Emotion and Social Cognition (HP)

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/P_HEMSCOG

Course Objective

Emotion and Social cognition investigates the dynamics of people's thoughts, emotions, and behaviors as they occur in everyday social situations. Some of the key questions in social cognition research are:
- How do people infer traits from the behavior of others?
- How do various kinds of stereotypes and prejudice influence our judgments of and behavior towards others? What role does language play in communicating stereotypes?
- Which factors shape how we think and feel about ourselves?
- What is the influence of the unconscious in our everyday judgments and decisions? Emotion and social cognition thus challenges us to reassess our intuitions and preconceptions about our own and others' behavior.

Course Content

This course is about how we think (cognition) and feel (emotion) about others. The course consists of lectures and students will perform a study with their workgroup. Each workgroup consists of four persons. Workgroups will focus on a recent target article in the area of social cognition from the lecturer. They will design an experiment and present this proposal to the other students. This course has the following learning goals:
- To be able to describe and understand the most important topics and approaches in the field of Emotion and Social Cognition.
- To be able to think critically about design of experiments.
- To be able to explain results from a study and link these results to theory.
- To be able to construct and provide scientific arguments when discussing research findings.

Teaching Methods

Lectures Develop a research proposal with 3 or 4 students One supervision meeting with the lecturerPresentation and discussion of the research proposal

Method of Assessment

- The final grade for this course is composed of an exam grade, which accounts for 70%, and a grade for the group project, which counts for 30%. To pass the course students need to have a 6 or higher for the exam and a 6 or higher for thegroup assignment.
- For the exam, students have to study the complete book, the lecture material and the research articles. The exam will contain 60 multiple choice questions (a,b,c,d).
- The lecturer will give feedback on the research proposals and presentations and will grade them. The grade for the group project will also takes into account the quality of the experiment.
- Partial grades for the group project and for the exam remain valid for 2 years.

Literature

Textbook: Te be announcedRecent scientific articles.

Recommended background knowledge

It is assumed that basic concepts of Social Psychology (introduced in the first year bachelor program of psychology) are known.