Investigate the social and health-related aspects of behavioural regulation.
How do we resist impulses (such as greed and appetite) to promote human cooperation and maintain a healthy lifestyle? How do we cope with social and health-related threats in order to prevent or recover from stress and anxiety? How does money affect our social and work life?
The Master’s programme in Social and Health Psychology will equip you with the tools and knowledge to analyse topics related to the control of human behaviour for the benefit of social interaction and health. During your studies, you will explore leading theories and concepts and their interconnections with various fields of study. You will also learn to use and develop cutting-edge research methods through participation in ongoing projects, where you will gain research experience in the study of behavioural regulation.
The two-year curriculum involves multiple perspectives ranging from concrete (neuroscientific and social cognitive perspectives) to global perspectives (relationships, welfare, and health). Considerable attention is paid to misregulation and underregulation (dysregulation) of behaviour in the context of social and health-related issues.
The Master’s programme has an international character that offers you multiple benefits:
The Social and Health Psychology programme is supported by two fields of research:
Through this Master’s programme, you will develop into a qualified psychological scientist who is ready for a PhD position or a research career outside academia. You will have the training and tools to use multiple research methods to investigate social and health-related issues related to behavioural regulation.
Are you interested in the relationship between the brain and behaviour? As a neuropsychologist, you will study psychological functions such as perception, memory, language, attention, emotion and motor skills.
This includes:
Disorders can be caused by a wide range of aetiologies, such as an accident, a stroke, neural degeneration (Alzheimer’s, Wernicke-Korsakov syndrome), or developmental defects (dyslexia, ADHD, autism).
The lecturers at the Neuropsychology Master’s programme all work in clinical practice and/or conduct state-of-the-art cognitive research at Utrecht University. This integration of science and practice feeds the Master’s programme’s educational activities.
In this Master’s programme, you will learn how to work together with other behavioural and medical professionals. Our lecturers often have different specialist backgrounds, and you will experience the same multidisciplinary atmosphere in your internship as well.
The Neuropsychology Master’s programme is limited to a maximum of 65 admissions for the academic year. This means that no more than 65 candidates will be permitted to participate.
In the Neuropsychology Master’s programme, you will learn the knowledge and skills needed to assess and treat cognitive disorders resulting from brain dysfunction. You will develop into an academic professional, who can apply the latest scientific models of functions such as perception, memory and attention in clinical practice or to innovate assessment and treatment.
Depending on your previous education, after completing this Master’s programme, you can continue your studies and:
With the Master’s programme Applied Cognitive Psychology, you will apply the most up-to-date knowledge of cognition to situations and solutions for problems that occur in daily life. Students will apply knowledge of human cognitive, sensory and motor systems in real-life situations.
During this one-year programme, you will learn about processing information, especially about how you can use that information to advise clients on how to improve communications. That knowledge is useful for making signage or advertising more effective, for example, or for making products more user-friendly.
Students also learn to come up with solutions for a wide range of problems that can occur in professional practice. Humans are dramatically changing their environment using increasingly complex technology, such as the Internet, social media, robotics and automation. In order to design a living environment that is well suited to human cognitive abilities, we must have a good understanding of how humans process knowledge and their skill at applying it.
This Master’s programme is internationally oriented, from the literature used in class to the opportunity to do an internship and write a thesis abroad, and from the option of attending electives at foreign universities to participating in international summer schools, research conferences or workshops.
Both our lecturers and our students have very diverse backgrounds. During the study programme, you will spend a lot of time learning to work in multi-disciplinary teams. Accurate and careful communication is vital to that process.
Once you have completed the Master’s programme, you will be a true academic professional who can apply scientific knowledge in day-to-day practice, such as acting as an independent consultant on ergonomic problems. As a member of an interdisciplinary team, you will contribute to solving these problems together with designers, policy makers, technicians, computer scientists and business experts. You can also advise on the sensory aspects of marketing communications. As a person with a Master’s degree, you will also have developed excellent verbal and written communication skills to communicate with all sorts of audiences.
