Topic guide · Development across life / Emotion, motivation and sleep / Social and cultural behaviour
What changes during adolescence?
Connect biological change, relationships and research design while retaining individual variation.
Topic guide · Social and cultural behaviour / Emotion, motivation and sleep
How does culture shape what people want to feel?
Distinguish felt emotion from desired emotion, then examine how researchers define contexts, compare groups and limit generalisations.
Topic guide · Emotion, motivation and sleep / Social and cultural behaviour
What are competing explanations of emotion?
Distinguish feeling, bodily change, action and social function, then ask what evidence links them.
Topic guide · Mental health and intervention / Learning, memory and education / Emotion, motivation and sleep
How are fear, avoidance and anxiety connected?
Connect fear learning and avoidance with wider clinical and developmental questions.
Topic guide · Emotion, motivation and sleep / Social and cultural behaviour
How do hunger and reward interact?
Connect internal regulation, rewarding cues, learning and food environments without offering diet advice.
Topic guide · Emotion, motivation and sleep / Cells, circuits and brains / Methods, evidence and reproducibility
How are sleep and biological clocks studied?
Connect timing, light cues and experimental measurements while keeping sleep and circadian questions distinct.
Topic guide · Evolution and other minds / Social and cultural behaviour / Emotion, motivation and sleep
How does social attachment work across species?
Distinguish kinds of relationship and connect behavioural, physiological, developmental and ecological questions.
Topic guide · Emotion, motivation and sleep / Mental health and intervention / Methods, evidence and reproducibility
How do researchers study stress and health?
Separate a stressor, a measured response and an outcome, then examine the study design linking them.
Lectures and explanations
Selections below prioritise source-checked annotations. Inclusion does not assess scientific correctness.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 20 - The Good Life: Happiness
Asks how treatment efficacy can be assessed, then turns to happiness, cultural variation and people's predictions about future satisfaction.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 13 - Eating Disorders and Obesity (Guest Lecture by B. Timothy Walsh)
Timothy Walsh discusses eating disorders, clinical complications, diagnostic problems and explanations involving interacting vulnerabilities.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 7 - Hunger in the World of Plenty
Discusses measuring hunger, consequences of starvation and the geopolitical circumstances that affect access to food.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 11 - Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part I
Presents an evolutionary approach to emotion through examples of smiling, fear, family relationships and infants' responses to caregivers.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 6 - Culture and the Remarkable Plasticity of Eating (Presentation by Ashley Gearhardt)
Combines Ashley Gearhardt's presentation of an addiction model of eating with Kelly Brownell's discussion of cultural food practices.
CARTA · Source-checked annotation
CARTA: The Healing Power of Love: The Oxytocin Hypothesis
Sue Carter examines oxytocin and social bonding, including gaps and myths surrounding the idea of a love hormone.
Greater Good Science Center · Source-checked annotation
Richard Davidson: The Four Constituents of Well-Being
Richard Davidson presents a four-part account of wellbeing.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 12 - Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part II
Continues an evolutionary interpretation of social emotions, discussing parental love, gratitude, responses to cheating and cultural differences in revenge.
MIT OpenCourseWare · Source-checked annotation
23: Olfaction and Gustation
Introduces smell and taste, distinguishing an odorant from the resulting sensation. The inspected opening follows olfactory receptors to bulb/cortical projections, discusses a scent-tracking experiment and connects smell with flavour.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 5 - Biology, Nutrition and Health III: The Psychology of Taste and Addiction
Explores taste, biological influences on eating and body-weight regulation, including methods used to investigate genetic contributions.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 2 - Food Then, Food Now: Modern Food Conditions and Their Mismatch with Evolution
Presents an evolutionary-mismatch explanation of why preferences shaped in earlier food environments may operate differently in modern ones.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 14 - What Motivates Us: Sex
Presents a 2007 course discussion of evolutionary explanations and psychological studies concerning attraction, sex, gender differences and sexual orientation.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 17 - A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part II; Some Mysteries: Sleep, Dreams, and Laughter
Combines a discussion of social impressions and stereotypes with an introduction to sleep, dreams and theories about laughter.
CARTA · Source-checked annotation
CARTA: Love, Loss, and Luminance
Karen Bales compares pair bonds and responses to loss across several species.
MIT OpenCourseWare · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 15: Emotion & Motivation
Introduces ways of defining emotion, including subjective feeling, bodily response, expression, valence and arousal, before considering models and brain mechanisms.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 1 - Introduction: What We Eat, Why We Eat and the Key Role of Food in Modern Life
Frames eating as a topic involving biological preferences, psychological meanings, marketing and the wider organisation of food systems.