Assignments for The Feeling Brain

Welcome to The Feeling Brain. This course is meant to be an exploration of the emerging science of the emotions. This field has undergone a tremendous resurgence in the last decade, and has become one of the most dynamic and exciting fields to develop out of the disciplinary merging of psychology and neuroscience. This merging, resulting in a field sometimes referred to as Affective Neuroscience, is redefining work from both traditional psychology and biology. We can only begin to dip into the vast amount of work this field is generating, and we see this course as sort of a “sampler”. Because this is a new course for both of us, we expect to be learning along with you; in fact, what makes this field so exciting is that in many ways it is developing due to an emphasis on  developing new ways of defining and looking at old ideas. Thus, we hope that in this class we can all contribute to the work of reshaping the thinking about emotions.

To that end, this class is designed to be very interactive. Even though the class is large by seminar standards (25 students), we expect to run the class in the seminar model, and participation will be central. We hope to ensure engaged participation by all students by defining the following expectations:

Class readings:

For each set of class readings, SIX students will be assigned to each write a detailed summary/evaluation/analysis of those readings, to be posted on the course blog by the Sunday preceding class on Wednesday. We expect this reading response to be comprehensive, and thus at least 2-3 pages in length. In the response, you should whenever possible try to tie the readings to the ideas that have been developed in previous classes, as well as responding to what is new.

All other students in the class will post ONE comment upon one of the six response papers. This comment should be posted by Tuesday evening before Wednesday class.

Thus, each of you will be asked to prepare this reading response THREE times over the semester. All students will be required to post a comment about the readings for every class. We will provide you with a schedule of the readings you will be responsible for shortly after the semester begins.

Remaining Schedule:

April 4: Naomi Bishop, Laurel Atwell, Tisch Abelow, Jake Szczypek

April 11: Sarah Weiss, Lia Bleichfeld, Naomi Fall, Aiyanna Sezak, Chess Piccione, Juila Norton, Bettina Barbier

April 18: Alee Russell, Matt Lupoli, Carolyn LeFeuvre, Margot Kern, Christina Keener, Danika Kasky, Basya Weissman

April 25: Meredith Gibbons, Amy Smith, Joan Davisson, Lia Bleichfeld, Naomi Bishop, Ali Marx

May 2: Bettina Barbier, Laurel Atwell, Tisch Abelow, Basya Weissman

Class Presentations:

Each student, working in pairs, will be asked to prepare one detailed presentation to the class on assigned readings. These readings will often be primary research articles that are related to the more general background readings that will be assigned to the class as a whole. In your presentation, you may have to do further background reading to fully explain the methodology or concepts of your research to the class. Students will work together in small teams of 2 on these presentations, which should be 20-30 minutes in length. In a few cases, there may be more than one presentation/class. You will be given an opportunity to choose a presentation during the first or second week of classes. Each student should also submit a written summary of their presentation.

Other Work:

Research Paper:  One academic research paper will be expected. This paper should be 6 –8 pages in length. The research paper is expected to make use of outside research on a topic not covered in depth in course work. Although the background information required in your project should be related to course material, your paper should extend that background by new research you have identified and investigated.  Depending on the topic and the resources you locate, we would expect a minimum of four outside references, but more often 6-8 sources are to be expected. In this paper, we also expect you to use correctly academic citations and references.  For APA style citation see this link recommended by our own research librarians:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/cws/wworkshop/writer_resources/citation_styles/apa/apa.htm

Conference project: Conference work can take a traditional form, e.g. working on a semester long research project that results in a comprehensive and well referenced research paper. As indicated by the italics, we are particularly concerned that all students learn how to write correctly referenced papers, using appropriate citations within the paper of the material drawn from your research. Unlike the research papers, topics can include areas not covered in course work. 

However, we are also open to many variations on tradition.  If you have a particular interest you would like to pursue that does not necessarily culminate as a large paper, or if you have ideas about how to link your interests in this course with other interest, that’s great.  In the past, some non-traditional projects have included designing a “museum” display on basic nervous function, writing and illustrating a children’s book on the brain, and writing a science fiction story incorporating basic principles of the course. One project including designing experiments to test for evidence of extrasensory perception; the project included interviewing subjects about their beliefs, and preparing a videotape presentation of both the experiments and the interviews.  All of these projects were firmly based in the basic academic work of the course, and involved a significant time commitment by the student.  These projects work only when well planned out ahead of time, and worked on steadily over the semester.

It is also possible to do a series of smaller papers, researching more than one topic over the semester.  Again, good planning is key to successfully completing more than one research project.

Conferences will start the second week of classes, and we would like you to come to that conference with some ideas about what you might like to do.  By the second conference, you should have developed a solid bibliography of possible readings and an outline of work you plan to do.