A Collection of College Courses: one per day

 

General Psychology gives you an overview of all of psychology. It is a sampler. To get a degree I’m psychology, you must take a dozen or so university courses taught, each fairly in-depth explorations of a topic. A whole term will be spent of a single topic.

A course in general psychology typically spends a day per topic. If you like a topic, a new one is coming your way. If you do like a topic, you know what to sign up for next year. Think of it as a preview of an undergraduate degree in psychology.

Here is a course description you might find in a college catalog:

This course is an introduction to the field of psychology. It is a scientific study of mental processes and behavior. The following psychology topics are explored: methodology, physiology, sensation, perception, states of consciousness, learning, memory, intelligence, thought, language, development, motivation, emotion, sexuality, health, stress, personality, abnormal disorders, and therapies.

Here is what it really means.

This class is the first in a series. You can’t take any of the others until you take this one. We are going to try to apply the scientific method to study everything, with varying success. Studying behaviors you can see is relatively easy. Studying things going on in your head is relatively difficult. On explaining the mysteries of the universe, we remain mute.

Every day you will get at least one new topic. Here are the topics I usually cover, and in the order I usually cover them:

History & Systems

This is a great class to take after all the other classes. It reminds you of all the people and theories you’ve covered, and bookends General Psychology. In general terms, as its name suggests, both the history of psychology and its approaches (systems) are covered.  In practical terms, History & Systems emphasizes two things: people and vocabulary. If you know the details of a theory (vocabulary) and who coined them, you can easily differentiate between theories. Shaping leads you to Skinner as much as object permanence leads you to Piaget, and superego leads you to Freud.

 

Perception

the earliest studies in psychology were on perception. It was thought to be easier to study than memory or pers. Vision is the most studied sense. But the course covers many techniques and fields of study.

 

Biological Psychology

The combination of biology and psychology is variously called neuroscience, physiological psychology, cognitive science and biological psychology. The focus is on the biological processes underlying behavior. We are the brain people of psychology, or the psychology people of neuroscience.

 

Lifespan Development

This is a combination of several classes: early childhood development, child development, adolescent development, and thanatology. It covers the rise and fall of a person, from pre-birth to post-death.

 

Research Methods

Sometimes called Experimental Psychology, Research Methods prepares you to conduct and analyze studies like a professional. The focus is of thinking and writing like a scientist.

 

Statistics

In order to do number crunching, you have to start with thinking. There are many decisions to make before you even collect the data. Minimal math skills are required; that’s what computers are for. Taught well, this is a very interesting class. The primary conceptual foundation is Measurement. The other concern folk have is How To Calculate Statistics.

 

Learning

You can improve upon what you already know how to do: learn. With a bit of effort, you can become much better at acquiring facts, concepts, and behaviors. And you can other people do the same.

 

Memory

The flip side of learning is memory. If learning is putting things in, memory is keeping and retrieving what you’ve learned. There are multiple systems of memory which work together seamlessly, usually.

 

Cognition

This course explores all the mental faculties we take for granted. Thinking, comparing, rule making, judging, and heuristics are all included. Cognition is the study of everything going on inside the head.

 

Social Psychology

Humans are social animals. We don’t do well alone. This is the study of how individuals are impacted by their social context. How do we act when we are in a group? How is our behavior different when we are alone?

 

Personality Theories

Personality is fun to study because you already have one, and because no one quite knows what a personality is. This course covers a lot of themes but not many answers. Hopefully, you’ll be able to use all of the competing views to write your own theory of personality.

 

Abnormal Psychology

Sometimes things go wrong. There can be issues that majorly impact daily life. Abnormal Psychology covers a broad range of disorders. Don’t assume you have any of these major conditions just because you have some of the symptoms.

 

Takeaways

There are five things you should get from an introductory course in psychology. First, people are basically the same. Across all nations and cultures, we are remarkably the same. What we find disgusting may be different but when we encounter something disgusting we react the same way. We stick out our tongues, wrinkle our noses, and tighten our eyes. We use the same underlying processes.

A second general psychology takeaway is that the scientific method doesn’t work on everything. There are many issues that can’t be studied with experiments. You can’t randomly assign children to good or bad families. You can’t analyze once in a lifetime events using statistics. And the validity of religion, philosophy worldviews is outside psychology’s reach.

Third, not everyone does therapy. At least half of psychiatrists never do clinical work. And applied psychology, as it is sometimes called, includes vocational psychology, human factors computer design, and organizational psych. You don’t have to be a shrink.

Fourth, one course in psychology isn’t enough. A PhD in psychology is a professional degree, requiring years of training. You don’t expert your cardiologist to do surgery after taking only one class. There is a great deal of knowledge that needs to be acquired before you will be of much use to others. But you’ve made a good start.

A fifth general psychology takeaway is that people are capable of tremendous change but we usually don’t.

 

Bonus

 

 

Photo credit: Joshua Earle, on unsplash