Psychology gives us valuable insight into many areas of life – from human behaviour in the classroom or courtroom to animal cognition and natural selection.
At Queen Mary, you’ll take a rigorous, biological approach to the subject, studying it as a natural and experimental science. You’ll develop a strong foundation of knowledge through modules in cognitive psychology, language acquisition and consciousness and causality.
You’ll integrate biological approaches by studying animal behaviour and cognition, mammals and evolution, and cognitive and affective neuroscience. In your final year, you can choose to carry out a research project, drawing on support and expertise from across the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences.
Teaching takes place in a combination of lectures and practical sessions, where you’ll get hands-on experience of running your own experiments, questionnaires and surveys. You’ll also have regular tutorials in small groups of six to eight students. For every hour spent in classes, you’ll be expected to complete additional hours of independent study – preparing, analysing results, writing up and reading.
Among the modules you’ll study in your first year is ‘Positive Psychology’. You’ll be introduced to important themes in the discipline of psychology, and consider a unique area of research which focuses on psychological well-being and optimal functioning, as well as the individual and social factors that determine them.
In your second year, you’ll study the module ‘Cognitive Psychology’, which explores specific cognitive functions and properties of the human mind. The material covered will include visual and multimodal perception, attentional processes, memory mechanisms and the relationships and links between processes. Language, reasoning and decision making will also be covered, and you’ll look at experiments and studies from classical and modern cognitive psychology.