Maastricht University, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience

Bachelor Psychology

Psychologists want to understand, explain, and predict how people think, feel, and behave. They do not only want to understand it, but also change it if necessary. The field of psychology is very broad. According to people in the work field, for general tasks on the academic level, you can best hire a psychologist. More and more, psychologists are called upon to recognise and come up with solutions for societal issues. Think about how people handle crises such as: climate, migration, digitalisation, loneliness, polarisation, social justice, or mental health. During your bachelor, you will learn the field of psychology inside and out.

Year 1

The bachelor in Psychology will start with a broad exploration of psychology. How has the field developed over the years, and what is the current situation in the diverse subdisciplines. This knowledge will serve as the basis for the rest of your bachelor’s programme. It will also give you a view on what direction you want to specialise in, in year 3, and even after the bachelor’s (and optional master’s) programmes. Equally important is the way in which you will gain this knowledge: together with others, thinking critically about the value of psychological knowledge, how it was gained, and the impact is has, or can have.

Year 2

In the second year you will deepen your knowledge and you can give your own spin on project education. In the first semester of this year, your project work will connect to the application fields of psychology and concrete questions from external stakeholders. Later that year you, together with fellow students, you will work on your own research project. By way of these projects, you will learn how effectively work together in diverse groups of people. Simultaneously, you will follow supporting courses such as: psychological communication, statistics, and programming.

Year 3

In the last year of the bachelor’s programme, you will get the chance to further personalise your education through electives and specialisations. After taking the electives, possibly abroad, you can choose a specialisation that connects to your interests and passions. You will then also write a bachelor thesis on a topic of your interest. That is how you take your first steps as a specialist. The three specialisations are:

Brain, behaviour, and cognition
The Brain, Cognition and Behaviour track will cover themes from biological and cognitive psychology. This specialisation will cover the cognitive neuroscience of perception, attention, learning, memory and action, biopsychology and psychopharmacology, and research methods of cognitive neuroscience, drug development, fundamental neuroscience and neuropsychology.

Clinical Psychology
The clinical track will enable you to acquire skills and theoretical knowledge of topics in mental health, including the psychodiagnostic process and psychodiagnostic data collection, psychometrics and decision making, care needs assessment and treatment, legal and ethical issues related to the psychodiagnostic process, and communication skills and (psychological) conversational skills related to mental health care.

Transdisciplinary Psychology
The transdisciplinary track will help you engage with scientific problems that invite perspectives from multiple psychological subdisciplines (e.g., work and organisational psychology, health psychology, legal psychology), as well as perspectives from neighbouring disciplines (e.g., economics, law, health science, political science, engineering, data science), and from society at large (e.g., sustainable development goals, social inequality). This specialisation shows how (applied) psychological research findings can help us confront today’s complex societal problems effectively and equitably.