专业描述

The Department of Psychology offers the psychology concentration for students with a strong interest in understanding the mechanisms that underlie mental processes and human behavior. The psychology concentration reflects the department's placement within the Division of Natural Sciences by providing rigorous foundational and advanced undergraduate courses in the empirical findings, research methods, quantitative analyses, and formal theories central to modern psychological science. Concentrators will gain mastery of the principles that govern psychological function, from basic processes such as sensation, perception, and movement, to more complex ones such as language, reasoning, decision making, and social interaction. Because psychological science involves working with large and often complex datasets, mastery of statistics is required. Moreover, since mental processes and behavior arise from the brain, the psychology concentration requires a strong grounding in neuroscience. The concentration also offers extensive opportunities for research in areas at the cutting-edge of psychological science, such as the development of perception and language in infants and children, the use of neural measures for understanding and training memory and attention, the impact of implicit biases and stereotypes in social cognition, and the combined use of behavioral, neuroscientific, and comparative approaches for studying social communication and influence. Such research experiences, combined with the course offerings, prepare concentrators for graduate studies in psychological science and related disciplines, such as cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as for numerous careers, such as data science, policymaking, and teaching. The psychology concentration is also compatible with fulfilling requirements for medical school and law school.