Psychology and Sociology: The importance of communication in social life.

We have filmed some role play exercises on communication styles. These short stories display a wide range of assertive, aggressive and passive uses of language in diverse social situations: family (Parents and daughters), friendship (A dangerous drive), couple relationships (A night at the cinema, Couples, Voices in my mind). These kinds of communicative attitudes can have actually positive or negative consequences on the mutual bonds that build communities. Try to guess which communication style adopts each character in the stories.

We wish you happy summer holidays!

Psychology and Sociology: Trust exercises.

In class we have been dealing with the topic of emotional intelligence, and we have prepared for you a couple of videos, which show two experiences that we have performed on the trust emotion.

In the first experience, students let themselves fall backwards and are held by classmates who prevent them of hitting the floor.

In the second experience, some of the students walk around with their eyes closed. Their classmates stay quiet and are expected to guide them only by touching them gently in case they pass near them, so that they help the blind wanderers not to run into obstacles such as pieces of furniture or the walls of the classroom.

   

Once the experience was over, the students who took part in it were requested to share their feelings during the activity. It was both illustrative and funny!

Psychology and Sociology (2nd Batx): presentations and practice.

We have made a video with clips which show some of the activities we have done in our subject in English lately: on the one hand, the introductions to presentations of the students about several topics of Psychology, and, on the other hand, a theatrical performance that simulates the interaction in the classroom that took place during an actual discussion of a documentary on the subject of therapy: the discussion lasted several sessions, from which some interventions were selected and put together for the final result.

Introductions to presentations and abstracts from papers: Students expose the subject of their presentation or an abstract of a paper or project they have done and delivered. They can choose freely the particular topic they want to work, though it must remain within the boundaries of the lessons about schools in Psychology, mental disorders and kinds of psychological therapy that we have recently studied. As you will see, some of the topics are related to experimental verification of Piaget’s stages of cognition (uauh!), food disorders, mental disorders, the role of love in Psychology (original, isn’t it?), bullying... and even a comic about the application of psychology to teaching practice, generated and written by a student (simply wonderful). All these works shared an extraordinarily high quality, and we learned a lot from them.

Practice “Carl Rogers counsels Gloria”: We have been dealing with different approaches to psychological therapy at our Psychology class. In order to dive deeper in the subject, we have watched a documentary about the great therapist Carl Rogers, founder of humanist therapy, whose seminal ideas have greatly influenced therapists belonging to a wide range of  psychological schools ever since. In the documentary, we see how Carl Rogers explains the main points of his conception of therapy: the conditions to create a suitable climate in the therapeutical session and the improvements expected to achieve in the client’s mental health.  We have actively got through these topics and have prepared a stage act showing some of the real interventions of the students during these sessions. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we did.