Senior Capstone Descriptions
The Capstone Experience, completed near the end of baccalaureate studies, integrates liberal learning with specialized knowledge. Each Capstone emphasizes sharing of ideas, synthesis, and critical, informed action and reflection, and each includes student initiative in defining and investigating problems or projects.
Capstones may be completed in or outside student's majors; in some departments, for psychology majors, the Capstone Experience is a requirement. All Capstones presume a significant scholarly background of specialized study in a major as well as in liberal education course work. In other words, a Capstone does more than culminate years of baccalaureate study: it culminates a student's liberal education.
Ordinarily, a Capstone Experience is taken at Miami and completed in the senior year (minimum of 96 hours registered or earned). Students who plan to transfer any course to meet the Capstone requirement must obtain permission from the Office of Liberal Education before they take the course.
Senior Capstone/Senior Course Titles and Descriptions
Fall Semester 2023
PSY 410D Section A
Capstone Cognition
Instructor: Dr. Christopher Wolfe
Monday/Wednesday 1:15 - 2:35 PM (Face-to-Face)
This course explores the psychology of medical decision making. Medical decisions are among the most important that a person will ever make in their lifetime, and the decisions made by physicians and other health care providers can be matters of life and death. Thus, efforts to understand and improve medial decision making are potentially valuable to medical practice and to the broader society. Moreover, medical decisions provide an excellent real-world domain to test psychological theory. We will explore the professional medical decision making literature, and consider a number of issues related to medical diagnosis and the comprehension and communication of medical risk in the context of shared shared medical decision making between patients and health care providers. This course draws on basic research in cognitive psychology with an emphasis on judgment and decision making.
PSY 410F Section A
Capstone: Social Psychology
Instructor: Dr. Jeffrey Hunger
Wednesday/Friday 11:40 AM - 1:00 PM (Face-to-Face)
PSY 410K Section A
Capstone: Clinical Psychology
Instructor: Dr. Vaishali Raval
Wednesday/Friday 10:05 am - 11:25 am (Face-to-Face)
What does mental health mean to you? How might another individual with different life experiences than yours understand and experience mental health? This course will grapple with fundamental questions about how psychiatric disorders are understood and experienced by individuals in different communities around the world with varying beliefs about self, others, relationships, health, and illness and different social, political, and economic contexts. We will also tackle the substantial gap between mental health needs and available resources worldwide but particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and brainstorm innovative intervention and prevention approaches that align with the needs, values, beliefs, and preferences of individuals while also being low-cost so that they are easily scalable to reduce the global burden of mental illness.
PSY 410K Section B
Capstone: Clinical Psychology
Instructor: Dr. Zachary Soulliard
Wednesday/Friday 10:05 - 11:25 AM (Face-to-Face)
PSY 410U Section A
Capstone: Developmental Psychology
Instructor: Dr. Brooke Spangler-Cropenbaker
Monday/Wednesday 1:15 - 2:35 PM (Face-to-Face)
This capstone will be examining human development through an evolutionary developmental psychology lens. We will cover the genetic and ecological mechanisms that influence development and how developmental processes have influenced evolution. Topics include: parent-child relationships, the importance of play, the role of siblings and peers, language development, and more. We know how humans develop, this class will explore the reasons why we develop the way we do.