This is a new documentary about the Oregon State Hospital (made famous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). It documents the struggles of 5 people in the hospital. It also touches on the history of mental hospitals and the legal struggles these patients face.
http://www.guiltyexcept.com/index.php 
It was shown in Portland at the end of June and there is no word on when the full version will be available for the public, but there is contact information for the people involved in the documentary.
Here is little excerpt from the website:
"Guilty Except for Insanity follows the journeys of five people who enlist the insanity defense after being charged with serious crimes. The documentary portrays the circumstances surrounding their crimes and the dilemmas they confront as they enter the Oregon State Hospital under the "guilty except for insanity" plea."
-posted by Trevor Tusow
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This post comes to you from the Pacific Northwest! I (Rob) got to work with some FABULOUS teachers at the AP Psych Institute in Bellevue, WA, and we worked with an interesting website this morning: Poll Everywhere
http://www.polleverywhere.com/
This site allows you to post a multiple choice question for folks (students and/or teachers in a prof. development course, etc.) who can then text in a certain code and "vote" on one of the options. At our institute we used poll everywhere as part of a discussion about "Formative Diagnostic Items" - a formative assessment technique that helps teachers quickly gather data about student misconceptions.
(By the way: My participants are the BEST participants ever in the history of AP Psychology institutes. So there)
- posted by Rob McEntarffer
How do people move away from their extremist beliefs? When an individual leaves a terrorist organisation do they change their attitudes and beliefs or do they just stop acting on them? How often do individuals leave one extremist organisation and replace those beliefs with other extreme beliefs? Do they hold similar values and just moderate them a bit? If governments around the world address disenfranchisement and bring the extremists "into the tent" does that deradicalise them?
What a fantastically interesting area to pursue for a Phd. My lovely friend Kate has the untold luxury and burden of trying to answer these questions for the next two years. She is already one year in and these days we only have a strict three year time frame for each Phd. She has the privilege of interviewing the fair dinkum extremists who have walked away. She gets to get to know why they no longer belong to the groups that throw the bombs. Did they change, or have they just changed how they do it? fascinating
I was browsing DonorsChoose today and found several psychology-related projects to share. If you can, please consider helping these teachers help their students by contributing. If you are a teacher, DonorsChoose is a great way to get additional resources for your classroom. Go here if you are a teacher to find out how to begin the process. (Full disclosure: I did one last year to get copies of The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation for my civics classes.)
Here are the projects I found:
- California teacher needs 36 copies of Morton Hunt's The Story of Psychology
- California teacher needs 8 copies of the "IB Psychology Course Companion"
- Georgia teacher needs 40 copies of the AP Psychology exam preparation book "5 Steps to a 5"
- Illinois teacher needs 7 review books and flash card sets to help prepare them for the AP Psychology Exam
- California teacher needs 35 copies of the Barron's AP Psychology review book and 7 additional AP Psychology resources and 35 sets of Barron's AP Psychology flash cards
- Ohio teacher needs 7 boxes of index cards, one recordable MP3 player, and 2 AV carts to move supplies room to room to perform clinical interviews
- Missouri teacher needs 25 copies of "Ordinary People" by Judith Guest, with 8 videos, including "The Outsiders" and "Tootsie"
- Iowa teacher needs 30 flash drives to make completing [students'] first scientific research paper a less stressful experience
--posted by Steve
i need some help with the technology I struggle with. if anyone out there reads this stuff you might notice i dont respond to comments. the problem is all the comments i receive are written in japanese script! no matter who posts the comments! i am missing a whole lost of interesting comments and i'd love to respond or at least see if people think i write crap. If you have any suggestions for how to fix the problem please e-mail me to make a suggestion: katman2@dodo.com.au
The Wall Street Journal today posed a question: what's the best preventive health slogan for kids? The story focuses on Blue Cross Blue Shield's new "5-2-1-0" campaign (PDFs in English and in Spanish) to teach healthy habits and reduce the amount of obesity and prevalence of diabetes by encouraging children to do the following everyday:
- 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day
- 2 hours or fewer of screen time
- 1 hour of physical activity
- 0
unsweetened drinks
So here's your assignment, in three parts:
1) Have your students redesign the 5-2-1-0 campaign using what they have learned in psychology. This would be a perfect time to include subjects like operant and classical conditioning, memory, motivation, persuasion, etc. Can they create something that would be more memorable and most importantly that would lead to behavior change? (And how could you measure whether it was successful?)
2) See if your students can counter Hobson's article. For every "Coke is it" there are surely many other private sector ad campaigns that fall flat, and maybe there are more catchy public service slogans out there than she points out. "Fried Egg," also known as "This is Your Brain on Drugs," for example, was a PSA created by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk" is another memorable PSA. How many others can they think of?
3) How effective are PSAs in general at changing behavior? Have your students identify an issue, find the slogans used to encourage behavior change and then look for evidence that the behavior actually changed during the time that the slogan was used. Did "Just Say No" or "Fried Egg" really change behavior? Help them find the evidence that would support or reject these claims.
--posted by Steve
racism is always confronting. it is especially difficult when it comes out of the mouth of a family member. Someone who will always at your diner table at family functions but with atrocious values. My brother in law began the tirade about the migrants who are violent criminals. He argued that Sydney is going down the toilet because of these migrant gangs. He sees them "everywhere" and they are responsible for violence and crime.
Psychology can explain racism. it can explain that we have a tendency to attend to the bits of information that confirms our attitudes but we ignore the bits that don't. So my brother in law only sees and only remembers the examples of the migrant violence but conveniently ignores the violence caused by anglo celtic aussies.
The other bit of psychology is much more personal ( in a way). Any forensic psychologist can tell you that people behaving badly are every where. They come from all backgrounds, all races. They are more likely to be uneducated, illiterate, not very smart. They are often traumatised and have been exposed to violence, they are dispossessed and without resources. Forensic psychologists can tell you that shit is not race specific.
Unfortunately bigoted and uneducated racist men don't often want to listen to the wisdom of university educated women. ah...pass the bottle of wine.
