Course Offerings by term

This seminar is required for all students in their final semester of classes in the MAIA program. It is designed to instruct them in the appropriate methodology for the actual writing of the thesis. During the course of the semester students will be personally guided as they choose their thesis topic and will create an outline and abstract in preparation for their research and/or fieldwork.

This course discusses the intellectual foundations of contemporary psychology. Students learn about the concepts, theories and experiments basic to an understanding of the discipline, including classic thought and recent advances in psychology such as psychoanalysis, learning theory,biological mechanisms, developmental, social, cognitive, personality and abnormal psychology.

This course provides knowledge - but also provokes the student's knowledge on the mind-brain relationship. Phenomena in brain-damaged patients teach us how the brain creates our mind. We will talk about how memory, language, visual perception, but also social processes or the body image are represented in the brain. This course is not a standard neuropsychology course and is accessible for non-psychology students.

The course is an introduction to developmental psychology. From various points of view it explores the key question What is, and how can we understand, human development? It engages with central issues of developmental psychology (among others, through the work of influential psychologists such as Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, E. Erikson, Jerome Bruner, Katherine Nelson, Peggy J. Miller, and Michael Tomasello) and puts them into cross- and interdisciplinary contexts. These contexts include evolutionary theory; cultural and sociocultural, narrative, and critical psychology; history; anthropology; and philosophy. Beyond the scientific and conceptual domain, the course also investigates phenomena of human development in literature, arts, and film.
PY1000 is strongly recommended as a prerequisite.