Psychology - graduate program

Psychology

[ undergraduate program | graduate program | faculty ]

All courses, faculty listings, and curricular and degree requirements described herein are subject to change or deletion without notice.

Courses

For course descriptions not found in the UC San Diego General Catalog 2019–20, please contact the department for more information.

Lower Division

PSYC 1. Psychology (4)

This course provides an overview of the basic concepts in psychology. Topics may include human information processing, learning and memory, motivation, development, language acquisition, social psychology, and personality.

PSYC 2. General Psychology: Biological Foundations (4)

This course provides an introductory survey of the relationship between human behavior and brain function. Specific areas of emphasis include vision and other sensory processes, memory, motivation, attention, and cognition.

PSYC 3. General Psychology: Cognitive Foundations (4)

This course provides an introduction to the basic concepts of cognitive psychology. Topics include perception, attention, memory, language, and thought. The relation of cognitive psychology to cognitive science and to neuropsychology is also covered.

PSYC 4. General Psychology: Behavioral Foundations (4)

This course provides an introduction to behavioral psychology. Topics include classical conditioning, operant conditioning, animal learning, and motivation and behavior modification.

PSYC 6. General Psychology: Social Foundations (4)

This course provides an introduction to social psychology. Topics may include emotion, aesthetics, behavioral medicine, person perception, attitudes and attitude change, and behavior in social organizations.

PSYC 7. General Psychology: Developmental Foundations (4)

This course provides an introduction to theories and research results in developmental psychology, covering infancy through adulthood.

PSYC 60. Introduction to Statistics (4)

This course provides an introduction to both descriptive and inferential statistics, core tools in the process of scientific discovery and the interpretation of research.

PSYC 70. Research Methods in Psychology (4)

This course provides an overview of how to choose appropriate research methods for experimental and nonexperimental studies. Topics may include classic experimental design and counterbalancing, statistical power, and causal inference in experimental and nonexperimental settings. Prerequisites: PSYC 60 or equivalent.

PSYC 71. Laboratory in Psychological Research Methods (4)

This course provides hands-on research experience. Lecture topics will include experimental and nonexperimental designs, research ethics, data analysis, and causal inference. Students will design original research projects, collect and analyze data, and write a full APA-style report, including a brief literature review relevant to their design. This course builds on PSYC 70 by applying design principles to students’ own research questions and ideas. Prerequisites: PSYC 70.

PSYC 81. Laboratory in Brain, Behavior, and Evolution (4)

This course provides students the opportunity to learn about the intricate relationship that exists between brain and behavior, as well as the evolutionary forces that shape this interaction. Lectures for this course aim to introduce students to some of the best examples in the literature that highlight these issues, while a parallel component of the course aims to introduce students to performing research on the topic. Prerequisites: COGS 14B or Math 11 or PSYC 60.

PSYC 87. Freshman Seminar (1)

The Freshman Seminar Program is designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman Seminars are offered in all campus departments and undergraduate colleges, and topics vary from quarter to quarter. Enrollment is limited to fifteen to twenty students, with preference given to entering freshmen.

PSYC 90. Undergraduate Seminar (1)

This seminar introduces the various subdisciplines in psychology and their research methods, and also explores career and graduate school opportunities. This includes informal presentations by faculty, graduate students, and other professionals.

PSYC 93. Topics in Psychology (4)

Selected topics in the field of psychology. May be repeated for credit as topics vary.

PSYC 99. Independent Study (2 or 4)

Independent study or research under direction of a member of the faculty. May be taken up to three times for a maximum of twelve units. Prerequisites: lower-division standing, completion of at least thirty units of undergraduate study at UC San Diego with a minimum UC San Diego GPA of 3.0; completed and approved Special Studies form.

Upper Division

PSYC 100. Clinical Psychology (4)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the causes, characteristics, and treatment of psychological disorders. Particular emphasis is given to the interaction between biological, psychological, and sociocultural processes contributing to abnormal behavior. Students may not receive credit for both PSYC 163 and PSYC 100. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 101. Developmental Psychology (4)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the field of developmental psychology, including topics in cognitive, language, and social development. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 102. Sensory Neuroscience (4)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the neural mechanisms that support vision, audition, touch, olfaction, and taste. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 104. Social Psychology (4)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the field of social psychology, covering a review of the field’s founding principles, classic findings, and a survey of recent findings. Topics will include social perception, attributions and attitudes, stereotypies, social influence, group dynamics, and aggressive and prosocial tendencies. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 105. Cognitive Psychology (4)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of cognitive psychology, the scientific study of mental processes: how people acquire, store, transform, use, and communicate information. Topics may include perception, attention, language, memory, reasoning, problem solving, decision-making, and creativity. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 106. Behavioral Neuroscience (4)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of human and animal behavior from a neuroscience perspective. Topics include the functions and mechanisms of perception, motivation (sex, sleep, hunger, emotions), learning and memory, and motor control and movement. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 108. Cognitive Neuroscience (4)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of neuroanatomy and major methods and results from neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies of behavior. Topics include attention, motor control, executive function, memory, learning, emotion, and language. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 110. Juniors Honors Research Seminars (4)

This course provides research seminars by a range of departmental faculty, exposing students to contemporary research problems in many areas of psychology. Class discussions will follow faculty presentations. Must be taken for a letter grade for the Psychology Honors Program. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Admission by application. Department approval.

PSYC 111A. Research Methods I (6)

This course provides training in applying advanced statistical methods to experimental design. Emphasis will be placed on the developing skills in statistical problem-solving, using computer applications, and writing scientific reports. Must be taken for a letter grade for the Psychology Honors Program. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Open to honors students or by consent of instructor. Instructor and department approval.

PSYC 111B. Research Methods II (6)

This course builds upon the material of PSYC 111A. Students will participate in data collection, data organization, statistical analysis and graphical analysis, with emphasis placed on developing scientific report writing, presentations, and critical thinking about experimental methods. Must be taken for a letter grade for the Psychology Honors Program. Prerequisites: PSYC 111A; upper-division standing. Instructor and department approval.

PSYC 114. Psychophysiological Perspectives on the Social Mind Laboratory (4)

This course provides an overview and training in the use of psychophysiological methods to investigate the cognitive and emotional process involved in understanding and reacting to other people. Students will develop individual research questions and actively participate in designing and conducting the experiments. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 115A. Laboratory in Cognitive Psychology I (4)

This course provides training in the design, execution, and analysis of cognitive psychology experiments. Students may not receive credit for both PSYC 115 and PSYC 115A. Prerequisites: upper-division standing and PSYC 60 or equivalent; an interview with the instructor is required.

PSYC 115B. Laboratory in Cognitive Psychology II (4)

This course is designed to extend the training of PSYC 115A in the design, execution, and analysis of cognitive psychology experiments. Students may not receive credit for both PSYC 115 and PSYC 115B. Prerequisites: upper-division standing and PSYC 115A. Instructor and department approval.

PSYC 116. Laboratory in Clinical Psychology Research (2, 4)

This course provides examination of theory, research design, and methods for clinical research. Students complete an internship at a clinical research lab, culminating in a paper. May be taken for credit three times for a total of eight units. Students may not receive credit for both PSYC 116 and PSYC 107. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Instructor approval. Corequisites: PSYC 199.

PSYC 117. Laboratory in Educational Research and Outreach (4)

This course provides experience conducting educational research and outreach for children in greater San Diego County. May be taken for credit three times. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Instructor approval.

PSYC 120. Learning and Motivation (4)

This course provides a survey of research and theory in learning and motivation. Topics include instincts, reinforcement, stimulus control, choice, and human application. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Must be taken concurrently with PSYC 121 or PSYC 140.

PSYC 121. Laboratory in Operant Psychology (4)

This course provides laboratory experience in operant psychology. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. May be taken concurrently with PSYC 120.

PSYC 122. Mechanisms of Animal Behavior (4)

This course focuses on approaches to the study of behavior and its underlying fundamental units of analysis in human and nonhuman animals. Students may not receive credit for both PSYC 122 and PSYC 103. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 123. Cognitive Control and Frontal Lobe Function (4)

This course provides an understanding of how the frontal lobes allow us to engage in complex mental processes. Topics may include anatomy and theory of prefrontal function, frontal lobe clinical syndromes, pharmacology and genetics, emotion control, and cognitive training. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Instructor and department approval.

PSYC 124. Clinical Assessment and Treatment (4)

This course provides an introduction to the history, purpose, and recent changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders along with appropriate evidence-based interventions. Other topics include psychiatric emergencies, crisis management, and ethics. Recommended preparation: Completion of PSYC 100. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 125. Clinical Neuropsychology (4)

This course provides a fundamental understanding of brain-behavior relationships as applied to the practice of clinical neuropsychology. Major topics include functional neuroanatomy, principles of neuropsychological assessment and diagnosis, and the neuropsychological presentation of common neurologic and psychiatric conditions. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 126. Practicum in Community Mental Health Care (4)

This course provides experience with clients in a community mental health care setting, under professional supervision. Seminar-based instruction also provides a framework for understanding theoretical, practical, and ethical issues related to client care. Prerequisites: PSYC 100 and PSYC 124 and department approval.

PSYC 128. Psychology of Reading (4)

This course provides basic information about the nature of reading. Topics include word recognition, eye movements, inner speech, sentence processing, memory for text, learning to read, methods for teaching reading, reading disabilities and dyslexia, and speed-reading. Recommended preparation: completion of PSYC 105 or PSYC 145. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 129. Logic of Perception (4)

This course provides an overview of how we perceive the world. Topics include classic studies in perception, discussion of the view that perception is “logical,” and new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying perception. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 130. Delay of Gratification (4)

This course provides a review of research on delay of gratification. Topics include what makes it so tough, in what situations it is possible, who can do it, and the implications of this ability. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 131. Scientific Racism: Genetics, Intelligence, and Race (4)

This course provides a background into the origins and implementation of scientific racism, especially since the nineteenth century. Topics may include race/ethnicity and genetics, intelligence, nationalism, criminality, human performance, and morphometry. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 132. Hormones and Behavior (4)

This course examines how hormones influence a variety of behaviors and how behavior reciprocally influences hormones. Specific topics covered include aggression, sex and sexuality, feeding, learning, memory, mood and neural mechanisms both in humans and nonhuman animals. Recommended preparation: completion of PSYC 106. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 133. Circadian Rhythms—Biological Clocks (4)

This interdisciplinary course provides an overview of the fundamental properties of daily biological clocks of diverse species, from humans to microbes. Emphasis is placed on the relevance of internal time keeping in wide-ranging contexts including human performance, health, and industry. Cross-listed with BIMM 116. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. PSYC 106 or BILD 1 or PSYC 2 or consent of instructor.

PSYC 134. Eating Disorders (4)

This course provides an overview of the biology and psychology of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. Abnormal, as well as normal, eating will be discussed from various perspectives including endocrinological, neurobiological, psychological, sociological, and evolutionary. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 136. Cognitive Development (4)

This course provides an overview of how children’s thinking develops. Topics may include perception, concept formation, memory, problem solving, and social cognition. Prerequisites: upper-division standing; PSYC 101 or PSYC 105.

PSYC 137. Social Cognition (4)

This course provides an overview of social cognition, which blends cognitive and social psychology to understand how people make sense of the social world. Topics may include social perception, inference, memory, motivation, affect, understanding the self, stereotypes, and cultural cognition. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 138. Sound and Music Perception (4)

This course provides an overview of auditory perception. Topics may include the physiology of the auditory system, perception of pitch, loudness, and timbre, sound localization, perception of melodic and temporal patterns and musical illusions and paradoxes. Recommended preparation: ability to read musical notation. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 139. The Social Psychology of Sport (4)

This course provides an introduction to the applications of social psychological principles and findings to sports. Topics include motivation, level of aspiration, competition, cooperation, social comparison, and optimal arousal. Additional topics may include the perspective of spectators, discussing motivation and perceptions of success, streaks, and such. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 140. Human Behavior Laboratory (4)

This course provides training in applying the principles of human behavior, including choice behavior, self-control, and reasoning. Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Must be taken concurrently with PSYC 120.

PSYC 141. Evolution and Human Nature (4)

This course provides insight into the question of whether important aspects of human behavior can be explained as resulting from natural selection. Topics include sex differences, selfishness and altruism, homicide and violence, and context effects of human reasoning. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 142. Psychology of Consciousness (4)

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This course provides a survey of research on consciousness from an experimental psychology perspective line discussion posts. P/NP grades only. May be taken for credit two times. Only four units can be...