Psychological Perspectives on Human Motivation
Course | Available (Membership Required)
Why do we behave in certain ways instead of others? This course will overview various psychological approaches to the study of human motivation – the science of why we do what we do. Different faculty from the Psychology Department will consider motivation from their own areas of expertise. We will investigate questions about the social, emotional, and evolutionary factors that affect motivation and consider how motivation changes across the lifespan. Each class meeting will consider motivation from a different psychological perspective and discuss classic findings and recent developments in the field.
Afshin Gharib
Dr. Gharib's earned an MA and PhD from UC Berkeley. His research interests include the cognitive and neural mechanisms of associative learning - focusing on the role of attention, timing, and response learning in operant conditioning - and age-related changes in learning and memory. He is particularly interested in the effectiveness of antioxidants in reversing age associated declines in cognition. His teaching interests include Introduction to Psychology, Physiological Psychology, and Statistics and Research Methods. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at Dominican University of California.