Exploring Psychology

Course Coordinator: Dr Sara Li, BSSc (CUHK), MSc (Edinburgh), PhD (HKU)

Course Developer: The Open University, UK, Course Team

This course provides a distinctive account of psychology at the beginning of the 21st century, with a clear emphasis on behaviour and experience within complex, everyday contexts.

Aims
The course aims to guide students to (a) master the key concepts, theories, research and issues in the study of psychology, and (b) to apply the concepts and theories learned to their daily lives where appropriate.

Contents
The course covers the following topics:

Part 1

• Identities and diversities

• Evolutionary psychology

• Approaches to learning

• Biological bases of psychological explanation

• Individual differences approaches to personality

• Perception and attention

• Perceiving and understanding the social world

• Memory

• Begin a person: Psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology

Part 2

• Lifespan development

• Language and meaning

• Sex and gender

Part 3

• Stress

• Post-traumatic stress disorder

• Psychological factors in witness evidence and identification

• Telling and detecting lies

• Autism

• Computer-mediated communication

• Relationships at work

Learning support
There will be 18 two-hour tutorials and four day schools.

Assessment
There are eight assignments, including two guided small-scale research projects, constituting 50% of the course grade, and a final examination constituting the remaining 50% of the course grade. Students are required to submit assignments via the Online Learning Environment (OLE).

Set book(s)
A custom textbook will be provided.