders such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Every class will involve classic and cutting edge research from the literature on mood disorders. The class will also involve discussion of psychological (i.e., therapeutic) and psychiatric (i.e., medical) perspectives on etiology and treatment. By the end of the course, students will understand the etiology, course, and treatment of a variety of mood disorders.

The goal of this course is to give an in-depth understanding of the theoretical and empirical work on stress (e.g., negative life events, psychological and physiological stress), coping, and resilience. Theories of stress will be discussed from social, cognitive, and biological perspectives. Major focus will be given to the study of resilience to stress and related topics (e.g., psychopathology, self-injury) through the lens of positive psychology. By the end of the course, students will understand the causes, course, and consequences of stress and resilience to stress.

Provides a conceptual and practical introduction to statistics used in psychology and other behavioral sciences. Covers basic topics in statistics including: measures of central tendency and variability; probability and distributions, correlations and regression, hypothesis testing, t-tests, analysis of variance, and chi-square tests. Includes a lab section with instruction in statistical analysis using a computer program.

This course offers intense, foundational exposure to psychological statistics, focusing heavily on analysis of variance (one-way, factorial, repeated-measures, mixed-model). Other topics include: exploratory data analysis, sampling distributions, null hypothesis significance testing, t-tests, fixed versus random effects, post hoc and planned comparisons, correlation, simple regression, the general linear model, chi-square tests, nonparametric statistics, confidence intervals, and meta-analysis.

Advanced survey of research topics in cognition/brain/behavior, development, experimental psychopathology, clinical and social psychology.

Advanced survey of current topics in experimental psychopathology.

What's stopping you from doing absolutely everything that your devious heart desires? The ability to flexibly control our behavior - particularly when it comes to rewarding things like food, sex, and drugs - has huge consequences for our long-term happiness and success. Though we are reasonably good at this as a species, dramatic individual differences in the capacity for self-control are readily apparent. In this class, we will examine the cognitive construct of self-control, its neurobiological underpinnings and sources of individual variation, and relationships to psychopathology.

Year-long lab course on children's social-cognitive development and the study of cooperation. Students develop and pilot experiments with children or participate in ongoing projects. In addition, students read and discuss papers on social cognition, understanding of norms, and cooperation from developmental and evolutionary psychology.

This seminar, organized in coordination with the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, will focus on the development of knowledge in the first five years. Drawing on behavioral research on infants and young children, as well as research in cognitive neuroscience, research using controlled rearing methods with animal models, and research developing and testing computational models, we consider both the starting points for human cognitive development and the ways in which early knowledge grows. Topics will be chosen in accord with student interests and likely will include early developing knowledge of objects and their mechanical interactions, of animate beings and their behavior and intentions, of social beings and their communication and relationships, as well as the development of abstract concepts (e.g., causal concepts, mathematical concepts) that apply to all these entities. In addition, we will look at how infants and children learn to represent their own abilities and utilities and how these emerging self-representations support and constrain their learning about the world.

Proseminar in conceptual development and language acquisition.

Read and discuss papers to understand how the primate frontal cortex supports a wide range of cognitive operations, including attention, working memory, executive control functions, and decision making.

What is memory for? We examine issues of memory structure in light of questions concerning memory function, including errors and distortions and the ways memory informs decisions about future reactions.

What makes a successful cognitive or neural model? In this seminar, we will do a series of in depth case studies to address this question, exploring several of the more successful cognitive and neural models. While many examples will be drawn from the literature on human vision, the course will also draw on examples from language, development, and higher-level reasoning.

Discussion of current research on visual cognition (how we perceive, attend to, and remember visual information). We will also discuss ongoing research by participants in the seminar.

Topic to be announced.

Involves readings, seminar discussion, and research on emotional disorders conducted in the instructor's laboratory (e.g., social anxiety disorder, complicated grief, obsessive-compulsive disorder).

Examines cultural, racial, ethnic, and other individual differences in human behavior which affect the practice of psychology. Reviews current science examining the relations between these factors and human behavior, psychopathology, and provision of psychological services.

Review theories of behavior change, methods of studying such change (single-case research designs, randomized clinical trials, etc.), and current evidence-based approaches to assessing and treating psychopathology. Examines historical, ethical, and cultural issues.

Reviews two emerging fields in neuroscience, affective and social neuroscience. Through integration of human and animal data, the course focuses on mapping affect, motivation, and social cognition to brain function.

Provides instruction and experience in conducting clinical research in laboratory and clinical settings, with a special focus on developmental psychopathology.

Research seminar examines the neurobiology of disinhibitory psychopathology (aggression, antisocial behavior, substance abuse). Students participate first-hand in personality/behavioral testing and brain imaging, and in weekly discussions of the genetics and cellular/systems/cognitive neuroscience of disinhibitory psychopathology.

Advanced survey of classic and current research and theory in social psychology, including self, social cognition, attitudes, social influence, altruism and aggression, prejudice and discrimination, close relationships, and group dynamics.

This seminar provides lab experience in behavioral approaches to decision making and negotiation.

Laboratory methods and research seminar on social cognition, with emphasis on moral judgment and attributional processes. Provides experience with behavioral, formal and neuroscientific research methods.

Topic to be announced.

Topic to be announced.

The course addresses traditional questions about the role of social cognition in human evolution and development, integrating the newest findings from comparative and developmental psychology. The course is structured around three themes (cultural learning, cooperation, and competition), corresponding to the three main theoretical approaches that have given rise to the study of social cognition from an evolutionary perspective. This course is discussion-based, bringing some new ideas (your ideas!) to bear on tricky questions that are still unresolved in the field.

This course is aimed at doctoral students who intend to conduct experimental and quasi-experimental research for the study of individuals' behavior in business (e.g., marketing, organizational behavior) and related disciplines (e.g., psychology). The primary objective of the course is to provide students with the concepts and tools needed for planning and designing laboratory experiments, and for collecting and analyzing behavioral data. The course will also discuss other methodologies that may be helpful when working with field sites (namely, field experiments and surveys). A secondary objective is to provide students the foundations for the methodological evaluation of other behavioral researchers' work - a skill that will be helpful in their role as future academic reviewers. The course thus covers the designs and analyses that are most often used by experimental researchers in psychology, organizational behavior, and also marketing. The course will be hands-on and oriented towards providing technical skills for the design and implementation of laboratory experiments, including overcoming possible pitfalls and common barriers. The course assignment will be for students to write a proposal outlining the theory, design, power analyses, and proposed analysis for a laboratory experiment. Our hope is that the students will conduct the research during the course or afterwards, and that this course will help design and conduct impactful and rigorous behavioral research. Overall goal The overall goal of the course is for students to understand that how they design their experiment (all aspects of it) has a large role in whether they can answer their research questions. Please note that the course will begin on Monday, September 8th.

Students will gain human subject research skills and experience in the lab and online. We will cover a range of topics in social psychology, including but not limited to: nonverbal behavior, social perception, personal power, hormones, emotions, and performance in stressful situations. In biweekly meetings, students will have the opportunity to provide and receive feedback on the work of the lab as well as discuss relevant papers. In addition, monthly trainings will be held covering research tools such as eye-trackers, physiological measures, Qualtrics, and Mechanical Turk.

A deeper exploration into the theoretical and experimental issues pertaining to decision making and the psychology of possibility, raised in Psychology 2670a.

Faculty interview psychiatric inpatients to demonstrate establishing treatment alliances, gathering histories, and initial assessment. Group discussion will consider how theoretical principles are applied to clinical work.

Research seminar open to graduate students conducting research in cognitive development.

This weekly seminar for graduate students in clinical psychology is designed to provide basic skills in administering and interpreting standardized tests in the areas of intellectual assessment and personality assessment.

Covers research methods for language acquisition and language comprehension throughout the life span. All students must be currently engaged in experimental research.

This course is all about Statistical Learning techniques in Psychology and related fields. Statistical Learning is a modern discipline of Statistics which involves developments from the fields of Statistics (obviously), Machine Learning, Computer and Data Science. Overall it refers to a vast set of tools for understanding complex data. The first series of lectures covers basic regression techniques for categorical data (ordinal and multinomial logit models) as well as advanced techniques such as causal models (propensity score matching), spatial regression, censored regression (tobit), nonlinear regression (generalized additive models), regularization and shrinkage methods (Ridge, LASSO), and generalized estimation equation (GEE) for longitudinal/correlational data. Another lecture series deals with clustering techniques such as hierarchical clustering, k-means, BIRCH, and mixture models (e.g. latent class analysis). The mixture model approach will then be embedded into a regression context in order to estimate regression models with unobserved heterogeneity (latent class regression). Finally, there will be a unit on functional data analysis (FDA) where each single observation is described by a function (e.g. eye tracking data, brain imaging data).

A graduate companion course to "Psychological Science," which explores the theories and controversies in greater depth. Topics include genetics, evolution, cognitive neuroscience, perception, development, consciousness, social psychology, personality, psychopathology, violence, sex, and morality.

Graduate companion course to Origins of Knowledge, which explores the theories and controversies in greater depth. Topics include the evolutionary, cultural, and ontogenetic origins of representational capacities, including space, number, objects, agents, language, and intuitive theories.

Examines ethical principles and legal issues involved in the practice of psychology, with an emphasis on clinical psychology. Covers ethical principles and code of conduct; uses case examples to highlight the application of these principles.