Aims

The key aim of this introductory course is to present students with the fundamentals of Psychology and show its relevance to issues encountered within the students' own major subject field. Teaching focuses on the main areas of research and attempts to introduce students to the study of basic behavioural processes using scientific methods. This is an important aim of the course, given that Psychology is a field where uninformed intuition, not to mention a whole popular literature of very variable quality is likely to lead to errors.
For this reason, the second objective of the course is to demystify a number of popular ideas and equip students with critical judgement with respect to the most dubious applications. To achieve this, teaching on methodology and history of Psychology is essential.

Main themes

In the first part of the course, Psychology is set within a historical perspective. This is followed by teaching on methods in Psychology, to develop students critical skills. The teaching of the applications will be designed so as to introduce the basic concepts and principal results in the different topic areas. The teacher(s) will take care to use these applications to illustrate the basic concepts and critical principles developed in the first part of the course.

Content and teaching methods

Contents: Introduction to basic Psychology:
- Historical approach: the major movements (structuralism, functionalism, behaviourism, cognitivism, evolutionism…), their key ideas, results and areas of application (clinical, industrial, commercial, health)
- Methodological approaches (experimentation, observation, correlation, simulation)
The applied topics will be selected from the following list (alphabetically):
- Mimetic behaviour
- Decision and risk (the psychology of choice, perception of risk and uncertainty)
- Emotion, cognition and physiology
- Memory and witness (the construction of false memories)
- Personality, intelligence and measuring instruments
- Persuasion (innate/acquired, publicity, conditioning and self-criticism)
- Psychology of personal development
- Reasoning and problem solving (simple problems, complex problems and cognitive illusions)
- Health and well-being (life hygiene, stress, psychological determinants of health risks)

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Course entry requirements: none.
Evaluation: Students will be evaluated on the specific skills they should have acquired: research and critical analysis skills in the field of Psychology. There is a written examination, evaluation during the course and a short research project which students must complete.

Other credits in programs