Courses tagged with "Taking derivatives" (68)

This course will introduce you to the psychology behind gender and sexuality, or the study of the different ways our gender roles and sexual identities impact our lives. Although the terms “gender” and “sex” are often used synonymously in everyday speech, this course will assign the terms two different meanings. “Sex” refers to biological differencei.e. whether you are a female or male from a biological standpoint. “Gender” refers to the social and psychological attributes that come along with one’s sex. Though these terms are similar and relate to one another, there is a distinct difference between the two that you should recognize for the purposes of this course. In this course, we will take a look at how our understanding of our own gender and sex can affect different aspects of our functioning, while also identifying the factors in our lives that can impact our gender and sex. While we often assume we know a lot about how gender affects our lives and the lives of the opposite gender, t…

Human societies have always been dependent upon local and regional environments for critical natural resources, and loss of these resources (either due to environmental changes or human overuse) has often reduced a society’s resilience to future challenges.  When resilience decreases, the risk of societal collapse increases.  Today, our globalized, highly connected societies have increased access to environmental resources, yet they leave us more vulnerable to disruptions and disasters that begin in other regions or systems.  By understanding how our societies are connected to each other and to the environment, we can better manage our interactions so that they do not increase the potential for societal collapse.  This course will use a complex systems theory perspective to investigate how coupled human-environment systems interact to either increase or decrease their risk of collapse.  This complex systems approach works across many disciplines, so that human-environment linkages can be understood fro…

Sociology is the scientific study of society. As such, it closely examines human interactions and cultural phenomena, including topics like inequality and urbanization and the effects of these on groups and individuals. To do their work, sociologists rely on a philosophy of science called positivism, which you will study in Unit 1. The philosophy of positivism asserts that authentic knowledge, or truth, can only be gained through empirical observations. In other words, we need to be able to experience our observations or use scientific measurement with a form of sensory experience, as opposed to using faith-based or emotional experiences. Another central concept to sociology is that of the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination allows sociologists to make connections between personal experiences and larger social issues. For example, did you know the U.S. has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world? In order to understand this trend, sociologists use scientific methods…

This course will introduce you to the fundamental principles of psychology and to the major subjects of psychological inquiry. It has been designed to not only provide you with the tools necessary for the study of psychology but to present you with a sampling of the major areas of psychology research. The course begins with a short overview of how psychology developed as an academic discipline and an introduction to a number of the principle methodologies most commonly deployed in its study. The subsequent units are arranged around broad areas of research, including emotion, development, memory, and psychopathology. We will focus on well-substantiated research and current trends within each of these categories. This course is designed to align with Excelsior College’s UExcel Psychology examination. Visit the Excelsior website [1] to download the content guide for the PSYX-101 exam.  For more information about this partnership, and earning credit through Excelsior College, go here [2].    [1] http:/…

Do you know what you’re watching? What you’re reading? You might think that what comes across your television or web browser, in your newspaper or magazine, or on your movie screen is pretty much the whole message; what you see is what you get. But the content we see, read, and hear is the product of complex forces − economic, governmental, historical, and technological. This course will explore those underlying forces and provide analytical tools to evaluate media critically. An overall goal is to become media literate, to gain an understanding of mass media as cultural industries that seek to influence our behavior and affect our values as a society. Unit 1 aims to define mass communication, mass media, and culture. It also will introduce the core concepts of media literacy and the concept of transmedia, the practice of integrating entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. Unit 2 will introduce selected theories that will help in analyzing mass communication and its effect…

This course will introduce the concept of environmental ethics, a philosophy that extends the ethical concepts traditionally applied to human behavior to address the entire natural world. The course will outline the history of environmental ethics, discuss the idea of environmental justice, and explore how our views about the natural world have changed over time. Though environmental ethics is considered a fairly new branch of scientific philosophy, it has actually been debated avidly since the 19th century. From the frontier era of the developing United States through to the modern-day environmental movement, you will identify and analyze the key pioneers and events in the move to help preserve our planet for future generations and species. You will also explore the notion of environmental justice and how this impacts certain social groups, particularly in poorer communities throughout the world. Finally, you will familiarize yourself with the major environmental laws and world views that support the envir…

This course will introduce you to cognitive psychology, or the study of the ways in which we come to know about the world around us and about one another.  While you may understand “cognition” as “thinking” or “thoughts,” we will here use the term to refer to almost any process that takes place within the human mind. Though cognitive psychology as a formal branch of study has only been around since the late 1960s, it has been studied for decades as an area of interest in psychological inquiry and has its roots in philosophy.  In the late 1880s, for example, Ebbinghaus conducted some of the very first scientifically based studies of cognition when he attempted to explain the mechanism of memory.  Memory, along with attention, perception, language, and decision making, are amongst the most prominent issues within the broad and diverse field of cognitive psychology.  While we could spend an entire semester exploring just one of these issues, this course will instead provide you with an overview…

Abnormal psychology is one of the most recognizable and intriguing subfields of study in psychology. Part of what makes this field so intriguing is that it challenges us to define what is normal and abnormal. Most experts in the field have settled on several criteria to define abnormal behavior; however, this definition and even the very existence of certain disorders still remain a source of debate. This course will help us to define abnormal and normal behaviors and to group these abnormal phenomena into disorders. These disorders are used to capture a particular type of abnormal psychological phenomena and to help us diagnose or make an educated decision regarding what disorder a patient/client may have. In order to distinguish between different disorders, clinicians often use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which identifies the specific criteria used when diagnosing patients/clients. This manual represents the industry standard for psychologists and psychiatrists, who often…