Psychology Education Video and Audio Lectures

This time as many psychology video lectures as I could find!


General Psychology (@ UC Berkeley)

• Video Lectures: Psych 1
• Course Website
  

This course will survey the scientific study of mental life and the mental functions that underlie human experience thought, and action. The emphasis is on cognitive processes and social interactions characteristic of adults. However, research on nonhuman animals, as well as biological, developmental, and pathological processes, will be introduced as relevant. This course, or its equivalent, is a prerequisite for admission to most upper division courses in the Department of Psychology. Psychology 1 (or its equivalent) is required for prospective majors in Psychology, and is intended for lower-division students (freshmen and sophomores).

Topics include:
Biological Bases of Mind and Behavior, Learning, Sensation and Perception, Attention and Memory, Thought and Language, Personality and Social Interaction, Psychological Development, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy.


Drugs and Behavior (@ UC Berkeley)

• Audio Lectures: Psych 119
• Course Website
  

A survey course exploring the basic principles of psychopharmacology. The major focus of the course is on the relationship between behavior and the physiological actions of drugs. Emphasis will be placed on effects of pharmacological agents on complex mental processes such as attention, motivation, learning, and memory.


Clinical Psychology (@ UC Berkeley)

• Audio Lectures: Psych 130
• Course Website
  

This course will consider the field of Clinical Psychology by focusing primarily on the scientific study of psychological disorders. We will begin by discussing historical notions of abnormality and specifying a multidimensional approach to the study of psychopathology. We will then proceed to cover the descriptions, causes, and treatments of many different forms of psychopathology. Throughout the course, we will also consider the various career paths of the clinical psychologist, including their roles as scientists, practitioners, and policy advocates. The required textbook for the course will provide you with an overview of the current research on different psychological disorders. Lectures, discussions, films, and discussion sections will supplement the text, allowing for a more broad-based coverage of the material.

Topics Include:
History, Paradigms, Diagnosis and Assessment, Research Methods, Anxiety Disorders, Dissociative Disorders, Stress and Health, Eating Disorders, Mood Disorders, Substance Related Disorders, Late Life and Psychological Disorders, Schizophrenia, Mental Health Services: Legal and Ethical Issues, Developmental Disorders.


Human Emotion (@ UC Berkeley)

• Audio Lectures: Psych 156
• Course Website
  

This course will examine two different theoretical perspectives on emotion: (1) the differential emotions approach with its strong evolutionary grounding, and (2) the social constructionist approach. Next, the course will investigate empirical research on many facets of emotion including facial expression, physiology, appraisal, and the lexicon of emotion. Finally, we will consider more specific topics including social interaction, culture, gender, personality, and psychopathology.


Social Psychology (@ UC Berkeley)

• Audio Lectures: Psych 160
• Course Website

Social psychology is the scientific study of the way people think about, feel, and behave in social situations. It involves understanding how people influence, and are influenced by, the others around them. A primary goal of this course is to introduce you to the perspectives, research methods, and empirical findings of social psychology. Topics to be covered include: impression formation, conformity, prosocial behavior, interpersonal attraction, persuasion, stereotyping and prejudice. Equally important is the goal of cultivating your skills for analyzing the social situations and events that you encounter in your everyday lives. Finally, throughout the course, emphasis will be placed on developing critical and integrative ways of thinking about theory and research in social psychology.

Topics Include:
Themes, Research Methods, Introduction to Social Cognition, Effects of Schemas, Confirmation Biases and Schema Change, Automatic vs. Controlled Processing, Attribution, The Self, Cognitive Dissonance, The Multiply Motivated Self, Attitudes and Persuasion, Conformity and Compliance, Obedience, Group Processes, Attraction, Close Relationships, Prosocial Behavior, Stereotyping and Prejudice, Intergroup Relations, Applying Social Psychology and Revisiting Themes.


Introduction to Psychology (@ MIT)

• Audio Lectures
• Course Website

This course surveys questions about human behavior and mental life ranging from how you see to why you fall in love. The great controversies: nature and nurture, free will, consciousness, human differences, self and society. Students are exposed to the range of theoretical perspectives including biological, evolutionary, cognitive, and psychoanalytic. One of the best aspects of Psychology is that you are the subject matter. This makes it possible to do many demonstrations in lecture that allow you to experience the topic under study.

Topics Include:
The Brain: Between the Ears, Behind the Eyes; Motivation and Emotion: "Reason Alone Cannot Move Us To Do Anything"; Learning: The Power of Association; Sensing: Gathering the Information; Attending: Limiting the Information; Perceiving: Interpreting the Information; Memory: What Do You Remember?; Cognition: How Do You Think?; Cognitive Development: How Do Children Think?; Language: What Do You Say?; Language Development: What Do Children Say?; Intelligence: How Do We Know You Are Smart?; The Battle of the Sexes: Love and Evolution; Social Exchange: Romantic Economics; Attitudes and Behaviors: How Can We Be Controlled?; Who Are you? The Psychology of the Self; From Dissociation To Repression; Freud and the Development of Morality; Freud and Fairy Tales; Sleep and Dreams; Defining Mental Illness: Are Suicide Bombers Insane?; Causing Mental Illness: What Can Make You "Lose" Your Mind?; Curing Mental Illness: Beyond Magic Bullets.


Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

• Video Lecture @ MIT World
• Lecture Website

Why does a three year-old say “I went,” then six months later start saying “I goed”? When you first heard the word “fax,” how did you know the past tense is “faxed”? And why is it that a baseball player is said to have “flied out,” but could never have “flown out”?

After fifteen years of studying words in history, in the laboratory, and in everyday speech, Steven Pinker has worked out the dynamic relationship – searching memory vs. following rules – that determines the forms our speech takes. In one of his final lectures at MIT Pinker gives the ultimate lecture on verbs, in a rich mixture of linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and a surprising amount of humor. If you’ve ever wondered about the plural of Walkman, or why they are called the Toronto Maple Leafs and not Leaves, this lecture provides answers to these and other questions of modern language.


Pinker's Farewell

• Video Lecture @ MIT World
• Lecture Website
  

In this personal and reflective event, Pinker looks back at twenty plus years at MIT and shares his deep appreciation for the place where "ideas and content always come first."

Recalling his earliest work at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science, he describes the maddening problem of how children learn to use verbs correctly. You can splash the wall with paint and can splash paint on the wall; you can spill water on the floor but you can’t spill the floor with water. Pinker theorized that children unconsciously divide the world of actions into categories like geometry and force, and that humans have evolved a grammar based on this intuitive physics. Pinker discusses Noam Chomsky’s “enormous” impact on him, as well as his profound differences with Chomsky concerning the evolution of humans’ innate ability to acquire language. In spite of jibes from outsiders (often journalists), Pinker says he reveled in teaching MIT’s introductory psychology course. Finally, he describes many sleepless nights while pondering the “most agonizing choice of my career”—his decision to leave MIT for Harvard.


The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

• Video Lecture @ MIT World
• Lecture Website
  

From the book jacket: Our conceptions of human nature affect every aspect of our lives, from the way we raise our children to the political movements we embrace. Yet just as science is bringing us into a golden age of understanding human nature, many people are hostile to the very idea. They fear that a biological understanding of the mind will be used to justify inequality, subvert social change, and dissolve personal responsibility and strip life of meaning and purpose. In The Blank Slate Pinker retraces the history that led people to view human nature as dangerous, and unsnarls the moral and political debates that have entangled the idea along the way.


Intelligence, Cognitive Reflection, and Decision Making

• Video Lecture @ MIT World
• Lecture Website
  

Would you go for the sure bet -- say, a guaranteed $100, or a 75% chance on $200? How about receiving $3,400 this month, or waiting two months to get $3,800?

People have widely varying tastes for risk, and different levels of patience. Decision researchers have known this for a while. But Shane Frederick’s work puts a new spin on the subject. With a deceptively simple “cognitive reflection test (CRT),” Frederick has come up with a way of predicting individuals’ predilections for risk-taking.

Frederick found 3,000 plus subjects -- mostly university students across the U.S. – to answer his three CRT questions, as well as to respond to a survey on financial gambles and other risk-based decisions. The CRT, which he describes as functioning like an IQ test, tends to elicit impulsive, erroneous answers. Here’s one sample question: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The intuitive answer is 10 cents. The correct answer is 5 cents.


The Secret Impact of Social Norms (@ Princeton)

• Audio Lecture
• Lecture Transcript
• Lecture Website
  

Excursions into the New Psychology of Entertainment (@ Princeton)

• Video Lecture
• Lecture Website
  

Lots and lots of other psychology videos can be found at WGBH Forum Network.
Enjoy!