Nov 21, 2024  
Academic Catalog 2024-2025 
    
Academic Catalog 2024-2025
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PSY-706 Cognitive and Affective Bases of Behavior

4 semester credits
This broadly conceived course includes knowledge derived from history, philosophy, early psychology, and contemporary neuroscience. Some of its foci, notably involving the nature of consciousness, address questions that remain insufficiently answered and possibly ultimately unanswerable by those with human brains and nervous systems. Students investigate how human behavior is shaped and modulated by cognition, affect, and their interaction. The course includes theories and empirical bases of learning, perception memory, language, motivation, affect, emotion, and executive function, as well as factors that influence cognitive performance and emotional experience and their interaction. Topics include (1) contemporary perceptual, cognitive and affective neuroscience, (2) false and distorted memories, (3) the nature of consciousness, (4) basic emotions, (5) culture, gender, cognition and affect, and (6) interrelationships among cognitions/beliefs, behavior, affect, temperament, and mood.
Delivery Method: Distance/Electronically Mediated
Grading Default: Letter Only
Note: For Clinical students only: This course cannot be taken in conjunction with PSY-707.
Learning Outcome(s):  

  1. Identify and describe aspects of emotion, including emotional brain circuitry, categories of emotion, neural pathways for basic emotion, empathy, rewards and motivation, emotional impairments and disorders, and stress
  2. Critically examine theories, models, principles, and research methods used to study emotion
  3. Identify and describe aspects of cognition, including sensation and perception, attention, learning, memory, visual-spatial processing, language, decision-making, and executive functioning
  4. Critically examine theories, models, principles, and research methods used to study cognition
  5. Explain the sources of individual and cultural differences, including psychosocial factors, that influence: (a) cognitive, and (b) emotional processes
  6. Synthesize concepts and research on cognition, affect, and emotion (e.g., conceptual processing of emotion, cognitive reappraisal and emotion regulation, memory and affect, language and emotion, attention and emotion, stress and cognition)



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