BSc (Hons) Psychology and Counselling

Module 01
Advanced Diploma in Psychology & Counselling

Indicative Content:
Introduction to Psychology
• Defining psychology
• The roots and early schools of psychology
• Contemporary perspectives to psychology
• Areas of specialization and careers in psychology
• Personality and individual differences
• Motivation and emotion

Module 02
Introduction to Counselling and Related Helping Relationships

Indicative Content:
• Definition of counselling as a process of resolving personal problems
• Definition of coaching, mentoring, coaching, and other related helping relationships and the ways they differ from each other and from counselling.
• History of process for resolving human problems
• Necessary qualities of a counsellor
• Types of psychological counselling and core skills in counselling
• Ethical framework of counselling, mentoring and coaching

Module 03
Research Skills in Psychology I

Indicative Content:
• Developing research questions and hypotheses
• The scientific method
• Experiments and quasi experiments for basic two condition experimental designs
• Types of data, including independent and dependent variables, nominal, ordinal, interval, & ratio.
• Basic statistical concepts for the normal distribution, z-scores, probability, null and alternative hypotheses, probability and hypothesis testing, statistical significance
• Basic descriptive and inferential statistics, including related and unrelated t-tests, non-parametric alternatives to the t-test, Pearson and Spearman correlations, and simple linear regression
• Guidelines for academic literature searching, academic writing, referencing, reporting research according to professional publication standards.

Module 04
Human Behaviour I

Indicative Content:
• The structure of the neuron
• Neuro transmitters
• The nervous system
• The brain structure and function
• The endocrine system
• Vision
• Structure of the eye
• Processing the visual message
• Hearing and other senses
• Smell and taste
• Skin senses

Module 05
Human Development I

Indicative Content:
• Theoretical perspectives in developmental psychology, including cognitive developmental, evolutionary, learning, psychodynamic, social-cognitive, and sociocultural.
• Research strategies and methodology.
• Biological development throughout the life span, including course of development, genetics, pre-natal influences, and physical milestones.
• Psychodynamic approaches to development, including personality formation, psychosocial development
• Cognitive development throughout the life span, including cognitive milestones and abilities, genetic, biological, and environmental influences on cognition, and the theoretical approaches of Piaget and Vygotsky.
• Learning theory and development, including behavioural modification and punishment.
• Social learning and modeling, including personality and social development.
• Language development, including topics of bilingualism and language acquisition

Module 06
Academic Writing and Presentation Skills

Indicative Content:
1) Features of Academic Writing
2) Paragraph Writing
3) Essay Writing
4) Listening and Note-taking
5) Presentations Skills

Higher Diploma in Psychology & Counselling
Module 01
Basic Counselling Skills

Indicative Content:
1. Definitions of guidance, counselling, and psychotherapy
2. Characteristics of the effective helper
3. Multicultural issues and ethics in counselling
4. Counsellor competence issues
5. Use of assessment in counselling
6. Characteristics of a good counselling theory
7. The humanistic and existential approaches to counselling
8. The psychodynamic approach to counselling
9. Behaviour Therapy approaches
10. Cognitive and Cognitive-Behavioural approaches
11. Family Systems Approaches
12. Counselling Services provided to minors, couples or families
13. Group counselling
14. Interruption of counselling and terminating counselling

Module 02
Human Behaviour II

Indicative Content:
• attention and concentration
• perceptual organisation
• memory, including types of memory, historical and current models, recollection and recall, and amnesia
• problem-solving and creativity
• language, including reading, acquisition, and types of aphasia
• intelligence, including historical models and testing of intelligence
• methods of measuring cognition
• exceptional and special cognitive abilities
• gender and cultural differences in cognition
• emotion intelligence

Module 03
Human Development II

Indicative Content:
• cognitive, sensory, perceptual and physical development for late adolescence and adulthood
• development of gender, self-concept and identity (including analysis of class, sexuality, disability, culture and gender)
• development of morality reasoning
• ecological perspective of parenting
• types of family structures
• concepts of parenting
• psychology of work issues at different stages of adulthood
• developmental stages of ageing and death, dying and bereavement

Module 04
Research Skills in Psychology II

Indicative Content:
• Introduction and data collection
• Descriptive Statistics- Graphical summaries of data
• Descriptive Statistics- Numerical summaries of data
• Basic Probability/ Probability Distributions
• Sampling and Sampling Distributions
• Covariance and Correlation
• Design of experiment
• Hypothesis testing
• Experiments and quasi- experiments
• independent samples, repeated measures
• group differences, correlational methods simple linear regression
• multiple regression including enter, stepwise and hierarchical variants
• mediation and moderation
• Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
• Factorial ANOVA
• Interpreting main, interaction, and simple effects in Factorial ANOVA
• Statistical report writing

Module 05
Psychology of Health & Dysfunction

Indicative Content:
• Introduction to health psychology, including distinctions between health, well-being, and happiness
• Stress and coping
• Addictive behaviours
• Health promotion approaches
• Management of pain
• Defining abnormality
• Perspectives on abnormality, including medical, psychoanalytical, behavioural, cognitive, humanistic, and socio-cultural perspectives
• Classifying abnormal behaviour, according to the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association
• Anxiety disorders, including phobias, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder
• Somatoform disorders, including hypochondriasis disorder and conversion disorder
• Dissociative disorders

Module 06
Advanced Counselling Skills and Techniques

Indicative Content:
1. Different situations in which counselling is relevant
a. Relationship problems
b. Family disharmony
c. Personal distress
d. Suicidal attempts
e. Traumatic experiences
2. Counselling techniques for family and relationships.
3. Counselling methods for addictions.
4. Crisis and Trauma Counselling.
5. Counselling in Sri Lankan context.

BSc (Hons) in Psychology & Counselling
Module 01
Psychology of Society and Organisations

Indicative Content:
• social perception, including attitudes and attribution
• group processes, such as prejudice, inter-group conflict, leadership, decision-making, norms, and productivity
• social influence, including conformity, obedience, and bystander effect
• close relationships, including interpersonal attraction, love, and intimacy
• aggression
• critical social psychology, including diversity and multiculturalism
• applied social psychology, particularly in work settings and advertising

Module 02
Mindfulness and Meditation

Indicative Content:
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
• Mindfulness-Based Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy
• Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
• Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
• Compassion Focused Therapy
• Western secular mindfulness by comparison to Buddhist practice

Module 03
Drug Use and Addiction

Indicative Content:
• drugs as tools to develop models of psychopathology
• drugs as treatments for behavioral disorders
• drugs as substances of abuse and the major psychotropic drug classifications
• etiology of addictive behavior
• epidemiology of substance abuse
• theories of addiction
• health consequences of long term drug use
• drug types and their effects on behavior

Module 03
Counselling Practice

Indicative Content:
• This module is an assessment of the student’s counselling practice, which will vary from one site to the next. Students will be expected to see clients for individual counselling for an average of three hours per week.
• Students will also be expected to have a minimum amount of supervision in accordance with the requirements detailed in the Aims and Summary above over the lifetime of the course.

Module 04
Independent Research Project

Indicative Content:
• Dependent upon the area of psychological investigation agreed by the student and project supervisor, and approved by the University Ethics Committee, the module will involve guidance on locating prior research papers, instruction in ethical guidelines, efficiently annotating literature from reviews of past research, and completion of the dissertation proposal.

Course fee: LKR 650,000/-
Registration Fee: LKR 3,000/-

Student loan facilities are available from BOC, NSB & NDB banks. Send us an inquiry to ask about payment plans and loan facilities.