Year One - Human Behavior Course

Human Behavior is a 27-hour course taught in the latter part of the first year. This course focuses on growth and development, stress and coping, sleep physiology and behavior, the neurobiology of memory, language, emotion, and attention, medical sociology, and family systems.

The GOALS of the course are:

Define the narrative approach and explain its importance in medicine

Define the learning models (association, classical and operant) used to explain human behavior

Explain the relevance of these models to health and disease and to the behavior of patients, families and health care professionals

Conceptualize the issues involved in changing health related behaviors

Understand how health care organization and finance effects the behavior of patients and physicians

Understand the neurobiology and phenomenology of sleep

Understand the subjective and sensory dimensions of pain

Grasp the importance of understanding the history of health care systems and practices (example: Why the United States medical insurance system is financed by employers)

The OBJECTIVES of the course are:

• Discuss the neurobiology of brain, mind and consciousness
• Discuss distributed brain networks and brain (e.g. cognitive) operations
• Discuss the localization and testing of specific cognitive operations
• Discuss development in terms of gene-environment interactions
• Discuss the stress model and its implications for health and disease
• Differentiated and give examples of classical and operant learning
• Discuss attachment psychology
• Discuss early cognitive development (emergence of a theory of mind)
• Discuss the concept of critical windows in development
• Discuss the willpower and the Stages of Change model
• Discuss Motivational Interviewing and its relationship to bringing about change
• Discuss the behavioral model of addiction
• Explain contemporary developments in health care delivery and finance
• Explain the etiologies of aggression
• Describe the relationship of the narrative approach and empathy
• Discuss the neurobiology and function of sleep and dreaming
• Discuss the mechanisms of acute and chronic pain
• Define the concept of somatization and its strengths and weaknesses
• Explain the placebo and nocebo responses
• Discuss the phenomena of hypnosis
• Define and give examples of transference and countertransference
• Summarize the health report card of this country compared to other nations
• Define the functions and stages of a family
• Discuss the demographics of divorce, single-parent households and day care on child development
• Discuss the impact of illness on families
• Discuss how to discuss "bad news"
• Discuss the pathophysiology of the "shaken baby syndrome"