Behavioral Sciences Minor

This course will explore the relationship between individual experiences and the socio-cultural context, focusing on the role socio-cultural institutions play on personality, health, and world view.

This course will present a comparative examination of religion as an aspect of human culture and will include substantive and functional approaches to religious behavior, religion as a symbol system, ritual behavior, magic, religious movements, and paranormal phenomena. Prerequisite: ANT 210 or permission of instructor. Offered alternate years.

This course will study language as a fundamental component of human beings by examining the link between experience, culture, and language through the investigation of how language communicates, changes, and is used strategically to accomplish social ends.

The effect of social influences upon the development of personality and behavior patterns will be examined in this course including socialization, attitude formation and change, communication, propaganda, roles and stereotypes, leadership, and collective behavior.

This theoretical and research-based course will investigate the mental processes that underlie perception, imagery, attention, memory, language, reading, reasoning, decision making, and problem solving.

Unlike traditional models and schools of thought that see diseases solely as malfunctions of organs or breakdowns of body systems, this course will present the approach that health and illness are parts of a complex interplay among biological, psychological, and social factors.

As an introduction to the major problems in contemporary America, this course will focus on the causes, theoretical explanations, and social policy solutions including economic, political, urbanization, environmental, family and educational problems; child abuse; social deviance; crime; delinquency; and drug, alcohol, and tobacco abuse.

This course will introduce the sources, functions, and dynamics of the unequal distribution of wealth, power, knowledge, and prestige in an historical, comparative perspective.

This course will examine selected social theories and theorists and the history and development of social theory including the following: the formulation and evaluation of social theories such as social systems, evolutionary, formal, phenomenological, symbolic interaction, social action, and exchange theories; sociology of knowledge; and functionalism. Offered alternate years.