Pacific University Graduate School of Psychology
Social and affective or emotional bases of behavior
The course is in the books! What an enjoyable term delving into Social & Affective Bases of Behavior as adjunct professor at Pacific University's Graduate School of Psychology.
I've long been drawn to thinking about how our social environment and our emotional lives affect our psychological experiences.
In addition to the usual textbook, we looked at Jonathan Haidt's very important book The Anxious Generation, which outlines some of the social causes of the dramatic, counter-intuitive increases we have been seeing in mental health challenges since 2010. Angela Duckworth's book Grit makes a nice companion to this.
I highly recommend the book Humankind by Rutger Bregman. The book takes on our society's rampant cynicism by demonstrating how much people are drawn to living a pro-social life.
The course also provided an opportunity to really delve into how emotions work. I've long felt dismay over how our culture treats emotions as either something to ignore or something to revere. Instead- feelings are functional! They serve a purpose.
The course brought me back in touch with two remarkably good movies: Inside Out and Inside Out 2. Media often gets psychology completely wrong. These movies are almost perfect in their depiction of how psychology works. Pixar knows what they are doing!