A week-long field course held in Bolonia on the Andalucian coast of Southern Spain, within the Estrecho natural park. The field course will take place during the Easter holidays, when there is a large diversity of flora and fauna to survey. As a residential field course, you will be able to immerse yourself in research, undertaking a research project of your own design, to test a novel ecological hypothesis. You will then collect, analyse and interpret your data, producing a written report and a conference-style presentation. Throughout the module you will keep a field notebook to record your project’s development, data collection and interpretation. Teaching sessions will be accompanied by practical work which involves animal observation, with alternatives in place if required to meet minimum learning outcomes.
This module examines the essential role of behaviour change in Clinical Exercise Physiology, focusing on promoting and sustaining physical activity and exercise in individuals with various health conditions. You will explore the psychological, social, and biological factors influencing exercise behaviour, including the effects of chronic illness and socio-cultural context. You will develop client-centred counselling skills underpinned by the principles of motivational interviewing and critically evaluate evidence-based models of behaviour changes. Utilising University of Southampton academic expertise in simulation, you will develop person-centred communication skills, learning to co-produce personalised, sustainable intervention plans that foster long-term health improvements in clinical populations. This module aligns with CEP-UK standards, preparing students for effective, compassionate clinical practice.
Behavioural ecology considers the evolutionary pressures that shape behaviour. This module will explore animal behaviours from evolutionary biology and population ecological perspectives. Each week, lectures will consider a different behavioural ecology topic, to be discussed in more detail in accompanying weekly seminars. Throughout the module, students will keep an individual notebook/log/journal, sharing their notes and reflections with other students during seminars as part of group discussions to expand their personal learning network. Each student will write a research proposal for a behavioural ecology research project of their own devising, requiring them to consider the relevant background information, appropriate methodology and to budget the costs of their proposed project.
This module gives an overview of the concepts, models, and findings in behavioural economics. Behavioural economics is a field of economics that imports relevant insights from neighbouring disciplines, like psychology and anthropology, to inform economic theory and policy. Many of these insights have been generated through lab and field experiments about the drivers of economic behaviour, and they have revealed systematic patterns of individual and group behaviour. These systematic patterns are relevant for economic behaviour in several domains (e.g. consumption, savings, risk behaviour), and this module studies them in depth. It also exposes students to modifications of economic theory that capture these patterns, and to various behavioural phenomena such as self-control problems and cognitive bias, both in theory and in practice. It equips students with the theoretical toolset to analyse and understand economic choices in the presence of behavioural biases, as well as the analytical tools to make normative and policy analysis in the presence of behavioural phenomena. The module also emphasises the consequences of departures from classical microeconomic theory for prediction of economic choices and market outcomes and policy implications.
Behavioural finance (BF) is an unorthodox area of finance that assumes financial markets are fundamentally inefficient. Advocates of BF believe that investor behaviour and decision making are driven by aspects of personal and market psychology. This module will involve an introduction to BF followed by a detailed analysis of the main issues.
Mainstream finance assumes that people are rational and is mainly concerned with how they should behave when making financial decisions. In this module, instead, we focus on how individuals make financial decisions in practice, and we use insights from psychology and behavioural economics to explain why they systematically deviate from normative financial theory and make predictable errors. The cognitive, emotional, and social biases that influence people’s decisions bear important implications for individual investors, financial managers, and the dynamics of financial markets. The module builds on results from a wide spectrum of disciplines outside of finance (such as psychology, medicine, and sociology) and includes practical examples, simple in-class experiments, and discussions of academic studies.
The module aims to develop the themes introduced in the Introduction to Psychology Module in semester 1. The module integrates the approaches and findings of biological psychology in an attempt to understand the biological factors that explain why people behave as they do. The module will examine how innate biological mechanisms control our desires. For example how is hunger and satiation controlled within the body. We then apply those principles to understand how the system might break down and might lead to conditions such as Obesity The module is one of the pre-requisites for PSYC2025 and PSYC3048.
This module aims to develop your capabilities of addressing behavioural issues in an operational context. It goes beyond the typical focus on single decisions taken by an individual to decision making—possibly involving some strategic considerations—in what is called operations. Operations is an area of the management field focused on designing and controlling the processes involved with the production of goods or services. The study of operations can refer to the field of operational research or operations management. Known paradigms for the former include Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making and System Dynamics and for the latter Operations Management. In both cases, the module focuses on decisions under genuine uncertainty that cannot be meaningfully reduced to probability (risk). We cover novel and transparent tools that do not rely on probability, such as simple heuristics and simulations of system dynamics, and contrast them to traditional tools of optimisation in operational research and operations management.
This course will provide an overview of behavioural physiology, which is a growing, interdisciplinary research area that stems from the idea that animal physiology and behaviour are inextricably linked and mutually enriching fields of study. This field focuses on identifying the causal physiological mechanisms responsible for observed behavioural patterns in animal species, and distinguish which mechanisms are common across animal groups and which are unique adaptations to specific taxa. Animals also face a barrage of natural and anthropogenic pressures driven by environmental factors throughout their lifetime, which can modulate the connection between physiology and behavior.
The core of this module is a fieldtrip to Berlin. This fieldtrip is used to address questions about the production of urban space in twentieth-century Western Europe. Topics include: modern urbanism and architecture; political ideologies and monuments; memory and memorials; global capital and public space; the performance of urban space; and the reading/writing of urban space
The first portion of the module comprises the learning of the basics of human osteology and palaeopathology. The second portion is more theoretically driven and integrates bioarchaeology with skeletal analysis, including topics such as age, gender, ethnicity and activity patterning. The module will start by detailing the skeletal anatomy of the human body. In this part of the module, you will learn detailed skeletal human bioarchaeology. In the later part of the module, you will start to implement more interpretative aspects, such as assigning age, sex and stature to skeletons. Aspects of health and disease, and the identification of palaleopathology, will be developed and considered. You will also study aspects of funerary archaeology and its integration with skeletal studies and taphonomy to develop archaeologies of death and burial.
This module concerns global biodiversity, what we understand by it and why it is in crisis, and current efforts to conserve and manage it. We begin with an appraisal of different values of diversity at scales from genetic to species, communities and ecosystems. We then consider the causes and consequences of losing biodiversity, the nature and scale of its loss, countermeasures at global, national and local scales, and the costs we may face in replacing services that depend on biodiversity. During the second half of the module, we take a community ecology approach, focusing on interactions between species, rather than species per se. We look at networks of interactions, and consider how they have been used to address practical issues in conservation. Finally, we consider global impacts on ecosystems, how they interact with one another, and how we might mitigate their impacts. The module seeks to engage discussion and debate,and inform opinion, on biodiversity and conservation. We recommend that students have done 1st or 2nd year ecology modules in their own School, for example, BIOL1029 and BIOL2004.
This module concerns global biodiversity, what we understand by it and why it is in crisis, and current efforts to conserve and manage it. We begin with an appraisal of different values of diversity at scales from genetic to species, communities and ecosystems. We then consider the causes and consequences of losing biodiversity, the nature and scale of its loss, countermeasures at global, national and local scales, and the costs we may face in replacing services that depend on biodiversity. During the second half of the module, we take a community ecology approach, focusing on interactions between species, rather than species per se. We look at networks of interactions, and consider how they have been used to address practical issues in conservation. Finally, we consider global impacts on ecosystems, how they interact with one another, and how we might mitigate their impacts. The module seeks to engage discussion and debate,and inform opinion, on biodiversity and conservation. We recommend that students have studied ecology previously in Southampton, or elsewhere, to make the most of this module.
The module explores critical aspects of biodiversity in a changing world and ways to restore and enhance it. The course covers biodiversity concepts, key threats (such as invasive species, climate change and habitat fragmentation), restoration science and applied restoration methods. There will be a diversity of teaching and assessment methods, including fieldwork and field trips. We recommend that students have studied ecology previously.
The bioenergy industry is undergoing rapid growth due to the policy drivers underpinning the current interest in bioenergy, such as energy security and climate change. This module provides an overview of key topics on sustainable bioenergy production, including the main biomass systems for bioenergy generation and the wide range of bioenergy conversion and utilisation methods. This module adopts a whole systems approach and enables students to critically appraise the sustainability of various biomass energy production routes. The module teaching and learning will comprise lectures and a site visit. The coursework requires students to either design a biofuel/bioenergy production system, or critically review a biofuel/bioenergy production system and its real-world application.
