An applied graduate level course in multiple regression and analysis of variance for students who have completed an undergraduate course in basic statistical methods. Emphasis is on practical methods of data analysis and their interpretation. Covers model building, general linear hypothesis, residual analysis, leverage and influence, one-way anova, two-way anova, factorial anova. Primarily for doctoral students in the managerial, behavioral, social and health sciences. Permission of instructor required to enroll.

Choice of half or full course units each sem. covering a range of subjects and approaches in academic psychology.

Choice of half or full course units each sem. covering a range of subjects and approaches in academic psychology.

Open to senior honors candidates in psychology. A two-semester sequence supporting the preparation of an honors thesis in psychology. Students will present their work in progress and develop skills in written and oral communication of scientific ideas. Prerequisite: Acceptance into the Honors Program in Psychology.

This is a two-semester course starting in the Fall. Class size limited to 8-10 students.

PSYC 4460 is an activity-based course with three major goals. First, the course is an opportunity for psychology and cognitive science undergrad majors to develop their professional and science communication skills and share their enthusiasm for these topics with high school students at a nearby public high school in West Philadelphia. In this regard, Penn students will prepare demonstrations and hands-on activities to engage local high school students, increase their knowledge in functions of the mind and brain, providing insights that may promote well being for the high school students and their community. This will be accomplished as students design and execute hands-on/minds-on activities on a range of psychology topics. There will be 10 sessions across the semester for these lessons, allowing the college and high school students to develop a consistent teacher-learner relationship.
Second, students will explore the literature that discusses the need for better bridges between scientific research and the broader community. Discussions will incorporate the students' experiences, including challenges and rewards, as they bring psychology lessons to local youth. This academic portion of the course will include guest lectures from the Penn community who actively engaged in community partnerships.
Third, students will be challenged to consider solutions for any problems that they encounter using a Theory of Change framework. This aspect of the course will result in a final project in which students much create logical, realistic, evidence-based links between interventions, indicators of change, and ultimate impacts to mitigate the problems.

In this research course, students will begin by first replicating earlier experiments to measure human visual memory capacity. After several class discussions to discuss ideas, each student will design and conduct their own experiment to further investigate visual and/or familiarity memory.

How do people decide and how can we study decision processes using formal mathematical and computational models? This course will address this question. It will examine popular quantitative modeling techniques in psychology, economics, cognitive science, and neuroscience, and will apply these techniques to study choice behavior. Students will learn how to test the predictions of choice models, fit the models on behavioral data, and quantitatively examine the goodness-of-fit. They will also get practice formulating their own models for describing human behavior. This class will have a major programming component, however no prior programming experience is required.

Though almost half a century old, Milgram’s 1961-1962 studies of “destructive obedience” continue to puzzle, fascinate, and alarm. The main reason for their continued grip on the field’s attention (other than the boldness of the idea and elegance of execution) may be simply that they leave us with a portrait of human character that is radically different from the one that we personally wish to endorse or that the wider culture teaches us to accept. In this seminar, we will take an in-depth look at these famous studies (along with the more recent replications) and explore their various psychological, political and philosophical ramifications.

This course is designed to help you become a better decision maker. By the end of the semester, you should have the skills to approach decision making from a broader perspective with new tools and a new awareness of many common errors and biases. You will learn about normative decisions (how people should make choices if they want to use principles of rationality, logic and probability), descriptive decisions (how people really do make decisions) and prescriptive decisions (how people can make better decisions given normative principles and what we know about human behavior). We’ll discuss the theoretical foundations of the field, some of the key empirical insights. We’ll discuss what it means to have good judgment and how experts and novices differ. We look at decision making in such as public policy, medicine, the law, business, and intelligence analysis. Decision making is something we do every day, many times a day. It is so natural that some people don’t even realize they are doing it. Many of the insights from this field have real-world implications.