A bachelor’s program should serve as the foundation of your education — but that doesn’t mean you should step into your first college classroom totally unprepared. If you are , you might want to start learning about some basic psychology history and theories before your courses begin, so you can have some context for the information provided in lectures and readings. With , you can take courses in various topics related to psychology and earn a certificate upon completion. To that end, here are some of the most important names in psychology for you to know, both at the beginning of your psychology education and throughout your psychology career:

Wilhelm Wundt

One of the first men of science to separate psychology into its own discipline, Wundt wrote the world’s first psychology textbook in 1874 and opened the first laboratory for investigating psychology at the University of Leipzig. Wilhelm Wundt earned the title “the father of experimental psychology” by o…

Ignatius Banda

BULAWAYO, Jul 30 2009 (IPS) – A functioning public toilet has become a rare sight in Bulawayo. Across this southern Zimbabwean city of about two million residents, public toilets have all but stopped functioning, the buildings now more useful as platforms for graffiti and campaign posters than as public conveniences where people answer the call of nature.

Community-led initiatives have so far not extended to maintaining public toilets like this one. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

Some daring members of the public relieve themselves outside the locked doors of the colonial-era facilities in what …

Milagros Salazar

LIMA, Sep 25 2009 (IPS) – Leaders of the Achuar people are challenging a decision by the Peruvian government to declare that a clean-up effort by the PlusPetrol oil company in the northeastern Amazon jungle has been completed.
When PlusPetrol Norte, the Peruvian subsidiary of Argentina s PlusPetrol, took over oil block 1AB along the Corrientes River in Loreto province in 2000, part of the agreement was that it would clean up the environmental mess left by the U.S. Occidental Petroleum Corporation (Oxy).

But Achuar leader Guevara Sandi Chimboras, treasurer of the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River (FECONACO), told IPS that the environmental damages in our territory have not been fixed. Not enough has been done, and there is still clear evidence of pollution in our rivers and lakes.

Sandi Chimboras, who was also environmental monitor of the impacts of the oil industry in his community, said that so far this year indige…

VIENTIANE, Dec 4 2009 (IPS) – Lao women express their equality by being as mobile as men. The numbers astride motorbikes in particular, are the same as those of men. But there is a cost.

Girls dash across the road. Road users observe a sort of caste system where the motorised have right of way. Credit: Melody Kemp/IPS

As the number of fatalities and injured rise, so do the number of women victims, and those who find themselves caring for injured relatives. According to the Asian Development Bank s (AsDB) Road Safety Action Plan (2005-2010), 80 percent of accidents involve a motorbike. The road is an unforgivi…

Marcela Valente* – Tierramérica

BUENOS AIRES, Apr 28 2010 (IPS) – Fatal accidents at coalmines, like the recent tragedies in China and the United States, cause great public alarm. But U.S. physician Alan Lockwood warns that many more deaths are caused by the pollution that comes from the use of coal as an energy source.

Alan Lockwood Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace

Backed by studies from the organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility (affiliated with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 1985 Nobel Peace Prize winner), Lockwood asserts that coal causes heart and chronic respiratory diseases, strokes and cancer, which are among the five leading causes of death in the United States.

He and other experts published their conclusions last N…