Here are two free resources that will help you prepare for your next Intro Psych course. While I suggest assignments, you can certainly keep these for your own reference.      Neuroscience I hear from Intro Psych instructors that the biopsych chapter is one they are frequently uncomfortable teaching. As a resource, I highly recommend this free book: Brain Facts: A Primer on the Brain and Nervous System. It is published by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) and is available as a pdf, ePUB, MOBI, and as a Sound Cloud audio book. At 136 pages (71 pdf pages), its 18 chapters will help you help your students better understand psychology’s biological underpinnings. Here’s a sample of chapters: Chapter 2: Senses & Perception Chapter 7: Infant, Child, & Adolescent Brain Chapter 11: Childhood Disorders Chapter 12: Psychiatric Disorders Chapter 14: Injury & Illness Better yet, because this book was written for a general audience, you can assign chapters to students. For example, first ask your Intro Psych students to match each chapter in the Brain Facts book with the chapters you will be covering in the course. Next, ask students to pick one chapter to read. A student who was particularly interested in the biology of sleep might choose Chapter 9: Brain States. Or a student with a grandparent who is experiencing cognitive challenges might choose Chapter 8: Adult and Aging Brain. Or a student who has experienced addiction—either themselves, or as a friend or family member—might choose Chapter 13: Addiction. Since the purpose of this activity is to introduce students to free resource from a reputable organization, you can simply ask students to quote part of the chapter that they chose to read that they found particularly interesting, and then explain why they found it interesting. If you’d like to put a minimum word count on the assignment, tell students that the quote does not count toward that word count. Score the assignment as complete/incomplete.   Industrial/Organization Psychology For instructors wanting to include more examples of how psychology can be applied to real-world situations, the good folks at the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology (SIOP) have written a free I-O chapter. You are welcome to use this chapter—just be sure to give SIOP credit. If your Intro Psych textbook allows for customization, add the chapter to your book. The nicely-designed pdf is 23 pages. The chapter could work as an end of course assignment. If you are using APA’s integrative themes, one option would be ask students to quote text from the chapter that illustrates each of the integrative themes with a brief explanation of how their chosen example fits the theme. If you are not using the themes, another option would be to ask students to quote text from the chapter that illustrates content from, say, at least five chapters that you covered in the course. Again, each quote should be accompanied by a brief explanation of how that quote fits with their chosen chapter. This assignment could also be scored as complete/incomplete.         ... View more

Need another example of the American Psychological Association’s integrative theme #1: “Psychological science relies on empirical evidence and adapts as new data develop”? The motor cortex map that psychology instructors have been teaching since the 1940s is now known to be wrong. In retrospect, that’s not too surprising. Wilder Penfield and Edwin Boldrey mapped it by electrically stimulating different areas of the motor cortex and seeing which muscles moved. Today’s brain imaging techniques are, let’s say, more refined. In this open access Nature article, Evan Gordon and colleagues (2023) report using fMRI to map the motor cortex. And it sure looks different.* [Nature gives these permissions for this article and its images: “Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.”] Figure a is, of course, the classic homunculus. Figure b is what researchers found when they looked at the motor cortex with fMRI. There are two big differences. First, there are three main areas centered by toes, fingers, and tongue. The areas on either side of these core areas, researchers believe, control opponent muscle groups. For example, one elbow area may control the biceps whereas the other elbow area may control the triceps (E. Gordon, personal communication, July 18, 2024). The second big difference are the three action/body areas. These action/body areas connect to many areas of the brain including those associated with free will, executive control, and pain. The action/body area between the areas centered on the fingers and centered on the tongue has especially strong connections to the visual cortex, perhaps creating a mechanism for eye-hand coordination (Gordon et al., 2023). What about the somatosensory cortex? Researchers have found a few differences (Willoughby et al., 2021), but we should be able to stick with our existing somatosensory cortex map for the time being. The motor cortex mapping team are working on solving the challenges associated with mapping the entire somatosensory cortex (E. Gordon, personal communication, July 18, 2024). We can let students know that research is ongoing on the specifics, but that the general principle that the greater the sensitivity of the body part, the more area devoted to it in the somatosensory cortex still holds.    As for the map of the motor cortex, it’s going to take a bit of time for the textbooks to catch up to this new information because of the publishing timeline, but they will get there.   Reference Gordon, E. M., Chauvin, R. J., Van, A. N., Rajesh, A., Nielsen, A., Newbold, D. J., Lynch, C. J., Seider, N. A., Krimmel, S. R., Scheidter, K. M., Monk, J., Miller, R. L., Metoki, A., Montez, D. F., Zheng, A., Elbau, I., Madison, T., Nishino, T., Myers, M. J., … Dosenbach, N. U. F. (2023). A somato-cognitive action network alternates with effector regions in motor cortex. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05964-2 Willoughby, W. R., Thoenes, K., & Bolding, M. (2021). Somatotopic arrangement of the human primary somatosensory cortex derived from functional magnetic resonance imaging. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 14, 598482. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2020.598482   ... View more

We know that using a cell phone while driving is dangerous, and that the risk of crashing is even greater among teenage drivers (Gershon et al., 2019). I’ve heard people say, “Let them crash. They’ll learn.” While punishment delivered as an environmental consequence can be effective, we’re not talking about a child not watching where they are walking and bumping into a pole. We’re talking about people piloting 2,000-pound missiles filled with flammable liquids traveling over 60 mph. Not only might a crash caused by inattention kill the driver, but it might kill their passengers, pedestrians, and the occupants of other vehicles. In addition to the cost in lives, there are the medical costs of the people who survive and the financial payouts related to the vehicles. The more people that crash vehicles, the greater the cost of medical and car insurance for everyone. In sum, we are all better off when people do not crash. After covering operant conditioning, invite your students to work in small groups (in person or in a class discussion forum) to answer this question: What can we do to encourage drivers to use their cell phones less while driving? If you’d like to add in some experimental design practice, ask students how they could test their ideas. They should include the levels of the independent variable with operational definitions and the dependent variable with operational definition. Invite volunteers from each group to share their ideas and their experimental designs. Lastly, share with students this freely available journal article that describes how one research team addressed this issue (Delgado et al., 2024). Ask students to answer the following questions: The researchers didn’t have a hypothesis because they didn’t have a prediction of the results. Instead, they had a question and an objective. What were these? When was the study conducted? How many volunteers participated in the study? How long were data collected from each volunteer? There were six levels of the independent variable which the researchers called “trial arms.” Identify all six, and describe how each was operationally defined. What was the primary dependent variable which the researchers call “measure”? How many seconds per hour on average were the control group volunteers on their phones while driving? The researchers report that their statistical analyses showed that the only interventions that had an effect compared to the control group were “standard incentive plus feedback,” “reframed incentive plus feedback,” and “double reframed incentive plus feedback.” How many seconds per hour less compared to the control group on average were the volunteers in these three groups on their phones while driving? What was the average cost per person for the most successful intervention? In the “discussion” section of the article, the researchers note that the heaviest phone users while driving showed no impact from the interventions. What do you think the heaviest phone-use-while-driving drivers are doing on their phones while driving? Identify an incentive that you think would help such drivers reduce phone use while driving. I recently had a conversation with a person who said that she knows that being on her phone while driving is dangerous. When she finds herself picking up her phone when she is driving, she immediately tosses it into the backseat.   References Delgado, M. K., Ebert, J. P., Xiong, R. A., Winston, F. K., McDonald, C. C., Rosin, R. M., Volpp, K. G., Barnett, I. J., Small, D. S., Wiebe, D. J., Abdel-Rahman, D., Hemmons, J. E., Finegold, R., Kotrc, B., Radford, E., Fisher, W. J., Gaba, K. L., Everett, W. C., & Halpern, S. D. (2024). Feedback and financial incentives for reducing cell phone use while driving: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open, 7(7), e2420218. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.20218 Gershon, P., Sita, K. R., Zhu, C., Ehsani, J. P., Klauer, S. G., Dingus, T. A., & Simons-Morton, B. G. (2019). Distracted driving, visual inattention, and crash risk among teenage drivers. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 56(4), 494–500. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2018.11.024   ... View more

“If you could introduce any two scientists, regardless of where and when they lived, whom would you choose, and how would their collaboration change the course of history?” (Bismuth et al., 2023, p. 28). The good people at the journal Science asked young scientists that question. (Access the freely available article.) Some of my favorite pairings are Leonardo da Vinci and the Richard Feynman (theoretical physicist), da Vinci and Nikola Tesla (electrical and mechanical engineer), Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing (both computer scientists), Abu Ali al Hasan ibn al-Haytham (mathematician and optician) and Isaac Newton (physicist), and Charles Darwin and Deisy das Graças de Souz (psychologist who studied behavior evolution). With each pairing, the writer briefly explains what each scientist was known for and why the pairing would have changed the course of history. I am very interested to hear how your students would answer this version of the question: If you could introduce any psychological scientist to another scientist, regardless of where and when they lived and regardless of discipline, whom would you choose, and how would their collaboration change the course of history? Posed at the end of an Intro to Psychology course, this could be a fascinating class discussion, in person or online. Give the question to students at least a week before the discussion to give students time to consider their chosen scientists. For me, I have to wonder what our kitchens would like now if Lillian Gilbreth’s engineering mind had collaborated with Leonardo da Vinci’s engineering mind. I bet they could have sorted out a better solution for our refrigerators—the one appliance that just does not quite fit seamlessly into our kitchens. Refrigerators are more of a sore thumb, actually. They are not standard size. They don’t sit flush with our counters and cabinets. Any cabinets above them are useless. For that matter, I would love to hear your answer to that question. Please post your thoughts in the comments.   Reference Bismuth, K., Sharma, V., Powell, J. R., Tang, H., Cao, B., Huang, J., Patel, R. J., Bezerra, P., Zhang, X., Wen, Q., Oda, F. S., Verstiuk, O., Khan, M. S., Virgüez, E., Zhi, Y., & Dedyo, J. M. (2023). NextGen voices: Historic introductions. Science, 382(6666), 28–30. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk8769 ... View more

It’s easy for us to talk about schedules of reinforcement in terms of bar-pressing rats. And it’s just as easy for us to talk about vending machines and slot machines. The behavior for both rats and humans is largely the same: pressing a button or lever. The reinforcement in these cases is something concrete: food or money. But reinforcement can be other things, too. For example, the praise we get from others, such as our caregivers, friends, and teachers, can be a very powerful reinforcement. After covering reinforcement in Intro Psych, ask students to work in small groups to identify three to five behaviors that are reinforced by the words or emotional responses of other people. For example, if we tell a joke and people laugh, we are more likely to tell more jokes. If people laugh at dad jokes but not knock-knock jokes, we are more likely to tell more dad jokes. Or if people groan at our dad jokes and we enjoy that response, we are more likely to tell more dad jokes. I’m convinced that people who frequently make puns enjoy the groans, speaking as one who groans at puns. Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax was asked by a reader, “When I make big life decisions and even some small ones, I wonder, will [my parents] be impressed or disappointed? And I often feel hurt when they don’t offer praise when I’m expecting it. They are extremely judgmental” (Hax, 2024). In Hax’s reply, she writes, “If you were a lab rat, you’d be mashing the reward button all day for two? zero? random cubes of cheese” (Hax, 2024). While lab rats don’t work for cheese, the point holds. Ask students to read the (gifted to you) Hax column, and answer the following questions: What behavior of the letter-writer is (occasionally) reinforced by their parents? What is the reinforcement? Is the reinforcement given on a fixed or a variable schedule? Explain. If the letter-writer was on a ratio schedule of reinforcement, what would that mean? If the letter-writer was on an interval schedule of reinforcement, what would that mean? If you have covered intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, ask your students these additional questions. 6. Based on the letter, was the letter-writer getting a tattoo intrinsically motivated or extrinsically motivated? Explain. 7. Based on the letter, is the desire to hide the tattoo from their parents intrinsically motivated or extrinsically motivated? Explain.     Reference Hax, C. (2024, June 10). She’s in her 40s and thriving, yet craves her parents’ approval. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2024/06/14/carolyn-hax-daughter-craves-parent-approval/       ... View more

When we cover sensation and perception in Intro Psych, we commonly discuss each sense in turn with most emphasis put on vision and hearing. Some of us even discuss synesthesia, a sort of mixing of the senses where a person might, for example, see different colors upon hearing different sounds. It is pretty common for us to use one of our senses to supplement or replace another sense. For example, we may turn on captions while streaming a movie or television program, using vision to supplement sound. For the blind and vision impaired, audio descriptions of movie, television, and game scenes (“descriptive video service”) can be enabled. (See Descriptive Video Works for more information.) Here's another example of how one sense can be used to give information about another sense. Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz created the sound shirt (or soundshirt, or SoundShirt, or Soundshirt—I’ve seen it rendered all of these ways). The sound shirt was originally designed to be worn by people who are deaf and hearing impaired while attending the symphony (CuteCircuit, 2018). The shirt is embedded with 28-30 actuators that are programmed to respond with a vibration to sounds coming from microphones placed around the concert space. At the symphony, for example, “violins can be felt on the arms and the drums on the back” (Marchese, 2019). The newest iteration of the sound shirt was created to be worn by fans who are deaf or hard of hearing attending Newcastle United soccer matches (Gornall, 2024). Just as in concert venues, microphones were placed around the stadium to capture the noise of the crowd. Actuators in the Newcastle United replica jersey sound shirt vibrate depending on the nature or the cause of the noise. For example, the singing crowd causes the shirt sleeves to vibrate, and a goal by the opposing team causes vibrations on the back (Eveleigh, 2024). Francesca Rosella “has degrees [in] interior architecture and Master’s degrees in Sustainable Design, and in Interaction Design” (“Francesca Rosella,” 2020). Ryan Genz has degrees in studio art and anthropology as well as a Master’s degree in Interaction Design (“Ryan Genz,” 2020). While the institution where Rosella and Genz earned their degrees (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy) was short-lived (2001-2006) (“Interaction Design Institute Ivrea,” 2024), the field of interaction design is very much alive. In fact, interaction design is part of the broader field of human-computer interaction (Löwgren, 2024) which is part of the even broader field of human factors and engineering psychology. The American Psychological Association has a brief introduction to this field. After sharing this information with students, invite students to work in small groups to answer the following questions: In what other contexts might a sound shirt be useful for people who are deaf or hearing impaired? Explain. Are there contexts where those with perfectly fine hearing might benefit from a sound shirt? Explain. Instead of using the sense of touch, might there be a way to turn sound into light waves? Explain how the crowd noise at a soccer match could be displayed via, say, virtual reality (VR) goggles. For people who are blind or vision impaired, how might a “sight shirt” work at a soccer match to help communicate the action on the pitch?   References CuteCircuit. (2018, May 11). Biography. CuteCircuit. https://cutecircuit.com/biography/ Eveleigh, R. (2024, June 5). Newcastle United introduces ‘sound shirts’ for deaf supporters. Positive News. https://www.positive.news/lifestyle/sport/newcastle-united-introduces-sound-shirts-for-deaf-supporters/ Francesca Rosella. (2020, August 25). Explore Mars. https://www.exploremars.org/speaker/francesca-rosella/ Gornall, K. (2024, April 11). Newcastle United introduce “sound shirts” for deaf fans. BBC Sport. https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/68780625 Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. (2024). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Interaction_Design_Institute_Ivrea&oldid=1206070266 Löwgren, J. (2024). Interaction Design—Brief intro. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/interaction-design-brief-intro Marchese, K. (2019, October 4). The sound shirt lets deaf people feel music on their skin. Designboom. https://www.designboom.com/technology/cute-circuit-deaf-people-feel-music-skin-soundshirt-haptic-sensors-10-04-2019/ Ryan Genz. (2020, August 25). Explore Mars. https://www.exploremars.org/speaker/ryan-genz/   ... View more

Macmillan Learning is honored to sponsor the PsychSessions podcast, a platform dedicated to insightful conversations about teaching and psychology. Today, we celebrate a monumental milestone—the 200th episode of the flagship series, PsychSessions: Conversations About Teaching N' Stuff. This episode features special guest host Chris Cardone as she joins Garth Neufeld to interview the esteemed social psychologist and author, Elliot Aronson.   Click here to receive a free PsychSessions discussion guide for this episode! PsychSessions is giving away 20 copies of Aronson's autobiography Not By Chance Alone. Register here for your chance to win.   ... View more

Road rage has been in our local news this spring. Last month, a man was found guilty of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon with a firearm enhancement for shooting a bicycle rider in October 2022. The man was driving a vehicle that almost hit the bike rider. The bike rider yelled at the driver. The driver got out of his vehicle and pushed the bike rider to the ground. The bike rider got up and pushed the driver back. When the bike rider turned to walk away, the driver pulled out a handgun and shot the bike rider in the face. The driver got back in his vehicle and drove away. The bike rider survived the shooting. There were a number of witnesses to the incident who photographed the license plate of the driver’s vehicle so identifying the driver was not difficult (Groves, 2024). Sentencing will be at a later date. On May 24, 2024, an older driver and a teenage driver pulled into the parking lot of a high school. Witnesses saw the two drivers exit their vehicles. The teenager pulled out a gun and shot the older driver. The teenager drove away. The older driver died at the scene. The police are still sorting out the cause of the shooting, but they believe road rage is likely. The teenager is in custody (Ibave, 2024). To anyone who tends to get angry with other drivers, please leave your guns at home—ideally, locked up where children and thieves cannot get to them. Angry drivers—even without a firearm—are still in control of a deadly weapon. Our vehicles are effectively missiles—2,000 pounds of projectile, loaded with several gallons of flammable liquids, and with the ability to travel at over 100 miles per hour. Within seconds, an angry driver can kill another person. Because the angry driver was unable—or unwilling—to regulate their emotions, a person is dead and the angry driver is headed to prison for murder. In this open access article (Bjureberg & Gross, 2021), researchers offer a model for how the emotions in a road rage experience come into being (emotion generation) and how a driver can use emotion regulation to short circuit those emotions. One of the American Psychological Association’s integrative themes is “applying psychological principles can change our lives, organizations, and communities in positive ways” (APA, 2022). Here is an opportunity to give your students a chance to do just that. Divide your class into eight small groups. If your class is larger, divide the class into 16 or 24 small groups. One group is assigned the task of illustrating the problem with road rage. Each of the remaining groups is assigned one of seven emotion regulation strategies from the article. The problem with road rage 4.1.2 Identification-stage strategies 4.2.2 Selection-state strategies 4.3.2 Implementation‐stage situational strategies 4.3.3 Implementation‐stage attentional strategies 4.3.4 Implementation‐stage cognitive strategies 4.3.5 Implementation‐stage response modulation strategies 4.4.2 Monitoring‐stage strategies. Each group’s task is to create an infographic that illustrates the problem (group one) or the strategies (groups two through eight). Work with the powers-that-be at your institution to get the infographics printed and posted. If budget limitations mean only being able to post them in your classroom, then at least everyone who comes through your classroom will see them. Even if your students are online, their infographics can still be posted in a psychology classroom. Because the posters will be publicly displayed, do at least one round of peer review where the members of two other groups review another group’s infographic. Because students can be reluctant to critique the work of their fellow students, explain that it’s better that the critiques come from classmates than from everyone else at your institution once the infographics go public. To drive the point home, consider requiring each peer reviewer to note at least one area where the infographic can be improved. Points will be docked for not noting one area of improvement. Here is a sample rubric your students can use to evaluate their own work and the work of their peers. If you are not an expert at designing infographics—I know I am not—this website has some tips. If you are feeling especially sporty, partner with a graphic design instructor at your institution. Once your groups know what information they want to convey, each of your groups would be partnered with one or more graphic design students who would actually design the infographic. Make clear, however, that the final approval of the design would come from your groups.     References APA. (2022). Psychology’s Integrative Themes. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrad/introductory-psychology-initiative/student-learning-outcomes-poster.pdf Bjureberg, J., & Gross, J. J. (2021). Regulating road rage. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 15(3), e12586. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12586 Groves, J. (2024, April 11). The man who shot NMSU student Daniel Garcia in a road rage found guilty by Las Cruces jury. Las Cruces Sun-News. https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/crime/2024/04/11/road-rage-shooter-found-guilty-by-las-cruces-jury/73265714007/ Ibave, D. (2024, May 24). Juvenile in custody after deadly road rage shooting at Anthony, NM high school. KFOX. https://kfoxtv.com/news/local/shooting-outside-empty-anthony-nm-high-school-prompts-lockdown-no-injuries-reported-new-mexico-gadsden-high-school-independent-school-district-isd-gisd ... View more

Will visitors to vending machines make healthier purchases if they know which purchases are healthier? After discussing experimental design, ask your students to work in small groups. First, they are to take the above question and reword it as a hypothesis. As part of their design, they should identify the independent variable and its levels and identify the dependent variable—providing operational definitions of the levels of the independent variable and the dependent variable. After discussion has waned, ask a volunteer from each group to share their group’s design. Conclude this activity by sharing the design and results from this freely available experiment conducted in Philadelphia (Gibson et al., 2024). Researchers tested four different messaging systems in 267 vending machines; 150 machines sold beverages and 117 sold snacks. The study began with a 9-month period where researchers just monitored sales at these machines. The intervention period began immediately after this baseline period and lasted 13 months. All of the materials used in this study are available with the article. Click on “supplemental content,” and select “Supplement 2.”    Message 1: Beverage-tax poster only. Next to the beverage machines, the poster read, “Philly bev tax is here. Starting January 1, 2017, a 1.5-cents-per-ounce tax will be applied to sweetened beverages.” Next to the snack machines, the poster read, “Are you drinking fewer sweetened drinks because of the cost? Keep up the healthy choices by also choosing healthy snacks.” For the remaining three conditions, a poster placed next to the vending machine explained how to interpret the labels. Message 2: Green labels. These labels were placed on items that were deemed a healthier choice. For example, seltzer water and popcorn got green labels. In the corresponding poster’s small print were the criteria the researcher’s used for the green label. This was their operational definition of “healthy.” Healthy beverages had 5g or less of sugar per 12 ounces. Healthy snacks Message 3: Traffic lights. Green, yellow, or red labels were placed on each vending machine option. Again, green labels were on healthier items like seltzer water and popcorn; the poster explained these were “choose often” options. Yellow labels were on so-so items like diet drinks and trail mix; the poster explained these were “choose sometimes” options. Lastly, red labels were on unhealthy items like sweetened teas and chocolate bars; the poster explained that these were “choose rarely” options. In the poster’s small print were the criteria used for determining what was green, yellow, and red. Message 4: Physical activity. Each item had a label noting how many minutes of brisk walking it would take to work off the calories in the beverage or snack. The accompanying poster noted that the healthier items would take less than 45 minutes to walk off. The primary dependent variable was product sales; data were provided by the vending machine company. Researchers compared sales data from the green label, traffic light, and physical activity conditions vending machines with the beverage-tax poster only vending machines. Here are some of the key results. “Traffic light machines were 25% more likely to sell a yellow (eg, taxed diet soda) compared with a red (eg, taxed soda) beverage compared with beverage tax machines.” While purchasers didn’t go green, some were willing to go from red to yellow. If you go to the machine to get a Coke, you might be willing to go Coke Zero, but declining the Coke for a seltzer water is asking a bit much.   “For snacks, green-only machines were 10% more likely to sell a green snack (eg, baked chips) compared with a red snack (eg, candy) compared with beverage tax machines.” If you want Doritos, you might be talked into popcorn. “At the machine level, physical activity compared with beverage tax decreased the expected monthly number of beverages sold by 24%.” If you go to the machine to get a Pepsi, and you see that it’s going to take 62 minutes of brisk walking to walk off the calories, you might choose to fill up your water bottle instead. “Traffic light labels significantly decreased total calories sold per customer trip compared with physical activity.” The researchers did a manipulation check. They asked the visitors to the vending machines if they noticed “any posters or labels displayed on the machines.” In the beverage-tax poster group, 26% reported seeing the poster. In the green-only group, 40% reported seeing the green labels. In the traffic light group, 65% noticed the green, yellow, red labels. In the physical activity group, 58% noticed the brisk-walking-minutes labels. Interestingly, “Reported noticing of messaging did not moderate condition effects on calories sold per trip.” Are any of your students interested in replicating this study at your institution? What would they need to do in order to conduct this experiment? Would they make any changes to the original study? Why or why not?     Reference Gibson, L. A., Stephens-Shields, A. J., Hua, S. V., Orr, J. A., Lawman, H. G., Bleich, S. N., Volpp, K. G., Bleakley, A., Thorndike, A. N., & Roberto, C. A. (2024). Comparison of sales from vending machines with 4 different food and beverage messages: A randomized trial. JAMA Network Open, 7(5), e249438. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.9438   ... View more

As telehealth visits skyrocketed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers wondered if the physician’s background mattered to their patients (Houchens et al., 2024). (The article is freely available.) The researchers asked volunteers to look at seven photos of the same physician with different backgrounds: bedroom, kitchen, bookcase, exam room, physician office (counter with office-type things on it), a wall of diplomas, and a solid color (control condition).  The researchers also asked about the type of physician (primary care or specialty care) and whether the patient’s length of relationship with the physician (new or established). This experiment is a 7 (type of background) x 2 (type of physician) x 2 (length of relationship) within-participants design, although they analyzed it as a 7 x 4 (lumping type of physician and length of relationship into one variable). In the results, neither type of physician nor length of relationship mattered. The only statistical difference was for type of background. There were two dependent variables. First, researchers asked volunteers which of the seven backgrounds they preferred. As compared to the solid color background, volunteers preferred the wall of diplomas followed by the physician office. The least preferred—again as compared to the solid color background—were the bedroom and the kitchen. There were no statistical differences between the solid color and the bookcase or the exam room. For the second dependent variable, researchers calculated a composite score after asking volunteers to rate the physicians with each background on six factors on a scale of one to ten: “how knowledgeable, trustworthy, caring, approachable, and professional the physician appeared, and how comfortable the physician made the respondent feel.” As compared to the solid background (7.7), the only two backgrounds where the physician was rated statistically lower were the bedroom (7.2) and the kitchen (7.0). Because this was a within-participant design and volunteers saw the same physician against every background, I could imagine that once volunteers rated one, it may have been more difficult to rate the others much differently.   After sharing this study with your students, give small groups this hypothesis: If students see an instructor in a virtual classroom with a professional background, they will rate the instructor as being more knowledgeable and trustworthy. Ask students to design an experiment to test this hypothesis. Students should be sure to identify the independent variable and its levels and the two dependent variables, providing operational definitions for all variables. Invite a spokesperson for each group to share their experimental design.   Reference Houchens, N., Saint, S., Kuhn, L., Ratz, D., Engle, J. M., & Meddings, J. (2024). Patient preferences for telemedicine video backgrounds. JAMA Network Open, 7(5), e2411512. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.11512   ... View more

“In the U.S., 42% of people are now myopic [nearsighted] – up from 25% back in the 1970s. In some East Asian countries, as many as 90% of people are myopic by the time they're young adults” (Godoy, 2024). That’s a lot of people who need corrective lenses. But the news is worse than that. “Once a kid gets myopia, their eyeball will keep stretching and the condition will get progressively worse. If they develop high myopia, it can increase the risk of serious eye problems down the road, such as retinal detachments, glaucoma and cataracts. It can even lead to blindness” (Godoy, 2024). That, I did not know. I also did not know “that light stimulates the eye to release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which can slow the eyeball from stretching” (Godoy, 2024). Researchers thought this would make for a good correlational study. In a study of 4,000 children, researchers found that the more time the children spent outside, the lower levels of myopia they had, even after “adjusting for near work, parental myopia, and ethnicity” (Rose et al., 2008). Here's an opportunity to give your students some experimental design practice in the sensation and perception chapter. After sharing the above information with students, give small groups this hypothesis: If children spend at least two hours a day outdoors, they will develop less myopia (nearsightedness). Ask students to address the following: Design an experiment that will test the hypothesis. Identify your independent variable, including the experimental group and the control group. Identify your dependent variable. All variables should include operational definitions. Your experiment should include random assignment to conditions. Briefly explain the importance of random assignment. Review the five general principles from the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct of the American Psychological Association. By these standards, would it be ethical to conduct your study? Why or why not? Invite a spokesperson from each group to share their group’s research design and their assessment of the ethics of conducting that study. To conclude this activity, share this information with your students. A Taiwanese ophthalmologist, Pei-Chang Wu, whose son was entering first grade convinced his son’s school to allow the children to spend more time outside. At the same time, he convinced another school to allow him to test their school children for myopia. “A year later, his son's school had half as many new myopia cases as the other school” (Godoy, 2024).  After these preliminary results, Wu did similar studies at other schools and found similar results. Pause here to ask your students to assess whether Wu’s research meets American Psychological Association’s ethical guidelines. Why or why not. Wu obviously has some pretty mean persuasive skills, but check out what he did next. With the data in hand, he convinced Taiwan’s Minister of Education to make a policy change that required schools to get children outside for two hours a day. “The program launched in September 2010. And after decades of trending upward, the rate of myopia among Taiwan's elementary school students began falling – from an all-time high of 50% in 2011 down to 45.1% by 2015” (Godoy, 2024). If time allows, ask students what schools and parents can do to help ensure children are getting two hours outside each day per the recommendation of ophthalmologists. Are your students ready to start a letter-writing campaign to their local school boards?   References Godoy, M. (2024, May 13). Want to protect your kids’ eyes from myopia? Get them to play outside. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/13/1250555639/kids-eyesight-myopia-near-sighted-nearsightedness-outdoor-play Rose, K. A., Morgan, I. G., Ip, J., Kifley, A., Huynh, S., Smith, W., & Mitchell, P. (2008). Outdoor activity reduces the prevalence of myopia in children. Ophthalmology, 115(8), 1279–1285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophtha.2007.12.019   ... View more

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about recreational fear. (See my first writing on the topic posted in October 2023). As a newly-minted honorary member of the research team at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark (thank you Mathias Clasen!), I’ve had even more reason to think about recreational fear. Proof of my honorary membership to the Recreational Fear Lab research team   According to a national survey of Intro Psych instructors, 64% of us cover emotion (Richmond et al., 2021). For the third who don’t, I encourage you to give covering it some consideration. If the theories of emotion don’t do much for you, leave those out. In other blog posts, such as this one from September 2022, I’ve discussed covering emotion regulation strategies. There are plenty of examples of people making poor emotion regulation choices, such as frustrated Denver Nuggets player Jamal Murray throwing a heat pack onto the basketball court as an opposing player drove for a layup (Li, 2024). Helping students understand the different types of emotion regulation strategies might help them make better emotion regulation choices. (There’s an empirical question worthy of study.) Here are the five emotion regulation strategies (McRae & Gross, 2020). Situation selection: choosing situations to elicit or not elicit specific emotions Situation modification: changing an existing situation to elicit or not elicit specific emotions Attentional deployment: shifting attention in an existing situation to elicit or not elicit specific emotions Cognitive change: reframing an existing situation or its elements to elicit or not elicit specific emotions Response modulation: employing behavior that reduces the strength of a specific emotion once it has occurred One way to help students understand emotion regulation strategies is—after explaining the strategies—to ask students to think about those strategies in terms of recreational fear, which we can loosely define as fear that is fun. Let’s use horror movies as an example of recreational fear. Situation selection. We watch horror movies in order to experience fear in a safe space where there is no actual danger from a murderer with a chainsaw. Situation modification. While watching a horror movie, we may cover our eyes during some scenes in order to reduce the amount of fear we experience. Attentional deployment. Rather than focus on the action in a particular scene, we may pay attention to the quality of the cinematography or admire the skill of the makeup artists. Or take the opportunity to fish out the last milkdud stuck to the bottom of the box. Cognitive change. “I’m not scared. I’m excited to see what is going to happen next!” Response modulation. “I am scared out of my mind right now. I’m going to take some deep breaths to reduce the intensity of what I am experiencing. If your students seem into the topic of recreational fear, give them the opportunity to explore the topic further. Here are some possible discussion questions. What are some other examples of recreational fear?   Some people enjoy some types of recreational fear more than others. Why might that be? Might there be personality differences? If so, what might those be? Are all horror the films the same? Or are there different types of horror films? If so, how do they differ? When does recreational fear cross the line into being real fear?     References Li. (2024, May 7). Denver Nuggets star Jamal Murray throws heat pack on court during game, slammed as “inexcusable and dangerous.” NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/denver-nuggets-star-jamal-murray-throws-heat-pack-court-game-slammed-i-rcna151021 McRae, K., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000703 Richmond, A. S., Boysen, G. A., Hudson, D. L., Gurung, R. A. R., Naufel, K. Z., Neufeld, G., Landrum, R. E., Dunn, D. S., & Beers, M. (2021). The Introductory Psychology census: A national study. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 7(3), 163–180. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000277       ... View more

With the NCAA women’s and men’s basketball tournaments behind us, the NBA playoffs coming up, and the WNBA season starting soon, here’s a timely research paper on free throw shooting (Büttner et al., 2024). While most basketball play involves interactions between players, the free throw is unique. Everything comes to a standstill while a player—with all eyes on them—attempts to make a basket from 15 feet away.  While waiting to make the free throw, players have time to think. That’s not a good thing in a sport that relies on a brain that automatically runs programs for particular sets of muscle movements. Of all the activities in basketball—because of the time to think—the free throw may be the most susceptible to stress-induced errors. If stress can impact free throw accuracy, Christiane Büttner (University of Basel), Christoph Kenntemich (Universität Koblenz-Landau), and Kipling D. Williams (Purdue University) wondered if social support could reduce the stress thereby increasing accuracy (Büttner et al., 2024). Read  their paper on ResearchGate. The researchers had three hypotheses, but for the purpose of this activity, let’s focus on this one: “Only after missing the first free throw (but not when the first free throw was successful), does being touched by more (vs. fewer) teammates increase the likelihood of success with the second free throw” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 2). If basketball is not your sport, this video will help you understand what the post-free-throw touching looks like. During the third quarter of the Iowa-UConn women’s NCAA 2024 final, UConn’s Aaliyah Edwards was fouled. She went to the line for two free throws. (Watch video.) After missing the first one, One of the two teammates in front of her (#25) tap her hands. Edwards turned around, and the two teammates behind her tap her hands. When Edwards turned back toward the free throw line, the teammate who missed the tap (#10) was standing there waiting to do her tap. That’s all four teammates. Edwards stepped to the line for her second shot. (Spoiler alert!) She made it. Was Edwards’ experience typical? Do hand taps following a missed free throw predict a made free throw on the next shot? To do this study, the researchers took an archival approach. Using the recordings of 50 Division I Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) women’s basketball games, they measured several variables with the key measures being the outcome of the first and second free throws (they only looked at free throws that came in pairs) and the number of hand taps after the first free throw. They observed 699 pairs of free-throws. They found that if a player missed the first free throw, the more teammates who tapped their hand, the greater the chance that the player would make their second free throw. If a player made the first free throw, the number of hand taps did not predict the making of the second free throw. Ask your students to determine if this was a correlational study or an experiment. How do they know?  The researchers wrote: “[W]e do acknowledge that our findings are correlational and the caveats that come with that” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). Teams were not, for example, randomly assigned to tap the hand of the free-throw shooting player zero to four times. Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop the researchers from making a causal statement in the next paragraph: “Physical touch by teammates boosts performance in one of the most stressful athletic tasks imaginable: Succeeding with a free throw in basketball after already missing one” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). They do, however, encourage experimental research: “Future experimental research should determine whether physical touch improves performance as an active ingredient or whether more frequent touch is a symptom of better team cohesion and, consequentially, better performance under pressure” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). After sharing this study with students, there are a couple of different directions you could take this. Choose your own adventure. Option 1: Experiment. Ask students to work in small groups to design an experiment that would test this hypothesis: “Only after missing the first free throw (but not when the first free throw was successful), …being touched by more (vs. fewer) teammates increase[s] the likelihood of success with the second free throw”(Büttner et al., 2024, p. 2). Participants would need to be randomly assigned to conditions. Students should identify the independent variable (including its levels) and the dependent variable. Ethics add-on: If this experiment were done with real teams—assuming it could be done without the participants being influenced by knowing the hypothesis, discuss the ethical implications of a study that may cause a team to score fewer points. Option 2: Correlation. Ask students to work in small groups to design a correlational study that would test this hypothesis: “[M]ore frequent touch is a symptom of better team cohesion” (Büttner et al., 2024, p. 6). First, create a measure of team cohesion. (Some research has been published in the context of work teams. One alternative is to ask students to do some research and adapt something that has already been created.) Next, describe how you could use that measure to test the hypothesis.     Reference Büttner, C. M., Kenntemich, C., & Williams, K. D. (2024). The power of human touch: Physical contact improves performance in basketball free throws. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 72, 102610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2024.102610       ... View more

This is the most horrifying thing I have read in some time: Nearly two-thirds of women in [Indiana University’s Debby Herbenick’s] most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four [from four years ago] (Orenstein, 2024). Nearly two-thirds of the women at this “major Midwestern university.” Let’s say that your students are no different than these “major Midwestern university” students. Let’s say you have 500 students a year. About 60% of college students are women (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023a). During the 2020-2021 academic year, 80% of bachelor’s degrees went to women (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023b). If you teach mostly Intro Psych, the number of women in your classes may be closer to 60%. If you teach mostly upper division courses for the psych major, the number of women in your classes may be closer to 80%. For illustration purposes, let’s split the difference and say that 70% of your 500 students are women. That means that you teach 350 women each year. If “nearly two-thirds” of those women have been choked during sex, that comes out to 231 of your students. “Nearly” half of your students. Are being choked. Actually, the number is likely higher than that. “[W]hile undergrads of all genders and sexualities in Dr. Herbenick’s surveys report both choking and being choked, straight and bisexual young women are far more likely to have been the subjects of the behavior; the gap widens with greater occurrences” (Orenstein, 2024). Men, too, have been choked, just not in the same numbers. “[W]hile the act is often engaged in with a steady partner, a quarter of young women said partners they’d had sex with on the day they’d met also choked them” (Orenstein, 2024). I had just gotten accustomed to a world where apps like Tinder make it easy for complete strangers to have sex—and that many young people were, indeed, using those apps to do just that. But 25% of the women in those same-day sexual encounters are being choked?! “No wonder that, in a separate study by Dr. Herbenick, choking was among the most frequently listed sex acts young women said had scared them, reporting that it sometimes made them worry whether they’d survive” (Orenstein, 2024). No wonder, indeed. Also, oxygen deprivation is bad for the brain. According to the American Academy of Neurology, restricting blood flow to the brain, even briefly, can cause permanent injury, including stroke and cognitive impairment. In M.R.I.s conducted by Dr. [Keisuke] Kawata [an early researcher on NFL concussions and CTE] and his colleagues (including Dr. Herbenick, who is a co-author of his papers on strangulation), undergraduate women who have been repeatedly choked show a reduction in cortical folding in the brain compared with a never-choked control group. They also showed widespread cortical thickening, an inflammation response that is associated with elevated risk of later-onset mental illness. In completing simple memory tasks, their brains had to work far harder than the control group, recruiting from more regions to achieve the same level of accuracy (Orenstein, 2024). And while we’re here, despite what students might have seen on TikTok, “There is no safe way to strangle someone” (Orenstein, 2024). Believing that there is a safe way to choke would be an Internet fact, not an actual fact (Frantz, 2024). “Among girls and women [Orenstein had] spoken with, many did not want or like to be sexually strangled” (Orenstein, 2024). I guess that’s the good news. But why is it so dang common—and becoming more popular? Here’s where I suggest we turn this article into a class or small group discussion (in person or online) as part of the social psych chapter in Intro Psych. Instructions: Read this New York Times opinion piece of April 12, 2024 titled “The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex” by Peggy Orenstein, and then answer the following questions. From the article, quote a sentence that illustrates the social pressure women feel to allow choking during sex. Have you seen this social pressure within your own friend group? If so, give an example. From the article, quote a sentence that illustrates the social pressure men feel to engage in choking during sex. Have you seen this social pressure within your own friend group? If so, give an example. From the article, describe how choking during sex became popularized through observational learning, starting with its beginning in porn. The article describes how oxygen deprivation can negatively impact the brain. Identify at least five of those effects. Which one do you find the most concerning? Why? The article suggests language that sexual partners can use to make clear what is okay and what is not okay during sex. What is that language? Consider a friend of yours. Do you believe they would be comfortable saying that to a sexual partner? Why or why not? In BDSM, consent—and the ability to withdraw consent (commonly with a safe word)—is paramount. Is choking someone because you think they want to be choked enough to establish consent? Why or why not? If someone gives their consent to be choked but then decides to withdraw their consent, can they do that if they cannot breathe and are losing consciousness? Why or why not? If someone has not given their consent to be choked, can the person doing the choking be charged with assault? Why or why not? If the person being choked experiences permanent damage to their brain or dies, can the person doing the choking be held liable? Why or why not? What was the most surprising thing you learned from this article? Explain.     References Frantz, S. (2024, March 22). “Internet fact or actual fact?” Macmillan and BFW Teaching Community. https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/psychology-blog/internet-fact-or-actual-fact/ba-p/19976 National Center for Education Statistics. (2023a). Postbaccalaureate enrollment. Condition of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/chb National Center for Education Statistics. (2023b). Undergraduate degree fields. Condition of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta/undergrad-degree-fields Orenstein, P. (2024, April 12). The troubling trend in teenage sex. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/choking-teen-sex-brain-damage.html   ... View more

Introduction to Psychology is the hardest course we teach because we are unfamiliar with so much of the course content (Frantz, 2024). We rely heavily on our textbooks to tell us what we—and our students—need to know about the field. This creates an unfortunate feedback loop that is difficult to break. Let’s take the personality chapter as an example. I am not a personality researcher nor did I take a personality course as an undergrad for my major. Yet, here I am teaching Intro Psych, and it seems like personality is a pretty important topic, so I’m game for teaching it. Step 1. I read the personality chapter in the Intro Psych textbook I have adopted. “This must be what Intro Psych students should know about personality.” Step 2. The personality chapter spends a lot of time on the history of personality theory, so I spend a lot of time lecturing on the history of personality theory. Repeat Step 2. Every term. For years. One day, the personality researchers were asked, “What should we teach Intro Psych students about personality?” They said, “Please focus on today’s personality research, and stop teaching the history of personality theory.” (See pages 8 to 16 of the 2017 Division 1/Division 2 Joint Task Force Report on Introductory Psychology.) Step 3. Authors of Intro Psych textbooks listen to the personality researchers. The authors greatly pare back the coverage of the history of personality theory in the personality chapter. Step 4. The publishers of those Intro Psych textbooks send the personality chapters out for review. They ask people who use the textbook—or who might one day use the textbook—what they think of the chapter. Step 5. The reviews come back. The personality researchers who review the chapter are thrilled! “Finally,” they say, “Intro Psych students are going to be learning about what we are really doing in the field.” Everyone else, though, is ticked off. “Wait! Where is the coverage of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis?! Where is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?! You can’t take that content out! I teach that!!” Let’s stop here for a minute to reflect. Why am I teaching the history of personality? Because many, many years ago when I first started teaching Intro Psych, the personality chapter in the textbook I used devoted many, many pages to the history of personality. That’s it. I don’t have any independent knowledge of personality. Because this is what I have always taught, this is what I think should be taught. Step 6. The publishers read the reviews. There is a very short stack of reviews saying, “Yay! Thanks for taking the history out of the personality chapter!” Those are primarily the reviews from the personality researchers. There is a very tall stack of reviews saying, “WTH?! Put the history back into the personality chapter, because I teach that!” Those are reviews from everyone else, including the neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, and cognitive psychologists. Step 7. The publishers tell the Intro Psych textbook authors, “Look at all of these instructors who won’t adopt our book, because this chapter doesn’t cover what people want. You have to put the history back in.” Step 8. The Intro Psych textbook authors respond with, “But… But…” And the content goes back in. As someone who has reviewed plenty of Intro Psych textbook chapters, I own that I was part of the problem. In retrospect, I should have said, “I know you want me to review five chapters, but I’m really only expert in two of these: research methods and social.” If they insisted that I pick three others, I should have said, “Okay, I will also review neuroscience, sensation and perception, and personality, but understand that I will defer to what the experts in those areas think should be in the chapter. For example, yes, I cover dark adaptation in the S&P chapter, but if the S&P researchers don’t think that’s important, I’m fine not covering it.” (And, indeed, S&P researchers do not think coverage of dark adaptation is particularly important. See page 7 of the 2017 Division 1/Division 2 Joint Task Force Report on Introductory Psychology. If you ever heard Scott Lilienfeld’s talk on Intro Psych, you’ll remember he had a great story about a reviewer’s thoughts on his dark adaptation coverage in his textbook.) “Yes, I teach that, because… well… I guess because I have always taught that.” Psychology is a dynamic field. Is having taught particular content a good enough reason to keep teaching it?  Or should what we teach be just as dynamic as our science?   Reference Frantz, S. (2024, April 4). Intro Psych: The hardest course we teach. Macmillan and BFW Teaching Community. https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/psychology-blog/intro-psych-the-hardest-course-we-teach/ba-p/20067   ... View more