Exploring and understanding human beings from a scientific perspective
The Department of Psychological Sciences conducts education and research about psychology to increase scientific understanding of human beings. The first and second year students study the fundamental knowledge of psychology and the basics of various research methods (for example, observation, experiment, surveys, examination, and statistical processing). Third year students become members of seminars led by professors who are specialists in their fields in order to study more deeply the knowledge and technologies of psychology and related fields. These seminars enable students to prepare to write the graduation thesis that is undertaken in their fourth year. There are many specialty fields, including: perception, physiology, cognition, learning, memory, thinking, language, emotion, motivation, personality, education, development, health, abnormal behavior, clinical, disorders, society, cultures, infants, elderly, parent-child relationships, animal behavior, behavior analysis, neuroscience, and psychiatric medicine. Science facilities include dozens of laboratory rooms, three laboratory halls, four interviewing rooms, five observation rooms, and three play rooms. These facilities hold leading edge equipments such as virtual reality systems, eye movement measuring equipment, real-time EEG analysis equipment, and various psychological examination instruments. In addition, the university has one of the largest scale animal psychology research facilities in the country. The department also conducts basic and applied research activities at various facilities outside the university (for example, elementary schools, hospitals, and aquariums) and is actively engaged in collaborative industrial research with manufacturers.
Studying human beings from a scientific perspective
In our graduate program, research activities are conducted from the perspective of scientific psychology. There are many specialty fields, including: perception, physiology, cognition, learning, memory, thinking, language, emotion, motivation, personality, education, development, health, abnormal behavior, clinical psychology, disorders, society, cross-cultural psychology, infants, the elderly, parent-child relationships, gender, animal behavior, behavior analysis, neuroscience, and psychiatric medicine. Empirical studies in psychology are conducted in these fields based on experiments and surveys.
Science facilities include dozens of laboratory rooms, three laboratory halls, four interviewing rooms, five observation rooms, and three play rooms. These facilities hold leading-edge equipments such as virtual reality systems, eye movement measuring equipment, real-time EEG analysis equipment, and various psychological examination instruments. In addition, the university also maintains the largest scale animal psychology research facilities in the country. The department also intensively conducts basic and applied research activities at various facilities outside the university (for example, elementary schools, hospitals, and aquariums) and is actively engaged in collaborative industrial research with manufacturers in the fields of electronics, automobiles, and foods.
Advanced research results in scientific psychology are reported at international conferences and published in top-ranking academic journals. Numerous graduates of the graduate school are actively pursuing psychology careers at universities and research organizations as well as in clinical and educational fields and institutions. Graduate students involve themselves in the research topics in their own fields of interest and specialty, receive help and guidance in seminars or as needed from their major professors, and advance their research in their chosen topics.