Bachelor of Science - Psychology with Integrated Foundation Year (C806)

The BSc (Hons) Psychology with Foundation programme has been designed to meet the accreditation criteria of the British Psychological Society (BPS). This four year, full-time programme starts with a year of building foundation of knowledge and skills. The programme gives students the opportunity to examine the biological, cognitive, developmental, individual difference and social psychological principles underlying everyday experience and behaviour, and then investigating those psychological principles in contexts related to those in which professional psychologists work.

Areas that are explored in this course include foundations of thinking, feeling and developing as well questions like: Is the internet making us miserable? Why is obesity so much higher in Western countries? Can we minimise the effects of dementia? Can men and women be friends? Are people born evil? Is love all we need? How can we eat ourselves healthy? Do we all have criminal intent? What is complete well-being? Can we remember what really happened? Can we define complete wellbeing?

The programme is designed to take students from building a foundation, analysing of everyday functions and attendant important behaviours, through core discipline knowledge of theory and empirical findings relevant to those behaviours and others, to an appreciation and understanding of contexts in which psychology can be applied. The key theoretical areas that will be studied include: cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, abnormal and forensic psychology, developmental psychology, individual differences, social psychology, and biological psychology.

The BSc (Hons) Psychology with Integrated Foundation Year programme sets psychological investigation and knowledge into everyday functions, and encourages students to ask what behaviours are involved in those functions, and how may those behaviours be explained using psychological constructs and methods of investigation. A questioning approach to behaviour is thus encouraged from year one.

Practical experiments are used as a foundation for understanding and explanation. Students will learn to link the development of research and analytic skills to explanations relevant to everyday experiences. This approach will continue to the final year where students will explore contexts such as work and lifestyle from a psychological perspective. Practical and laboratory experience and skills development is embedded within this process, as is practical experience of research participation, thus linking the development of research and analytic skills to explaining behaviours relevant to everyday functioning and experiences. This approach is carried through to the final year where psychological knowledge is applied to contexts relevant to peoples’ lives and work.