Hello!
This is Cherish, again! During my first DIS Summer session, I took Social Psychology, a faculty led course taught by a professor from my home university in the beautiful city of Stockholm! For my second session, I’m in Stockholm, but this time my class is taught by a DIS lecturer and the class is Affective Neuroscience. Another difference between last session and this session is that, as part of the DIS course, I get to participate in a five-day long Study Tour in Paris, France! During this Study Tour, my professor, who is originally from France, will lead my classmates and I through academic and cultural visits that will help us gain a better understanding of affective neuroscience and the city itself.
Affective Neuroscience is the study of emotion and the neuroscience and mechanisms involved in feeling. We talked about the subject briefly during my class last session, but I am very excited to dive deeper into the subject! Emotions are a complicated and very abstract topic, very at odds with my idea of neuroscience as a very definitive and concrete field of study. I’m interested to see how the two come together!
I am also very excited to meet and get to know my new professor and my new classmates. Many of my new classmates are coming to Stockholm from Copenhagen, where they stayed for Session 1. I am interested to hear what they thought of and experienced there and how it compares to Stockholm. I am also very interested in learning from my professor and hearing about her work at the Karolinska Institute prior to being a lecturer at DIS.
Paris will also be an amazing experience! We have a lot planned for both cultural and academic visits and I can’t wait to experience the city and learn about affective neuroscience in this context. I am happy that I chose to take two psychology related courses during my time abroad because psychology is so easy to see in the real world. It is also interesting to examine how people change psychologically based on culture.
A note: I wrote this post in future tense, but I have actually already been on the Study Tour to Paris and gotten to know my classmates and professor at the time of writing this (thus, the pictures!) This post was just meant to be a prologue for what is to come. I promise to fill you in on all the details in my next posts!
Stay tuned for more information on my new class, my time in Paris, and my final weeks in Stockholm!
What emotion did my professor and classmates demonstrate in the photograph above? Answer: Disgust.