Great Ideas in Psychology Podcast

Sexual motivation promotes the continuance of the species, as well as being a lot of fun.

A few personal notes about what creating this podcast has meant to me, how it was done, and a thank you to everyone who listened.

The class concludes with an upbeat lecture about how we are attracted to each other, how we help each other and what makes us fall in love.

We explore the dark side of human nature questioning how and why evil occurs and how each of us can act heroically to stop it.

Personality disorders are deeply rooted, maladaptive characteristics of personality that are not easily changed.

The most common disorders are Axis 1 disorders, such as anxiety and depression.

Your most powerful sex organ is your brain. We discuss the biology and physiology of an important topic.

Our attitudes shape our behavior, and vice versa. We want our behavior to match our beliefs.

How do you know your place in the world? We will learn about the ways of social thinking that define our identity as individuals and as members of social groups.

What does positive psychology teach us how to live happier, healthier and more fully?

Each school of thought approached psychotherapy in different ways. We start with psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

This lecture covers the scientific thinking that shaped psychology and the three -isms of psychology: empiricism, rationalism, and materialism.

Other approaches to therapy are humanistic, Gestalt, and cognitive therapy.

This lecture is a survey of the treatment of mental illness throughout history.

Defining abnormality is harder than you might think. What does it mean to be normal and is it possible that we are all just a little abnormal?

Mental illness has been recognized for thousands of years but the causes of mental illness have often been poorly understood.

Hunger is a basic motivation for survival that sometimes goes wrong.

Health, Stress, and Coping. The college lifestyle can have health consequences later in life. Finding balance in life.

What are feelings and why do we sometimes work hard for things that could be easier?

Racial differences in intelligence, test bias, the Terminites, and the Bell Curve.

There is more than one way of being intelligent because IQ is not the whole story.

Why do you do what you do? Its all about motivation.

What is intelligence and how can it be measured (and mis-measured)?

Sigmund Freud says personality is shaped by unconscious instincts, aggressive, and sexual drives. Defense mechanisms cope with anxiety in the psyche.

Sigmund Freud explains how your personality is shaped by age 6 and how we can get stuck in the early stages of personality development.

Humanistic psychology takes a positive view of human personality and shows how we can tap into our potential to grow as human beings.

Other theories of personality played down the forces that shape personality and instead focused on describing personality as it really exists in human beings.

How to make good decisions and how problem solving can go wrong.

Communication can be taken for granted but its mechanisms are amazingly complex.

How do you learn right from wrong? Moral reasoning makes it clear.

Thinking is made easier with clear concepts and good reasoning.

Erikson’s theory about the social motivation for development covers the lifespan.

Piaget studied cognitive development from childhood to adulthood

Freud’s theory is both influential and misunderstood. It’s time to clarify his work.

Human growth and development involves the body, mind, and emotions.

Getting information out of memory storage can be a tricky task. The lecture explores how memories are retrieved and what happens when memory goes away.

Memory encodes and stores information about your life. This lecture looks into the types of memory and how memories are created.

Brave dogs teach us about learned helplessness. We also learn by observing others and from insight.

Operant conditioning is reward-punishment learning.

Classical conditioning is stimulus-response learning.

Your consciousness connects you to the past and the present. Here we explore what consciousness means to you.

We explore the field of sleep & dreaming and the phenomenon of hypnosis.

Perception is making meaning of sensation. This lecture explores the rules your brain uses to understand the world.

The sense of sight is a primary sense used by human beings. Here we explore the amazing eye and its function.

The sense of hearing brings the world of sound to our brains. There are three more senses– taste, smell and touch – but are there even more senses than five?

The basic building blocks of the nervous system explains how changes in your body affect how you think and feel.

This lecture explores some of the great ideas in the history of Western thought (Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) and their contributions to the field of psychology.

The endocrine system is an important part of the body; it is controlled by the nervous system (kind of).

Your brain is you; the structure and function of your brain makes you who you are.

The divisions of the nervous system show us why what you think about changes how your body functions.

Psychology grew at the intersection of philosophy and science. This podcast looks at the founders of psychology and the major schools of psychology.