91 - 100 of 217 results for: PSYCH

Review of classic and current research on attitudes, attitude change and persuasion. Increase appreciation for the ways that our thoughts, actions, and feelings are shaped and manipulated by social influences.

(Graduate students register for 261.) The scientific study of emotion. Topics: models of emotion, emotion antecedents, emotional responses (facial, subjective, and physiological), functions of emotion, emotion regulation, individual differences, and health implications. Focus is on experimentally tractable ideas.

Can we know what someone is thinking by examining their brain activity? Using knowledge of the human visual system and techniques from machine learning, recent work has shown impressive ability to decode what people are looking at from their brain activity as measured with functional imaging. The course will use a combination of lectures, primary literature readings, discussion and hands-on tutorials to understand this emerging technology from basic knowledge of the perceptual (primarily visual) and other cognitive systems (such as working memory) to tools and techniques used to decode brain activity.nPrerequisites: Either Psych 30 or Psych 50 or Consent of Instructor

The causes and modification of individual and collective aggression. Major issues in aggression: social labeling of injurious conduct, social determinants of aggression, effects of the mass media, institutionally sanctioned violence, terrorism, psychological mechanisms of moral disengagement, modification of aggressive styles of behavior, and legal sanctions and deterrence doctrines.

Memory and human cognition. Memory is not a unitary faculty but consists of multiple systems that support learning and remembering, each with its own processing characteristics and neurobiological substrates. This advanced undergraduate seminar will consider recent discoveries about the cognitive and neural architectures of working, declarative, and nondeclarative memory. Required: 45.

Focus is on how politicians and government learn what Americans want and how the public's preferences shape government action; how surveys measure beliefs, preferences, and experiences; how poll results are criticized and interpreted; how conflict between polls is viewed by the public; how accurate surveys are and when they are accurate; how to conduct survey research to produce accurate measurements; designing questionnaires that people can understand and use comfortably; how question wording can manipulate poll results; corruption in survey research.

Two quarter practicum exposes students to multiple phases of research by participating in a laboratory focusing on social behavior in adulthood and old age. Review of current research; participation in ongoing data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Prerequisites: 1, research experience, and consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit.

Social cognition, the ability to perceive others, understand their behaviors, and reason about their thoughts, is a critical component of what makes us human. In what ways does this ability help young children learn about the world, and what can science tell us about the representations and the inferential processes that underlie early learning? This course will explore various topics on social cognition with an emphasis on (but not limited to) developmental perspectives, including face perception, action understanding, and Theory of Mind, and encourage students to think about how these abilities might be linked to the developmental changes in children's understanding of the world. Another goal of the course is to offer an insight into the fundamental questions that have motivated psychological research on social cognition, and the value of developmental methods in addressing these questions. Students should expect to read, present, and discuss theoretical and empirical research articles and to develop original research proposals as a final project. nStudents will have an opportunity to develop their proposals into a research project in PSYCH 187, a lab course offered in Spring as a sequel to this course. This course fulfills the WIM requirement. nPrerequisites: Psych60 or Psych141

Novel technology can fuel new discoveries and generate new questions for future research. For instance, looking-time methods for studying infants or response time (RT) measures in cognitive psychology have been enabled by the use of computers and video cameras. More recently, neuroimaging techniques (such as fMRI) have transformed the field by offering a more direct look into the working human brain. These methods are, in a way, ¿old¿ and ¿new¿ ways of studying what psychologists want to study ¿ mental representations. nnWhat are the promises and challenges of using these methods to study human cognition and its development? What have we learned, where have we fallen short, and why? Most importantly, how can we make the most out of these new methods to bear on our understanding of social cognition and its development? After the first two weeks of lectures on basic methods, each week we will consider a topic that has been extensively studied in cognitive development literature. Topics will include: perception of agency, theory of mind, and morality; on each topic, we will compare two different ways of studying mental representations ¿ the ¿old¿ way (behavior) and the ¿new¿ way (neural response) ¿ to assess their relative benefits and shortcomings, and to discuss the promises and pitfalls for combining the two.nnThis course will be a combination of lectures, presentations, and discussions aimed primarily for upper-class undergraduate students or graduate students who do not have much background in neuroimaging methods, but interested in learning more about neuroimaging methods and think about how these methods can (and cannot) help address questions about social cognition and development. Prerequisite: Psych60 or Psych141, or see instructor