Faculty Syllabus

There will be (at least) one quiz, a midterm and a final.

Grading Scheme:

A :90 or above

B: 80 or above

C: 70 or above

D: 60 or above

F Below 60

Students should review the ACC Catalog's Course Description for this PSYC 2301 course. Students should familiarize themselves with ACC policies, procedures, expectation, and the Student Handbook viawww.austincc.edu.  The last day for a student to withdraw is available there. Students should review the information available at http://www.austincc.edu/current for information about withdrawals, deadlines, transcripts, financial aid, health issues, international student status, or academic standing. It is highly recommended that the student see an advisor or counselor before making changes.

For a student to make an A in the class, two hours of focused research on each class' topic is necessary. Participation in class discussions is highly encouraged. It is better to ask questions than to wonder silently, and on-topic observations are welcomed. Attendance in the class is the way to get the most out of the course, as I will make a serious effort to make these topics come alive. These themes about the meaning of life, free will, health, emotion, thought, mind and brain, memory, behavior, the nature of consciousness, and others are not dry topics nor of interest only to academics and scientists; rather, these are the stuff of life itself!

ACC expects our students to be mature, collegial, and responsible.  Naturally, any student whose conduct or dress at any time is in violation of the law, is a public nuisance, or is deemed improper or detrimental to the College may be subject to warnings and/or disciplinary action.  It is only fair that students are therefore expected to respect the rights and welfare of other members of the College community and its guests. As such, violence, the threat of violence, any disruption to the learning process, or intimidation will be subject to disciplinary action.

In keeping with the great tradition of free inquiry and the life of the mind so critical to higher education and Western Civilization, the Department of Psychology respects Academic Freedom. Therefore, each student is certainly strongly encouraged to participate in discussions. However, in any classroom situation that includes discussion and critical thinking about the mind, behavior, and the nature of human beings, there will be many differing viewpoints. This exposure is a strength, and not a weakness, as consideration of diverse views is critical for intellectual and professional development. It is to be expected that students may disagree with each other at times. Patient, thoughtful, respectful exchanges are the expected result of differences of opinion.

Learning to disagree, and to have one’s ideas challenged, is interesting, stimulating, and of paramount importance to one’s career and to the life of the mind. The students and the instructor may also find that they have divergent views on sensitive and emotionally powerful themes.  These differences can certainly enhance the course experience!   Of course your grade will not be adversely affected by any beliefs or ideas expressed in class or assignments. On the contrary, it is expected that all of us do our best to respect the views of others, when expressed in classroom discussions. This includes respectful disagreement and debate, skills an adult should attempt to master.

Any chattering or activity in class that distracts the professor or fellow students will be noted, and Final Grade decreased each time.

AI Policy: Artificial Intelligence, including modern generative AI tools such as chatGPT and Claude, partially originate in scienific psychology fields such as neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral science. None of the material on this Syllabus is AI generated. Students are encouraged to use AI Chatbots as learning assistants, as long as it is recognized that AI tools hallucinate and are by no means always correct.

Try to spend two hours per lecture/four hours per week researching the questions topics below via Assignments listed. Library resources are a good tool. Recommended (especially for Psychology and healthcare majors) but optional text for looking up definitions of the terms below at https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-1-what-is-psychology

WEEK 1 Introduction: What is Psychology? What is the mind? What is the relationship between the mind and reality? What is human nature? What is the meaning of life? How should we live? What is the nature of the good life? What is the mind/soul/psyche? What is mental health and what is mental illness? What is the "mind body" problem? What is consciousness itself, and how is it related to the 100 billion neurons that make up the brain?

These psychological questions come from the legacy of psychology's origins in ancient myths, stories, poems and plays about tragedies, comedies, epics, philosophy, the liberal arts, the humanities, medicine, metaphysics, and religion. There is a tension between lived, everyday, "primary reality" or "real life" that is meaningful and existentially significant for people, vs the "objective" and "cold" description of human beings as machines from the natural sciences. There is an increasingly scientific nature to the psychological field which comes from the scientific idea of "Man as machine", impacting clinical work to diagnose and treat mental illness. There is an attack on traditional ideas of free will, culpability, and the self coming from interpretations of cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and genetics. Contrasting views come from the long history of humanistic inquiries into human nature, understanding mind and behavior, and treating mental illness relative to what it means and how it feels for the individual. 

ASSIGNMENTS (let me know ASAP if any broken links): Watch a video on history of psychology at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyAcEj6UgY0 and major debates in psychology at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AljYxcERgY and read https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-1-what-is-psychology Watch a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE5Js-9AzHo Listen to Podcast lectures at https://soundcloud.com/user-595534564/introduction-to-psychology-the-logic-of-life and https://soundcloud.com/user-595534564/introduction-to-psychology-part-two

WEEK 2 How does psychology relate to evolution, natural selection, and genetics? The environment selects for psychological and physical traits, rather like how animal breeders select for traits such as gentle or protective dogs. Natural selection is the great environmental force making of human bodies, behavior, and experience. The "classical" idea of genetics emphasizes genes as units of heredity from generation to generation that make recessive and dominant traits, ideas especially developed by Mendel. The modern idea of gene emphasizes the instructions on DNA to assemble RNA sequences, which assembles proteins and bodily and behavioral traits. Darwin and Wallace and natural selection. A major idea is that genes are using us to copy themselves; aka the "selfish gene."  ASSIGNMENTS:  Watch a documentary at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhFKPaRnTdQ Listent to Podcast lecture at https://soundcloud.com/user-595534564/evolution-homo-sapiens-and-psychology  Watch Spencer Wells' Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey documentary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6nEGfcwMNA Watch a documentary about the "great leap forward" or cognitive modernity at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgg0bhfNjo0, then read first 3 pages from The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution at https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/the-10000-year-explosion-how-civilization-accelerated-human-evolution-2009-by-gregory-cochran-henry-harpending.pdf  Listen to Podcast at https://soundcloud.com/user-595534564/human-prehistory-environments-cognition-and-behavior

WEEK 3 What is the history of Psychology relative to ideas about the mind in the ancient world?  We can start with the end of the ice age, the change from hunting and gathering and nomadism to he agricultural revolution, village life, towns, cities. kingdoms and the earliest civilizations. Language in written form progressed from pictograms, little standardized pictures such a 'fish", to represent increasingly abstract ideas such as eternity or infinity. Our distant ancestors lived in "Cyclical time', such as the yearly change of seasons, later they developed " linear time". Religion has at the very least a social function as "the ties that bind".  Psyche can be understood as the "life force" that gives living things their form, or soul as the form of the body.  Psyche also means soul or mind, while Logos is a complex term that means "to reckon with", "word", "to make an argument", or even the coupling of rational mind to intelligible cosmos. Plato advocated Idealism, that there is a real and spiritual reality beyond the untrustworthy physical world, while Aristotle's denied this and advocated we are in the real world, aka Realism .ASSIGNMENTS: Watch a documentary about the Golden Age of Greece that produced so many geniuses, and many of our ideas about human nature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GZN_qCmARs Read about the birth of philosophy at http://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Philosophy/  and the birth of psychology at http://www.electrummagazine.com/2013/03/ancient-classical-roots-of-psychology/  Read from Plato's Phaedo at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html and Aristotle's De Anima at http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/aristotle.soul.html Watch a short documentary on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nke9geV7g98  Podcasts at https://soundcloud.com/user-595534564/psychology-and-the-ancient-world-citieswriting-epics-and-gods and https://soundcloud.com/user-595534564/changing-understandings-of-psyche-free-will-soma-and-mental-illness-in-the-ancient-world

WEEK 4 What are the ongoing development of ideas about psychology and mental illness over historical time? The Greeks had ideas about mental health: read https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/diagnosing-mental-illness-in-ancient-greece-and-rome/282856/  Augustine's introspection and examination of conscience led to the development of the autobiography, and the psychology of the self: Read http://www.shmoop.com/augustine-confessions/ now we come to the end of the ancient world. ASSIGNMENT: Watch a documentary about the medieval world at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGUVcMYC6oY Still later, we come to the development of the modern individual via the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, radical individualism, Cartesian mind/body dualism and the subject/object split, and Luther and individual beliefs vs traditional authority and metaphysics. Watch documentaries on the Scientific Revolution and on the Enlightenment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ2dSTQwJo8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drgsZc8Gjb8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ef0erm_KQI.We can look at our modern situation as a current dilemma: we are caught between being a personal self in an everyday existential world of meaning, vs living in the mechanistic, soul-less universe as described by physics, chemistry, genetics, evolution, and cognitive neuroscience. ASSIGNMENT: Read the characteristics of modernity at http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/modernit.htm and watch documentaries about the development of modernity and modern understanding of self, society, rights, reason, science and psychology at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZVRl0D2DPU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIdflecvQG8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO0v_JqxFmQ

WEEK 5 What is the history of modern psychology with Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung?  What is the meaning of "disenchantment" with modernity? There is an idea that science, not spirituality or tradition, explains reality. This can be understood to lead to a crisis of over-individualism after the Enlightenment, and our own era. Mental illness can be re-framed as a crisis of culture, traditional cultures, modernity, and radical individualism leading to people feeling isolated and adrift: ASSIGNMENT: Read  https://www.britannica.com/topic/disenchantment-sociology and https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral-landscapes/201106/are-individualism-and-collectivism-compatible and https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral-landscapes/201107/no-us-against-them and https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201206/the-culture-mental-illness 

WEEK 6 What is clinical psychology and how do clinicians deal with and treat psychological Disorders? Stress can be understood via existential and biological perspectives on health. Psychosomatic theory helps us understand how stress impacts health. Freud's psychoanalysis emphasized the "taking cure", unconscious conflicts, primitive repressed sexual and pleasure seeking energies, while Jung thought "below" the sexual unconscious were archetypes and a "collective" unconscious. Cognitive-behavioral therapy developed as an American pragmatic variant of the so-called talking cure. Humanistic psychology and existential-phenomenological psychology emerged to inquire into the meaning of life, embodiment, healing and self-actualizing. Positive psychology came then as a means to live life more fully, to heal from the past and achieve potential. ASSIGNMENT: Read http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture3.html and watch a brief documentary on modern psychology's W.E.I.R.D problem:  relative to the rest of the world. researchers get data from students who are disproportionately Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich and from Democratic countries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=460knOSnYak

WEEK 7 How do psychologists and physicians understand mental illness, depression, PTSD, autism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia?. ASSIGNMENT: Read and research-Read a BBC piece on whether Freud still matters at http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140421-does-freud-still-matter Read a review of the work of Philip Rieff, author of Triumph of the Therapeutic at http://www.bostonreview.net/scialabba-the-curse-of-modernity. Watch a short piece on "Why I Like Humanistic Psychology" by Dr. Eric Dodson at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDO0-b4Tzi4 Experience of schizophrenia: read https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/a-mother-helps-son-in-his-struggle-with-schizophrenia/2013/05/25/3c92c63e-c19a-11e2-8bd8-2788030e6b44_story.html and http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/schizophrenia-identity/ and http://brainblogger.com/2012/08/07/schizophrenia-and-psychosis-brain-disease-or-existential-crisis/

WEEK 8 How is neuroscience related to cognition and behavior and how is the brain related to the body? How do medications work in the brain? Neurons use signals neurotransmitters, synapses, neural networks, action potentials, ions, and receptors to communicate. Drugs interact with cells via attaching to receptor proteins and changing cell signals. ASSIGNMENT: watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPix_X-9t7E&list=PLmfNjLhJKYDPhlIabYGYAExVAILOmWqVX and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZG8M_ldA1M&list=PLmfNjLhJKYDPhlIabYGYAExVAILOmWqVX&index=2 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4N-7AlzK7s&list=PLmfNjLhJKYDPhlIabYGYAExVAILOmWqVX&index=5 and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHeTQLNFTgU, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_zD3NxSsD8, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89W6uACEb7M, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSkxlpNs3tU, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIGqp6_PG6k, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9p2ou1IyC0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdUUP2pMmQ4. How do neuroplasticity, homeostasis, embodied cognition, peripheral nervous system, role of the "second brain" or "little brain" work?. ASSIGNMENT: Read https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/3-introduction and:http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/ and  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-second-brain-in-our-gastrointestinal-systems-excerpt/ and a piece about how the brain's plasticity is un-computerlike at: https://www.rxwiki.com/feature-article/stress-trauma-well-learning-and-novelty-can-affect-brain-structure-and-function

WEEK 9 Review and Exam 1 (will issue communication about exam)

WEEK 10 How can we use psychology research methods,including narratives, hypothesis testing, statistics and probability? How can the scientific method be applied to psychology to solve problems for organizations? How can people who are not clinicians get paid with psychology degrees? We must think about the difference between correlation vs causation, look at using a null hypothesis vs alternative/research hypothesis, and using control groups vs treatment groups in medical/pharma studies. We can use samples to estimate populations:We can use tests of statistical significance to answer, what is the probability that what we think is a relationship between two variables,  is really just a chance occurrence?" This can help determine if therapy such as a drug is really producing a benefit.  We can control for the "placebo effect" in such clinical trials with these quantitative methods. Central concepts include bell curve/normal curve, standard deviation, variance, measures of central tendency, randomness, outliers. ASSIGNMENT: Read from the recommended textbook at https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/2-introduction Read Gary Gutting's NyTimes piece  "How Reliable are the Social Sciences? Watch a video on hypothesis testing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK-rnA3-41c

What are qualitative research methods?  How can we test products for usability? Why is research ethics so important? No less important than quantitative methods are qualitative Research and narratives. By using both, we can do product usability work, and apply psychology to many domains for organizations. Research ethics are critical, and some psychology researchers have crossed way over the line with dangerous experiments.  Read at: https://www.simplypsychology.org/qualitative-quantitative.html.

WEEK 11  What is the nature of Memory and Learning?  Long Term Memory, Short Term Memory, Autobiographical Memory work together but can fail over time or with pathology. Perhaps the most famous idea in Cognitive Psychology is that of "Magic Number 7" of chunks of information in working memory aka Cognitive Load. Exceptionally good memoriziers can have serious problems, as healthier people tend to not obsess over bad memories which can hopefully fade over time. What is perception and how is it related to sensation? How does the brain enable these? Sensation is not the same as perception, but we see how they work together, and with optical illusions,we see how expectations and memory affect what we see. Vision is not just with the eyes, but with the visual cortex and optic nerves. The body sends signals through the spinal nerves, through the brainstem, to the cortex via the thalamus, and then we perceive.  

WEEK 12 How does language develop, how instinctual is it, how universal is it, and how is it related to thinking? Are humans "hard wired" for language via evolution and genes? What is the biological basis of language? Chomsky argued against Skinner and the behaviorist theories of language, for syntax vs semantics, for universal grammar. The errors children make learning language reveals cognitive mechanisms and support the idea of a language instict trait in humans. Nowadays the Piraha debate suggests perhaps Chomsky's universal grammar isn't actually universal.  ASSIGNMENT:  Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9shPouRWCs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zobBTuX03D8

WEEK 13 Consciousness: can cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology make progress understanding it? A historical view includes psychophysics, introspection, phenomenology, behaviorism, cognitive science, neuroscience and the gradual reawakening of interest in consciousness studies. Crick bestowed legitimacy on consciousness studies as a respectable branch of science via the "astonishing hypothesis". Chalmers' talks about "hard problem" vs "easy problem" of consciousness. Damasio has a  post-Cartesian theory of emotions, and consciousness as a neural map of body states based on homeostatic processes, and internal organ state.  What are emotions, and why are they useful? Emotion can be understood relative to embodied states and feelings, for instance, feeling sad or bored or intrigued or motivated, with some emotions more about perceiving body states than others. What about the brain and free will? There are controversies over free will and "free won't" from Libet's experiment with EEG, and debates about free will, legal education, cognition and the brain.  William James' had the  idea of consciousness as a stream: Watch a Podcast at https://soundcloud.com/user-357765846/consciousness-the-biggest-mystery-in-science and read https://philosophyisnotaluxury.com/2013/03/21/william-james-the-stream-of-consciousness-and-freewill/ and http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/jimmy11.htm 

WEEK 14 What is Intelligence? How is it related to personality? How much of these are genetic vs environmental? We can contrast I.Q with multiple intelligence, inquire about the value of emotional intelligence, and ask how IQ predicts educational achievement. The study of Identical twins vs fraternal twins and twins separated at birth provides a window into heredity/genetics relative to environmental inputs shaping traits. ASSIGNMENT: Listen to Podcast at https://soundcloud.com/user-357765846/intelligence-and-emotion and read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient, and watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xTz3QjcloI&t=7s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lev8dGnxvd and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk8sdMGJ3m4

Week 15 How do psychologists understand human growth and development, and the life cycle? ASSIGNMENT: Read and research Erickson's Stages and understanding of the life cycle at http://www.simplypsychology.org/Erik-Erikson.html. and read "The Coddling of the American Mind" by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/  Read a piece from Psychology Today on changing conceptions of career, work, and middle-aging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-resilience/201008/reversing-the-death-spiral-during-so-called-midlife What is the nature of happiness, and what is necessary for human flourishing, and what is the meaning of life? There are different views, including on moral excellence and human nature..  Read about: Psychology and eudaemonia or the "good life": four views by Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche: http://www.openculture.com/2015/12/plato-aristotle-nietzsche-kants-ideas-on-the-good-life.html and http://lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/ph/ph_01philosophyyouth14.html

WEEK 16 Review and Final Exam

This course is a survey of foundational topics such as the scientific status of psychology, memory, consciousness, sensation and perception, personality, neuroscience and the biophysiological basis of behavior, stress and health, psychological disorders, and research methods. 

Some of the questions we will examine include:

Do people have free will? Do our genes determine our behavior?

Can cognitive neuroscience explain human nature?

Are mental health problems disorders of genes or brain functioning?

When and why did people begin to theorize about the mind and human nature?

Why is psychology not just called “philosophy?”

Is psychology just the science of the mind, or does it include the humanities and the liberal arts?

Will psychology in the future be a branch of genetics, neuroscience, and pharmacology?

How does evolution relate to psychology?

Is the mind a computer or information-processing system? What else could it be?

How do the mind and brain relate to each other? How do psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and other “cognitive sciences” understand the “mind-body” problem?”

What role does psychology play in designing products, and how does it fit in to healthcare?

This course will emphasize the development of critical thinking methods. Don’t believe everything you read or hear! What is conventional wisdom today may be scoffed at as old tomorrow, and a generation later regarded as leading edge innovation. Keep in mind some of the following themes, and reflect on:

• the status of psychology as a science, where people are viewed much as bio-psycho-social machines, compared to the historical background in literature, humanities and liberal arts

• cognition, sensation, perception, thinking, emotion, life-goals, and memory

• the relationship of genes, physiology, and the brain to emotions, consciousness, cognition, and behavior

• Health psychology, psychosomatic phenomena, and coping with stress

• The role of psychology within product development, consumer research, human-factors considerations, and user-centered design of systems

• Psychological disorders and therapies, including pharmacology

Other topics will be introduced, time permitting

Student Learning Outcomes/Learning Objectives

Students should be able to understand and discuss basic concepts about the foundations and component disciplines of psychology.

The purpose of this introductory course in psychology is to present the concepts, topics, principles, and issues in applied and theoretical psychology. Major areas will be described and analyzed, research methods examined, a historical overview introduced, and relationships to other fields established.  The relevance of psychology to practical everyday needs, to asking the “big questions” about human nature, to health, and to industry will be discussed. This introductory course will provide students with the basic ideas and concepts that enable them to take more advanced courses in psychology or related fields, depending on interest. The course objectives or goals include (but are not limited to) students being able to comprehend, analyze, and discuss major theories, findings and concepts in the following areas:

Research Methods

Personality and how life experience shapes perception, cognition, behavior, and consciousness

Learning and the biological basis of learning

Life-Span Development, including aging and eldercare issues

Physiological Basis of Behavior (especially genetics, psychiatry, and clinical neuropsychology)

Cognition (including Sensation, Perception, Memory, and Consciousness)

Stress (including psychoneuroimmunology, and intellectual, social, physical and emotional health)

Psychological Disorders

Social Psychologyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE5Js-9AzHo

Students should be able to understand and discuss basic concepts about the foundations and component disciplines of psychology.

The purpose of this introductory course in psychology is to present the concepts, topics, principles, and issues in applied and theoretical psychology. Major areas will be described and analyzed, research methods examined, a historical overview introduced, and relationships to other fields established.  The relevance of psychology to practical everyday needs, to asking the “big questions” about human nature, to health, and to industry will be discussed. This introductory course will provide students with the basic ideas and concepts that enable them to take more advanced courses in psychology or related fields, depending on interest. The course objectives or goals include (but are not limited to) students being able to comprehend, analyze, and discuss major theories, findings and concepts in the following areas:

Research Methods including usability/UX and applied statistics for determining supposed benefits of therapy (such as an antidepressant)

Personality and how life experience shapes language competencies, perception, cognition, behavior, and consciousness

Learning and the biological basis of learning such as synapses

Life-Span Development, including aging and eldercare issues

Physiological Basis of Behavior (especially pharmacology, receptors, genetics, psychiatry, and clinical neuropsychology)

Cognition (including Sensation, Perception, Memory, and Consciousness)

Stress (including psychoneuroimmunology, and intellectual, social, physical and emotional health)

Psychological Disorders

Social Psychology