The technical term ‘psychology’, as used by academics and professionals, covers an immense range of activities.  Such diverse aspects of mental life and behaviour as memory, mental illness, psychological development and change throughout the life span, the effects of brain damage, the dynamics of social groups, attitudes and prejudice, the structure of organisations, safety in the workplace, and the measurement of personality and abilities all come within its purview.  Psychologists are to be found working in universities, hospitals, schools, courtrooms and in industry.  There are psychologists who study risk-taking in people working on offshore installations.  There are psychologists who specialise in trying to negotiate peaceful outcomes .  Some investigate the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and the recognition of faces.  Others, in order to understand group dynamics, are participant observers in social situations such as football crowds, parties and political meetings.  Market research is another area in which psychologists are involved as in the assessment of people who suffer brain damage or diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease.  This remarkable diversity is one of psychology’s greatest attractions.  Since psychology overlaps in subject matter with many other disciplines in the scientific, educational, medical, political and forensic fields, psychologists have a variety of educational backgrounds.

 

There are lectures on Biological Psychology, Consciousness, Developmental Psychology (human development from infancy to old age), Emotion, Memory, Perception, Social Psychology, together with laboratory practicals (experiments or demonstrations) illustrating some of the lecture topics.  Some of the experiments are carried out on computers but knowledge of computing is not required.  Course assessment is a combination of a multiple-choice examination score and a practical course score.

 

Themes are developed from Level 1 and some new topics are introduced.  There are lectures on, Aging & Individual Differences, Behavioural Neuroscience, Cognition (modelling and explaining the higher abilities of the mind), Developmental Psychology, Quantitative Methods (design of experiments and elementary statistics), Organizational Psychology, Perception, together with tutorials and laboratory practicals (experiments or demonstrations) illustrating some of the lecture topics.  There are also SPSS workshops (SPSS is computer software for analysing data).  Some of the experiments are carried out on computers but knowledge of computing is not required. Course assessment is a combination of examination results and course work consisting of practicals and essays.

 

There are lectures and tutorials on neuropsychology, methodology (design of experiments and advanced analyses of data to enable students to carry out and evaluate psychological research; students also take part in 6-week practical projects workshops), perception (brain organisation of vision; visual selective attention, colour vision; motion perception; stereopsis; object recognition), psychological assessment (assessment of abilities), developmental psychology (development from non-verbal to verbal communication; person perception and theory of mind), human memory (autobiographical memory; learning and memory), and social psychology (attribution theory; social cognition and stereotypes; interpersonal and social relations).  There are also tutorials and essays.  Much more emphasis is placed on students finding information themselves by reading books and journal papers.  Course assessment is a combination of examination results and course work.

 

At level 3 (non-Honours), students take all the Honours courses except the methodology ones.  Course assessment is a combination of examination results and course work.

 

At level 4 (Senior Honours), Single Honours students choose three options in each half-session from a range of courses (the range of courses may change from year to year): Health Psychology; Applied Social Psychology; Human Factors (design and operation of working environments in relation to human and organisation characteristics); Implicit Cognition; Neuropsychology of Visual Awareness; Advanced Developmental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience.  Students must also prepare a thesis under staff supervision and have regular tutorials as part of a critical review course. 

 Joint Honours students do not take any Level 4 options; instead they complete a prescribed set of courses and substitute a research project for the second half-session methodology course.

 Students taking the Combined Honours degrees with a foreign language take the normal Honours classes at Level 3 but at Level 4 they substitute language courses for two of the Psychology option courses.