Skip to Main Content

PSY5230 Social and Personality Psychology: Home

Course Description

This course combines social and personality psychology. The social psychology components focus on topics and theories related to social cognition, social influence, social relations and emotions. The personality section provides an in-depth analysis of classic theories of personality and recent developments in personality research.

Recommended Books

Advanced Social Psychology: The State of the Science

This book explores the most essential questions of the human psyche. It underscores the strengths of social psychology, especially by illustrating how exciting the research questions are, highlighting the remarkable creativity behind the field’s research paradigms, and emphasizing the importance of psychological mechanisms underlying key findings. Among the 21 chapters, except for one on a summary of the major developments, and one on the major methodological developments from the past decade, others are all topical chapters. This second edition deals directly with issues surrounding replicability, and includes two new content chapters, one on morality, the other on computational psychology.

Personality Psychology: Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature

This book demonstrates how scientists approach the study of personality. Major findings, both classical and contemporary, are presented in the context of six key domains—Dispositional (traits, trait taxonomies, and personality dispositions over time), Biological (physiology, genetics, evolution), Intrapsychic (psychodynamics, motives), Cognitive-Experiential (cognition, emotion, and the self), Social and Cultural (social interaction, gender, and culture), and Adjustment (stress, coping, health, and personality disorder), providing a foundation for the analysis and understanding of human personality. The authors argue that the domains of knowledge should be viewed as complementary rather than conflicting.

Culture and Psychology

This book puts psychological theories and concepts into a cross-cultural framework to invite the readers to ultimately understand the relationship between culture and psychology. The book strives to explore whether psychological theories and principles are universal or culture-specific. It challenges the traditional mainstream knowledge of human behavior that may not be applicable to people of all cultural backgrounds by examining cross-culture literature. Contents covered include cross-cultural research methods, enculturation, developmental processes, self and identity, personality, gender, cognition, emotion, language and communication, health, psychological disorders, treatment for psychological disorders, social behavior, and organizations.

Recommeded Databases