Syllabus
INDV 101: THE STRUCTURE OF MIND AND BEHAVIOR

Required Readings:
What Drives People to Behave the Way They Do? by Jeff Greenberg (available in the U of A Bookstore)

Exploring Psychology(4th Ed.) by David Myers (available in the U of A Bookstore)

This is a Tier 1 course which, within the U of A’s General Education Curriculum, fulfills the requirement of a course on Individuals and Societies. There are other, very different courses which fulfill this requirement as well and you should consider carefully whether or not this particular course takes the perspective on this topic which best suits your interests and goals. What distinguishes this course from those others is that the approach taken here to understanding individuals and societies is to focus in on the individual mind. Thus, we will be emphasizing the insights into individuals and societies provided by psychological theories and research. However, consistent with the objectives of Gen Ed and the nature of psychology, the course will also incorporate contributions from anthropology, biology, the humanities, philosophy, and sociology. If you complete this course, it will serve as a prerequisite for further courses in psychology. Thus, if you complete this course, you do not need to take Psych 101 if you choose to be a psych major or take more advanced psychology courses.

Psychology is the scientific study of why and how people think, feel, and behave the way they do. Psychology can be interesting and revealing but it also has the potential to be disconcerting and even anxiety-provoking. Psychology is a journey into the human mind, a journey to a new view of yourself, the people you know, and the reality you have chosen to inhabit. As Ernest Becker, whose work we will review, notes, the science of our knowledge about ourselves "gives a chill in addition to a thrill -- the chill of self-exposure".

CAUTIONARY NOTE 1: Any aspect of human behavior -- any actions people engage in and any words people use to express themselves-- may be used or discussed in this class or shown in video clips. Death, violence, sex, and drugs will come up (but don’t get too excited, less dramatic topics will predominate). If you have problems with "bad" language or these types of topics, you may want to take this course with a different instructor.

GOAL AND NATURE OF THE COURSE

My goal is to provide a broad sampling of some of the insights into human thought, feeling, and action that psychology has to offer. There are many approaches used in psychology to understanding why and how people think, feel, and behave the way they do. My personal favorite for a starting point is a motivational perspective, which emphasizes the needs and goals that guide human behavior. If humans are living organisms in the world, then their thoughts, feelings, and action must be directed by the basic concerns of living organisms, things like survival, seeking of pleasure, avoidance of pain, etc. However, each of the other fundamental perspectives contribute greatly to our understanding of these needs and goals and how they are satisfied and achieved. There is a biological or neuroscience perspective which focuses on the structure and functioning of the peripheral (skeletal and autonomic) and central (spinal cord and brain) nervous system, along with the endocrine (hormonal) system. There is a learning perspective which focuses on how our experiences, as we are exposed to particular environmental influences, alter and shape our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. There is a cognitive perspective which emphasizes how humans sense, perceive, think about, store, recall, and use inputs from their environment. There is a social perspective which views humans as individuals embedded in a social reality and greatly affect by perceptions of the social world around them.

Of course, each of these perspectives complements the others and they ultimately need to be combined for a full understanding of human beings. In some sense, the reading which I prepared for you(B) is based on a book, Ernest Becker’s Birth and Death of Meaning, which tries to do just that. However, as you’ll see once we delve into David Myers’ textbook Psychology (M), psychological theorizing and research generally progress in a step by step fashion, examining humans from one particular perspective at a time. Similarly, every Ph.D. in psychology, through their training and personal preferences, comes to emphasize a certain theoretical orientation and focuses on a particular subsets of questions about humans in their research and teaching and I am certainly no exception.

Before you decide whether to stay with my version of "the structure of mind and behavior", I want to let you know a little about my orientation. I am a social psychologist and thus am primarily interested in and knowledgeable with regard to how people relate to and are affected by their own self-concept and by other people. My specific theoretical orientation is an existential psychodynamic one, influenced heavily by the writings of Ernest Becker, who in turn was influenced by many earlier scholars, most notably, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Soren Kierkegaard, and Norman Brown. This perspective proposes that a driving concern of humans is to conceive of themselves as significant and that cultures and individuals work hard to create and sustain belief systems that serve this need. One of my favorite quotes representing this perspective is from a clinical existential psychologist named Irvin Yalom:

To examine this perspective, this course will begin with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, followed by a consideration of Ernest Becker’s analysis of human behavior in the book The Birth and Death of Meaning. Of course, I want to expose you to a variety of theories and findings, so following this section of the course, we will explore various perspectives and topics using the Myers text. We will at least briefly cover topics such as the brain, motivation, emotion, drugs, perception, memory, thinking, development, social influence, aggression, prejudice, relationships, and psychological disorders. Because the semester is so short, we won’t be covering all of the topics in the text, but feel free to read about these or ask me or the t.a.s about any of these topics in class or during office hours. Which brings me to a few words (or more) about the logistics of this course.

THIS IS A VERY BIG CLASS!!

The size of this class necessitates discussion of a variety of issues:

1)ATTENDANCE: I encourage you to attend class because I think it will help you learn the material and do well in the course. I will bring in material not covered in the text in most if not all the lectures, so if you do miss a class, be sure to get the notes.

2)COURTESY: Part of my job is to make sure that the students who want to attend to the lectures can do so without distraction. In large classes, students sometimes seem to believe that their behavior won’t be noticed by classmates or the instructor and so coming late, leaving early, talking, eating, reading the paper, etc are okay. These things are not okay, in fact they are a bigger problem in a large class; they are distracting and disturbing to both the person lecturing and students trying to listen. The class time is for those students who want to listen to the lecture and participate in the class appropriately. If on a given day, you can’t arrive by the starting time, or you don’t want to stay the full 75 minutes, or if you’d rather talk, eat, or read the paper, please just don’t come to class that day. Only come to class if you want to listen and participate in the class. Please respect your classmates, me, and yourself by not coming to class if you don’t think you can attend without distracting or disturbing others.

3)CONTACT: Obviously in a class this large, one on one contact has limitations: If I spent just one hour outside of class time with each of you, it would require 40 hours a week for approximately 13 weeks, not leaving much time for preparing for lectures, lecturing, or eating for that matter. However, I encourage those of you with an interest in such contact to see me during my office hours, or right after class, or visit any of the t.a.s during their office hours. Between myself and the t.a.s, there will be 14 ½ office hours per week available. If you are having difficulty contacting us, you can also use the e-mail addresses listed above.

4)STUDENT INPUT: Although the room is very big and not especially conducive to discussion, I welcome and encourage questions and comments during class; such input will help keep things moving. If you are interested in participating in this way, try to sit near the front of the class and speak loudly so your classmates and I can easily hear your remarks. Of course, I will welcome input from anywhere in the room.

5) FEEDBACK: The t.a.s and I will be happy to receive feedback and suggestions as the course progresses regarding the logistics of the class, the lectures, the books, topics to be covered, specific questions, relevant video material, etc. I have a mailbox in the main psych office, 312 Psychology Building, as do the t.a.s; you can even provide such feedback anonymously if you prefer. We will try to be responsive, but please keep in mind how many students we are trying to serve!

IF THERE IS SUCH A THING AS THE WHOLE TRUTH, YOU WON’T GET IT HERE!

    Introductory courses cannot go into sufficient detail on topics to be wholly accurate and complete. Thus, you should keep in mind that both the textbook and the lectures occasionally if not often oversimplify, distort, and/or lie about the true state of knowledge. This can’t be helped. The topic of each lecture and each book chapter could be the subject of an entire course or more by itself. Thus, details and complexities will inevitably be glossed over. In addition, neither textbook writers nor lecturers can possibly maintain up-to-date expert knowledge on all of the many topics covered. Therefore, you shouldn’t take what you learn here as the up-to- the-minute-precise-final word on anything. (Note that this caution applies even more strongly to newspapers, magazines, and TV shows that report on psychological findings, for they are not only limited by space available to devote to the story, but by the typically minimal expertise of the writers, and by the tendency to want to present exciting and easy answers).

    In this course, for example, if you learn where visual information is processed in the brain, it will be the primary place where it is processed but by no means the only place. If you learn about the effects of Prozac, it will be about some of the effects of it but not all of them. If from the readings or lecture, you decide that you are suffering from manic-depressive disorder (students have a tendency to see themselves fitting into psychological categories as they learn about them), well you may be, but you probably are not, and in any event, that diagnosis requires a careful assessment from a trained professional, not a few sentence description of the disorder from a textbook or lecture.

    You should not base any important decisions or actions solely on what you learn in this course -- or even more so on what you learn in the media! (Although for the exams, you’re best bet is to treat what you learn here as the absolute truth!) If you have a personal or academic interest in a particular point or topic, investigate it more deeply on your own. The t.a.s and I would be happy to provide you with guidance as to how to gain more precise, detailed knowledge on anything we cover in this course. In addition, keep in mind that what is considered the state of the art truth today in a science is often viewed as patently false or quaint oversimplification tomorrow. That is the nature of scientific progress.

PERSONAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

In a class this large, there will undoubtedly be some students having psychological difficulties or wanting to help someone who does. I am hopeful that you will learn some valuable things in this course, but there is no reason to believe that learning about psychology by itself will help you solve your own or someone else’s psychological difficulties.

    There are a variety of forms of psychotherapy that clinical and counseling psychologists and psychiatrists use to try to alleviate psychological problems. These include drugs, working on counter-productive beliefs and thinking about the self and the world, relearning and relaxation techniques, working on past experiences, family, and relationship problems, developing better social skills, and problem-solving strategies. All of these approaches can be useful. Our knowledge of what works best, and for what type of problem, is limited, but we do know from research that obtaining help from a reputable mental health professional is definitely better than not doing anything. People do improve and change but not until they make the effort to do so. So if you are miserable, or for other reasons feel that you have a psychological problem, by all means seek help! Pass this advice on to others in need. The easiest first step is to make an appointment to see someone with Counseling and Psychological Services at the Student Health Center, 621-3334.

THE READING

The reading for this course is tough, as is the material in both the readings and the lecture.

CAUTIONARY NOTE 2: If you are interested in an easy A or a course in which you don’t have to do much reading or thinking, this course isn’t it! The readings are dense and chock full of ideas, information, and tough vocabulary.

The textbook is not the kind for which you can cram in hundreds of pages the night before an exam --it won’t work! In fact, multiple short reading sessions each day are the best way to go. For the Myers text, I find 10 pages a sitting about the most I can do before glazing over. You will be expected to learn things from the text that I will not go over in class. There is simply not enough class time to go over everything in the Myers text or in the reading I prepared for you either, and I think it is reasonable to expect that you can learn some things directly from the text. You can of course ask questions about material in the book that I didn’t go over. Your best bet is to closely follow the reading schedule specified in the class schedule section of this syllabus. Note that we will be skipping sections of the Myers text and we will be reading it out of order to correspond to the order of the lectures. The ideal is for you to have the reading done prior to the relevant lecture so the lecture will be understandable and help reinforce the material and also so that you can bring up pertinent issues or questions in class. The reading assignments are designed to keep the amount of reading per class manageable. Extensive review and note-taking from the book will be critical for learning the material.

GRADES

Instead of focusing on your grade in this class, I would rather that you find the material interesting in its own right and focus on learning the material because its interesting and useful. If you think about it for a minute, I believe that 5 or 10 years from now you will agree that the things (however few) that you still remember from this class will be of greater value to you than whatever grade you happened to get. On the other hand, your overall GPA may be of considerable significance to you down the road, depending on the career direction you choose to pursue. So I know that many of you will be concerned about grades, and rightly so. In general, I follow the usual 90%=A, 80%=B, 70%=C, 60%=D, below that=E scheme. Although scores tend to follow a normal distribution, a prevalence of high grades is certainly possible. I will curve the grades if the class means for the exams are unusually low. I like to make exams challenging to set high goals for you all, so the chances of some curving are good. So, for example, you may be able to get an A with lower than 90%of the total points possible. If I need to curve, the nature of it will depend on the class mean, the distribution of scores, and my and the t.a.s’ perceptions of the effort the class has put into learning the material. My philosophy of grading is to be reasonably generous but not to the point that high grades lose their significance as indicators of excellent performance. The criteria for the letter grades will never be tougher than the 90/80/70/60 cutpoints, no matter how high the class mean is. I believe that the best way to do well on the exams is to focus on learning the material rather than on how to do well on the tests.

Our responsibility is to present the material in a coherent manner, to answer questions, and to provide suggestions to help you learn the material. It is however your responsibility to learn the material. To do this you have to take an active role rather than be a passive recipient of information. You have to put in the cognitive effort to: a)expose yourself to the material over and over again; b) concentrate on and think effortfully about the material as you are first listening to or reading the material, and when you are reviewing the material; and c) ask questions about material you do not understand.

To Learn the Material, There are No Substitutes For:

a) attending the class, paying attention, taking careful notes, and asking questions.

b) doing the reading according to the schedule provided later in this syllabus, and doing so in short segments.

c) reviewing your notes and the readings often and repeatedly -- concepts and explanations need to be understood, and facts, terms, and findings need to be memorized; there is no way around that. During lectures I will present material once. I will not have time to repeatedly present the same information. Therefore, to get the necessary repetition to learn successfully, you should take good notes and read them over repeatedly.

d) obviously extensive review is needed in the week prior to the exams, but don’t make those the first times you go over the material if you want to do well.

e) There will be a website with some pertinent information regarding the course including this syllabus, lecture outlines, and information about the exams and the paper. So you need to access this site using the following address precisely as listed below:

http://www.u.arizona.edu/ic/indv101/greenberg/

Additional Learning Aids You May Want to Check Out:

1) In the introduction to the Myers textbook, Myers offers a number of useful strategies for learning the material --I highly recommend you attend to his suggestions.

2) The text may come with a study guide which also provides useful strategies and exercises for learning the material.

3) There may be a cd-rom designed for the Myers text available with exercises as well.

EXAMS

Your grade will be based on your performance on two midterms worth a total of 50% of your grade, a final exam worth 35% of your grade, and a paper worth 15% of your grade. The first midterm will be short essay, with the questions provided on the website prior to the exam. The other exams will be multiple choice. Each midterm will be worth 25% of your grade. Make-up exams will be only provided if you have a documented excuse for having missed an exam. Excuses like thinking the test was on some other day, planning a vacation for that day, oversleeping, being told by your psychic to skip the exam, etc. will not work. The final exam will be partly cumulative -- it is important to me that at the end of the class you still remember major theories, facts, and findings from earlier in the course. Therefore, approximately 70% of the items on the final will be on the material covered after the second midterm, and 30% of the items will assess your cumulative knowledge.

The tests will focus on concepts, facts, and research findings that are emphasized by the readings or lectures, not on picky or obscure details like names and dates. In general, if something is covered by both the text and the lecture, it is especially likely to show up on a test. As far as cheating goes, there will be no tolerance for wandering eyes during exams or any other type of behavior that even suggests the possibility of cheating. For those few of you who might consider such a thing, forget about it.

THE PAPER

You have two choices for the paper, which must be typed and no more than 5 pages long. It is worth 15% of your grade, and is DUE ON NOV. 18. The paper should be an original, thoughtful well-written contribution of your own and should not be done with classmates. Thus your paper should not resemble the paper turned in by any other student. You will have the opportunity to turn in a rough draft of the paper during our office hours and receive feedback from myself or the t.a.s before preparing the final version of the paper; however the final version must be submitted by Nov. 18. The paper should precisely follow the requirements and format of EITHER Choice 1 OR Choice 2 as specified at the top of the next page:

CHOICE 1: PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF SOMEONE YOU KNOW

1) Pick a close friend, family member or yourself, and in no more than a page, describe the person’s personality and social and school/work situations.

2) Describe this person’s personality and/or how the person came to her/his current position in life using TWO of the following three perspectives:

A) Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
B) Ernest Becker’s theory of human behavior
C) A theory concerning social, cognitive, or moral development

CHOICE 2: PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF AN IMPORTANT EVENT IN YOUR LIFE

1) In no more than a page, describe an important event in your life.

2) To explain the causes and consequences of this event, use theories and research from TWO of the following three sets of topics:

A) Motivation and emotion
B) Thinking and memory
C) Cognitive dissonance, self-awareness, self-esteem

RESEARCH REQUIREMENT

There is one more requirement that applies to all sections of this course, and that is to become exposed first-hand to psychological research. There are two ways to do this. The more popular way is to be a participant in ongoing research projects of the faculty. The participation program for doing this is described in great detail on two pages following the course schedule. Essentially you need to participate in approximately 3 hours worth of research to earn the 6 credits necessary to complete the requirement. If the studies you participate in are properly explained to you following your participation (as is supposed to happen in this program), this can be a very enlightening experience with regard to what psychological research is really all about. If you object to being a research participant or simply prefer to write another paper, you can instead find a research article from a psychology journal and write a 5 page paper describing this research (it is due Dec.1). Note that this research paper option is quite separate from and different from the required paper assignment described above which will determine 15% of your grade. If you choose this research paper option, you must get your choice of an article to write about approved by one of the t.a.s by the day of the second midterm. If you do not either earn 6 credits for research participation or turn in an acceptable research paper, you will receive an Incomplete in the course until such time as you complete the requirement. Details regarding the Research Participation Program are provided on the last two pages attached to this syllabus; please read them over carefully.

If after considering all of this plus the class schedule below, you decide to remain in this class, WELCOME!

If not, good luck to you in your other academic pursuits!

The schedule of classes, exams, and readings due begins on the next page. M refers to the Myers textbook and B refers to the reading I prepared about Becker; both are available at the bookstore.

syllabus99.htm
8/25//99