Topic outline

  • Contemporary Psychology




    Instructor: Dr Elena Gregoria Chai Chin Fern

    Course Synopsis

    The course introduces students to the application of psychological concepts in contemporary society. Main areas of psychology taught in this course are general psychology, developmental, and social psychology. The course also includes key topics such as learning, memory, personality, motivation and emotion which will also be discussed in-depth in order to bring about understanding their relevancy to everyday life and work. Different core psychological domains such as social perception, social cognition, conformity, compliance, attitudes that are fundamental to understanding of human behaviour will be examined.

    By the end of this course, students will be able to:

    • Display the use of major concepts and perspectives in contemporary psychology
    • Demonstrate psychological principles to personal and social issues
    • Understand one's own and others' behaviour and apply psychological perspectives to other disciplines in social sciences

    Creative Commons LicenseThis OpenCourseWare@UNIMAS and its related materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

    • Conditioning and Learning

      - Classical Conditioning (Pavlov)

      - Operant Conditioning (Skinner)

      - Cognitive Learning

      - Observational Learning

    • Personality and Its Assessment

      - Definition of Personality

      - Psychodynamic view: Freud,

      - Neo Freudian: Jung, Adler, Horney and Erikson

      - Trait Approach: Allport, Cattell, Eysenck

      - Big Five Personality Traits

      - Behaviourist Approach: Skinner

      - Self Efficacy

    • Memory

      - Information Processing Model of Memory

      - Three-Stage Model of Memory

      - Sensory Memory

      - Short Term Memory

      - Working Memory

      - Long Term Memory

      - Forgetting: When Memory Fails

      - Failure of Encoding

      - Decay

      - Interference

    • Motivation and Emotion

      - Needs, Drives, Motivation

      - Drive Reduction Theory of Motivation

      - Motivation and Behavior

      - Self Determination Theories

      - Theories of Emotion

    • Social Cognition and Social Perception

      - Social Perception

      - Attribution Theories

      - Social Cognition

      - Impression Formation

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