Psychology Course

scripts： Psychology course 

welcome to this course, Introduction to Psychology. My name is Dr. Paul Bloom.

I'm professor of this course. And what this is going to be is a comprehensive introduction to the study of the human mind. So, we are going to cover a very wide range of topics including brains, children, language, sex, memory, madness, disgust, racism and love, and many others. The style of this course is that there'll be two lectures a week, as well as course readings.

Now, to do well in the course, you have to attend both the lectures and do the readings.There will be some parts of the readings that will not find their way into the lectures, and some lectures that will not connect at all to the readings. The slides are going to be made available online. I'm going to post it in a format which will be black and white and easy to print out so you don't have to worry about this. But again, attending to the slides is not a substitute for attending class. There's a textbook, Peter Gray's Psychology, 5th edition, and there's also a collection of short readings. it's an excellent textbook; it's an excellent collection, and you should get them both. They're available at Labyrinth bookstore on York Street or you get them online. The evaluation goes like this. There is a Midterm and there is a Final. The Final will not be held in the exam period, because I like to take long vacations. It will be held on the last day of class. The exams will be multiple choice and short answer, fill-in the blank, that sort of thing. Prior to the exams I will post previous exams online, so you have a feeling for how these exams work and so on. There will also be review sessions. Starting at the beginning of the third week of class, on each Monday I'm going to put up a brief question or set of questions, which you have to answer and your answers need to be sent to your teaching fellow. And you'll be given a teaching fellow, assigned one, by Friday. Now, this is a large class, and if you don't do anything about it, it can be very anonymous. And some of you may choose to pursue it that way and that's totally fine. But what I would suggest you do is to establish some contact with us, either with me or with any of the teaching fellows, and I'll introduce the teaching fellows sometime next week. You could talk to us at the beginning or at the end of class. Unless there are special circumstances, I always try to come at least ten minutes early, and I am willing to stay late to talk to people. You could come by during my office hours, which are on the syllabus. I'm very willing to talk to students about intellectual ideas, about course problems and so on.

Okay. That's the introduction to and requirements for the course. Do you have any questions?