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What we'll do

Introduction to Psychology covers the material typically covered in a one-semester college-level introductory Psychology course.

What we’ll learn

• How to apply attribution theory to explain motives and principles of emotional learning, taste aversion, superstitious behavior, and learned helplessness, and anticipate the impact of self-fulfilling prophecy on behavior
• How to articulate the impact of social and cultural categories on self-concept and relations with others, and distinguish the different domains of psychology
• How to compare motivational theories, including the strengths and weaknesses of each cognitive process and describe and compare different theoretical approaches in explaining behavior
• How to describe and differentiate psychological and physiological systems of memory, how research design drives the reasonable conclusions that can be drawn, the essential characteristics of insight learning, latent learning, and social learning, the hearing process, including the specific nature of energy transduction, relevant anatomical structures, and specialized pathways in the brain for each of the senses, the nervous system and its subdivisions and functions in the brain
• How to discuss psychology’s abiding interest in how heredity, environment, and evolution work together to shape behavior; the interaction of nature and nurture (including cultural variations), specifically social development, in the determination of behavior; the major diagnostic categories of various disorders; the value of reliance on operational definitions and measurement in behavioral research
• How to explain the maturation of cognitive abilities like Piaget’s stages and information process
• How to identify and apply basic motivational concepts to our understanding of the behavior of humans and other animals, and understand basic processes and systems in the biological bases of behavior, including parts of the neuron, and perform independent, dependent, confounding, and control variables in experimental designs
• How to identify the contributions of key researchers in cognitive psychology, the psychology of learning, the study of the brain, and the area of cognitive development in childhood
• How to interpret graphs that exhibit the results of learning experiments, and provide examples of how biological constraints create learning predispositions
• How to recognize the use of the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association as the primary reference for making diagnostic judgments, and summarize effectiveness of specific treatments used to address specific problems from various perspectives

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Determine how the methodology of research affects the outcome of a study
• Analyze how biological and environmental factors interact to influence our behaviors and mental processes
• Analyze how our interpretations of information we receive influences our behaviors and mental processes
• Distinguish between the different theories of learning
• Analyze different developmental theories to better understand our lifespan and how our mental processes and thinking change over time
• Determine why a psychological perspective is necessary in the diagnosis and treatment of disorders
• Analyze how groups can affect an individual's mental processes and behavior

How we'll measure learning

Instructors evaluate student work using rubrics and provide detailed constructive feedback on each assignment.