The Psychology major is a broad-based curriculum within a research-focused department. The program is designed both for students interested in a liberal arts education with psychology as a focal area and for students who plan to attend graduate or professional school either in psychology or in a different field such as medicine, law, social work, business administration, counseling, labor relations and many others. Areas of interest in psychology, and many of these are reflected in the similarly-titled concentrations that are available within the Psychology major:
How To Declare The Major |
- Intradisciplinary is the most flexible concentration allowing students to create their own major. Students may combine existing concentrations (Clinical/Community + Developmental, Behavioral Neuroscience + Cognitive Neuroscience, Industrial/Organizational + Social or Personality, Diversity Science + Clinical/Community, etc.) to design a major appropriate to interests/career paths.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Behavioral Neuroscience is the study of the biological mechanisms underlying behavior. Biological psychologists generally are interested in the brain and the nervous system, in the endocrine system, and in other organismic processes.
- Clinical/Comunity psychology - Clinical psychology is the study of problems encountered by individuals, groups, and families — especially problems involving psychopathology. Clinical psychologists are interested in the application of psychological knowledge and techniques for the alleviation of these problems. Community psychology is the study of the social processes and problems of groups, organizations, and neighborhoods, and the development and evaluation of progress for social change and social policy based on psychological understanding.
- Cognitive neuroscience is concerned with understanding the neuroscientific bases of cognition. Various methods are employed to assess the roles of different brain systems in psychological functions such as memory, attention, language, executive control, decision making, response processing, and emotion.
- Cognitive psychology is the study of basic behavioral and cognitive processes, including learning, memory, problem-solving, motivation, and language.
- Developmental psychology is the study of intellectual development, emerging personality, and the acquisition of language, as well as psychophysiological and social development processes as individuals develop from birth through old age.
- Diversity science is the study of psychological research focusing on prejudice, discrimination, race, ethnicity, gender, and other areas.
- Organizational psychology is the application of techniques of assessment, prediction, and intervention to areas of human resources in organizations, including, but not limited to, standard personnel selection and training, attitude assessments and interventions, and program evaluations.
- Personality psychology focuses on individual behavior. It is the study of ways to understand and describe an individual's behavior and to predict an individual's future behavior.
- Social psychology is the study of attitudes, social perception and cognition, interpersonal relations, interpersonal interactions, and social and cultural factors affecting human behavior.