Psychology Self-Help | Self Help

For me, this blog falls under the category of "Why didn't I find this before?" David Mcraney (who describes himself as a a journalist who loves psychology, technology and the internet") writes a provocative blog called You Are Not So Smart where he posts thoughtful musings about common "misconceptions", such as:

• Most opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.
• In romance, opposites attract.
• After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong.

These ideas probably seem familiar to most of us psychology teacher-types - we talk about them (often in the research methods or social psych. chapters) and often they start lively, important discussions in the classroom.

I've always wanted to have a psychological version of the great "Bad Astronomy" webpage, and this blog comes darn close, in a way.

(personal note: I found out about this blog through a great friend, Jim Hanna. Thanks Jim!)


posted by Rob McEntarffer

I'm catching up on podcasts that I missed during the pre-grad and graduation time.  I caught this Point of Inquiry interview with Scott Lilienfeld, author of 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions About Human Behavior.  The interview is a solid one which can describe for teachers (and advanced students) that makes the distinction between scientific and pop psychology.  He and the interviewer also go through a number of the myths covered in the book.  Great reading and great listening.




Posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Michael Britt (hi Michael!) just emailed an excellent question to the Society for Teaching of Psychology listserve, and I thought the Teaching High School Psychology blog community might like to think about his question too. Michael asked: Is Zimbardo's prison study an experiment? Does it meet the criteria for experiments? I often discussed the ethical issues involved in the study but I think its interesting to think specifically about the methodology, and it might be a good exercise for students to think about what criteria a study needs to meet to "qualify" as an experiment, then examine the Prison study to see if it meets those criteria.


Posted by Rob McEntarffer

Christopher Chabris's recent article about a fascinating conference in the Wall Street Journal got me thinking about the possibilities for high school psych students. Chabris describes some of the talks at Harvard's "Hard Problems In the Social Sciences" conference (you can find video of the talks here and a facebook page with an ongoing discussion here). Conference presenters all offered their ideas for the really big, really hard, really "over-arching" social science ideas that need to be tackled. How would high school students respond to a question like: "What are the most important psychological questions that have yet to be answered? Why are they so important? How could a researcher start to research the answers?" Might be an intriguing after AP test discussion?

Posted by Rob McEntarffer

Intriguing findings from this Science article about possible connections between social fear, genetics, and racist responses. The authors theorize that racist responses are more closely tied to an in-born social fear (out group bias) than they are to specific learned responses to race, and they use a group of children born with Williams Syndrome to try to test the idea. Kids with Williams Syndrome lack a few genes that are related to social fear, causing them to ber very sociable and have no fear of strangers (sometimes called "cocktail party personality").

This research could be a good place to start discussions about several topics: how creative researchers have get when studying complex behaviors (such as racist responses), how tough it is to operationalize some variables (the researchers in this study have to work hard to carefully measure "racist responses" - it sounds like they used something similar to the implicit associations test), and the links between genetics and, well, everything!

To me this study is a good example of the interconnectedness of psychology - our "chapters" are in many ways artificial boundaries between sets of ideas. The AP Psych. free-response questions always try to break down these barriers (requiring students to use knowledge from more than one chapter to answer a single essay question) and this research makes that reality evident.




Posted by Rob McEntarffer

I am not a small man.  BTW, this is Chuck.  You could call me large, big, fluffy (ode to Gabriel Iglesias), husky, bouncer-like, and more.  I am 6'3" 310 pounds.  Large, but proportional. 

I've always had a sweet tooth--I love the junk food and sugar in nearly all its incarnations.  This morning, I saw an article on NPR called, "Junk Food Jones Is Wired in Your Brain."  This confirmed what I suspected--I am an addict.  It was shown in a fascinating bit of research which could even diverge into a discussion of ethics and animal research.
One quote:  "Inside their little brains, the junk-food eating rats developed a big problem. Just like drug takers, the rats needed a bigger fix of junk food over time to maintain their pleasure. So they kept on eating, and kept on getting fatter. As the scientists explained in their paper, "extended access to palatable high-fat food can induce addiction-like deficits in brain reward function," which can spur overeating and lead to obesity."

If nothing else, this offers some good insight into the workings of the addicted brain and one factor in the obesity epidemic in the US.

I am not a small man.  BTW, this is Chuck.  You could call me large, big, fluffy (ode to Gabriel Iglesias), husky, bouncer-like, and more.  I am 6'3" 310 pounds.  Large, but proportional. 

I've always had a sweet tooth--I love the junk food and sugar in nearly all its incarnations.  This morning, I saw an article on NPR called, "Junk Food Jones Is Wired in Your Brain."  This confirmed what I suspected--I am an addict.  It was shown in a fascinating bit of research which could even diverge into a discussion of ethics and animal research.
One quote:  "Inside their little brains, the junk-food eating rats developed a big problem. Just like drug takers, the rats needed a bigger fix of junk food over time to maintain their pleasure. So they kept on eating, and kept on getting fatter. As the scientists explained in their paper, "extended access to palatable high-fat food can induce addiction-like deficits in brain reward function," which can spur overeating and lead to obesity."

If nothing else, this offers some good insight into the workings of the addicted brain and one factor in the obesity epidemic in the US.

Another great post from the Mind Hacks blog, this time describing a good example of a respectful, scholarly debate between two researchers regarding the impact of video games on learning and the brain. The author of the post, Vaughn Bell, talks about being inspired by another researcher, Susan Greenfield, when he was an undergraduate. He was invited to a conference to co-speak with her about the impact of video games on learning, and he writes about the experience of admiring her AND disagreeing with her scholarly position on the topic (must have been a lively talk!). This topic might be interesting to high school students, and this is a good description of how scientists both work together through disagreeing about important topics.

Link to Vaughn's blog post about all this:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/03/lords_ladies_and_vi.html

Another great post from the Mind Hacks blog, this time describing a good example of a respectful, scholarly debate between two researchers regarding the impact of video games on learning and the brain. The author of the post, Vaughn Bell, talks about being inspired by another researcher, Susan Greenfield, when he was an undergraduate. He was invited to a conference to co-speak with her about the impact of video games on learning, and he writes about the experience of admiring her AND disagreeing with her scholarly position on the topic (must have been a lively talk!). This topic might be interesting to high school students, and this is a good description of how scientists both work together through disagreeing about important topics.

Link to Vaughn's blog post about all this:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/03/lords_ladies_and_vi.html