The mission of the UCLA Department of Psychology is to promote discovery and innovation in psychological science within our faculty and in future generations of creators and consumers of psychological science and to maximize the impact of these efforts to promote human welfare. We believe that excellence in psychological science can be achieved only with a diverse and inclusive community of faculty, students, and staff, and when our research questions and methods sample the rich diversity of human experiences.
The interrelated goals of our research and teaching are:
- To advance the understanding of human behavior, cognition, and emotion, including functional and dysfunctional processes, across multiple levels of analysis.
- To promote human welfare through intervention, dissemination, and implementation of psychological research, and to translate knowledge into action across the realms of mental and physical health services, education, public policy, and more.
- To recognize and advance understanding about how inequities and disparities impact cognition, emotion, and behavior and to use psychological science methods to promote wellbeing for all.
Through integrative theories, rigorous methods, and groundbreaking interventions using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, faculty members in our department are at the forefront of advances in psychological science. Our expertise in psychological research across multiple levels of analysis, from single neurons to sociocultural differences, positions our department to contribute to the welfare of a diverse population and to understand and address complex individual concerns and population-level and intra- and interpersonal problems. Our ability to forge collaborations with researchers within our department and in many other disciplines, including medical sciences, law, computer science, artificial intelligence, applied math, statistics, engineering, ethology, economics, linguistics, education, anthropology, political science, sociology, biology, public health, business, and more, allows us to bring methods and findings in psychological science to bear on human functioning and fundamental human problems at many levels.