The course is designed to be a broad survey of the academic discipline of psychology. The text for the course, and therefore the course, is organized around five main questions: How do humans (and, where relevant, other animals) act; how do they know; how do they interact; how do they develop; and how do they differ from each other? Students are responsible for learning the material in the text without an oral repetition of the material in class.

This course surveys the various fields of inquiry within the academic discipline of psychology. Areas of psychology to be covered and examples of questions to be addressed within each area include the following: developmental psychology (How do children develop morality?), psychobiology (What are the psychological bases of drug addiction?), consciousness (Does everyone dream?), learning (How can classical conditioning help people overcome phobias?), memory (What is the most effective strategy to us in studying for an exam?), abnormal psychology (What causes manic depression?), personality (Why are some people more likely than others to conform to group pressures?), social psychology (In relationships, is it true that "opposites attract?"), and applied psychology (How do psychologists aid in profiling and apprehending serial killers?).

This course is a survey course of childhood development. From a psychological perspective, we will examine the cognitive, social, and motor development of children from infancy through middle childhood. The course itself is divided into three sections. In the first section, we will introduce the psychological theories of cognitive, social and motor development, which will serve as the theoretical foundation of the course. We will also examine the biological and environmental underpinnings of development, prenatal development, and birth. The second section of the course will cover development in infancy, and the final section of the course will cover early and middle childhood development.

This course is required before Moderation for psychology majors. The requirement of Psychology 203 and 204 cannot be met by courses taken elsewhere unless the student successfully passes tests based on these courses as they are taught at Bard. This is the first semester of a one-year, integrated course in applied statistics and research design and is offered only in the fall semester. In this semester we emphasize experimental research and parametric models, while the second-semester course focuses on correlational research and non-parametric models. The purpose of the year-long course is to prepare students to work seriously with quantitative data and to introduce them to the fundamental concepts of research design. The first semester includes elementary descriptive and inferential statistics from t-tests through contrasts and the analysis of covariance. It covers the rationale of basic concepts, their application, and the presentation of the results of statistical analyses; the fundamentals of the logic of experimental design and methods for controlling the effects of relevant variables; the practice of performing experiments and data analysis; some fundamental facts, approaches, and models developed in the contemporary study of human memory which have a direct application to the learning we do every day; and enough computer usage to permit use of experimental software programs and independent use of the SPSS/PC+ statistical analysis package. In addition, we will use a segment of the PBS tele-course "Against All Odds" as an introduction and warm-up activity for most class meetings. Any student planning a concentration in psychology must have adequate mathematical skills (basic arithmetic and algebra) before enrolling in this course. Those with a weakness in basic mathematics should enroll in appropriate courses during their freshman year.

Although building grand theories of personality has gone out of fashion in contemporary psychology, these systems play an important role in understanding the history of psychology and continue to provide central, although often implicit, frameworks for clinical thinking. Moreover, personality theories have influenced knowledge in many other disciplines, including literary studies, anthropology, politics, history, and art criticism. In this course we will review the major theories of personality, including but not limited to Freud, Jung, Erikson, Sullivan, Horney, Rogers, and Kelley. A central perspective of the course will be how the biography of the theorist as well as various historical and intellectual influences came to shape the theory.

Cross-listed: MES

of related interest: Gender Studies

In this course, students examine relations between various racial, ethnic, religious, and gender groups in the U.S. and in other cultures from the point of view of psychological theory, method and knowledge. The determinants of intergroup relations in neighborhoods, schools, work settings, and communities are studied, and we explore how prejudice and discrimination between groups can ultimately lead to large-scale social conflicts such as revolution, extreme violence and hatred, war, and genocide. Strategies for promoting harmony and equality, and for resolving disputes, between groups are considered.

Cross-listed: MES

How a given society conceptualizes the notion of the self has implications for the perception of agency and the attribution of responsibility in its therapeutic (helping) process. This course takes an excursion into the boundaries of the self from "Western," "non-Western," and "women's" perspectives, using research findings and cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural readings. It then examines the implications of the explanatory models for counseling in a multicultural society.

Cross-listed: AADS, MES