Understand how biological, psychological and health factors might affect citizens’ political perceptions, attitudes and behaviour;

Learn how to make sense of and critically engage with high quality academic research;

Learn how to motivate and generate original empirical hypotheses and test them using quantitative methods;

Learn how to manage, analyse and interpret data from public opinion surveys;

Learn how to write short academic papers that generate and test empirical hypotheses and interpret data in a way that can be used to advise politicians, political parties, or any organisation concerned with psychology / health and political behaviour.

(LO1) Students will be able to navigate key interdisciplinary research in political psychology and in health and political behaviour.

(LO2) Students will be able to critically analyse how citizens perceive politics, develop attitudes, make political decisions, and how biases influence their making sense of politics.

(LO3) Students will be able to use the statistical package SPSS to prepare datasets for data analysis.

(LO4) Students will acquire knowledge of key statistical techniques and be able to apply them to analyse specific relationships between variables.

(LO5) Students will be able to apply notions of statistical inference and generalise findings based on survey data.

(S1) Problem solving skills.

(S2) Numeracy.

(S3) IT skills.

(S4) Organisational skills.

(S5) International awareness.

(S6) Teamwork.

(S7) Communication skills.

(S8) Adaptability.

Topics covered during the module may include:

Introduction to the module;

Biology;

Personality;

Ideology;

Emotion;

Negativity;

Biases and heuristics;

Health;

Mental health;

Health and representation.

Teaching method 1 - Lecture.
Description: The lectures introduce the main concepts and theories of the module.

Teaching method 2 – Seminar.
Description: The seminars will debate part of the topics introduced in the lectures

Teaching method 3 - Problem Based Learning
Description: PC lab sessions will be based on flipped-classroom and problem-based learning methods.

Students will be given a set of questions about the rest of the topics not included in the seminars and will be asked to work with survey data in order to find out about the ways to answer those questions. Before each session, materials will be made available covering particular statistical methods that can be used by students in order to fulfil each session's tasks.