More and more of our students are uninterested in having children. The global fertility rate (number of children per woman) has declined from almost five in 1950 to just a little more than two in 2023. In the United States, we have gone from about three children per woman in 1950 to an all-time low of 1.6. There are 11 countries (per United Nations data) with a fertility rate of one or fewer. In fact, the U.N. data show only three countries that have increased their fertility rate since 1950: Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and Chad. And how much has the fertility rate increased in each of those three countries? 0.1 (Roser, 2024). After covering child development in your Intro Psych lifespan chapter or in your Lifespan course, share the above data, and then ask your students if any of them have children. Of those who do not, ask if they plan to have children. A Pew Research poll conducted in the summer of 2023 found that of the respondents between the ages of 18 and 49, 47% reported that they were unlikely to have children (Minkin et al., 2024b). Ask students for what reasons people ages 18 to 49 may give for why they are unlikely to have children or why they did not have children. Invite students to work in small groups to generate their list.  After discussion has died down, ask a volunteer from each group to share their list. Write each reason where the class can see it. When a group duplicates the reason of an earlier group, and a mark next to the reason. Share with students the results of a spring 2024 Pew Research poll of 770 adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who neither have children nor intend to have children (Minkin et al., 2024b). Here were the major reasons given: Just don’t/didn’t want to: 57% (women: 60%; men: 50%) Want/wanted to focus on other things: 44% Concerns about the world: 38% Can’t/couldn’t afford raising one: 36% Environmental concerns: 26% Haven’t found/didn’t find right partner: 24% Don’t like children: 20% Negative family experiences as a child: 18% (women: 22%; men: 13%) Medical reasons: 13% Spouse doesn’t/didn’t want children: 11% The same respondents were asked what benefits they saw in not having children. If time allows, ask students to work in small groups to identify the benefits they see. Here were the major benefits respondents identified: Time for hobbies/interests: 80% Money for things they want: 79% Ability to save money: 75% Job/career success: 61% Social life: 58% Of respondents 50 years of age and older who do not have children, 26% worry about having to someone to care for them in their later years. Although of those 50 years of age and older who do have children, 20% worry about the same thing. If you would like to turn this into a written assignment, ask students to interview friends and family members who do not have children the same questions you asked them. Encourage students to interview at least two people who are at least 10 years apart in age. If you’d like to do a deep dive into this as an example of survey research, be sure to read the methodology section for this survey (Minkin et al., 2024a).   References Minkin, R., Menasce Horowitz, J., & Aragão, C. (2024a, July 25). Methodology: The experience of U.S. adult who don’t have children. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/adults-without-children-methodology/ Minkin, R., Menasce Horowitz, J., & Aragão, C. (2024b, July 25). The experiences of U.S. adults who don’t have children. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-experiences-of-u-s-adults-who-dont-have-children/ Roser, M. (2024, March 12). Fertility rate. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate   ... View more

In doing some research on pain, I came across an open access journal article on an experiment that was testing the effectiveness of pain reprocessing therapy. Their control conditions were usual care and an open-label placebo (Ashar et al., 2022). An open-label placebo (aka non-deceptive placebo) is one where the study volunteers are told that they are being given a placebo. In that study, the placebo did confer some painkilling benefits, but the clear winner was pain reprocessing therapy. Yay! But what about this non-deceptive placebo business? Here's another open access article that used a non-deceptive placebo (Guevarra et al., 2024). This experiment was on reducing depression, anxiety, and stress that were COVID-related. The researchers used the non-deceptive placebo as the experimental condition. The control condition received no treatment, just an assessment. “We hypothesized that the non-deceptive placebo intervention would reduce COVID-related stress, overall stress, anxiety, and depression compared with the control group” (Guevarra et al., 2024, p. 3). Their study took place in Spring 2021 when many places were still under COVID lockdown when COVID-related stress was common. If you would like to give your students some experimental design practice either right after covering experiments in the research methods chapter or as an experimental design booster when you cover stress, give your students this hypothesis, and ask them to fill in a source of stress for students like themselves: “The non-deceptive placebo intervention would reduce [source of stress] stress, overall stress, anxiety, and depression compared with the control group.” The source of stress could be something like food insecurity, financial worries, or major exams. Really, anything students find stressful works. Ask students to work in small groups to design an experiment that would test their hypothesis. Students should identify the independent variable and its levels and the dependent variable. They should also give consideration to where researchers conducting such a study would find volunteers. After discussion has subsided, invite a volunteer from each group to share the experiment their group designed. For the COVID-stress study, researchers recruited participants on social media. Each participant was paid a total of $60 for completing all four sets of surveys (enrollment, baseline, midpoint, and endpoint). They only included adults who were experiencing COVID-related stress as measured by the COVID Stress Scale. Participants were randomly assigned to the control condition or to the non-deceptive placebo condition. Those in the non-deceptive placebo received information on what a non-deceptive placebo is and how effective they are. Since this study was conducted remotely, participants in this condition were sent placebos in the mail. The participants were instructed to take the pills for two weeks, one pill with breakfast and one pill with or after dinner. Where does one get placebos, you ask? Amazon. For this study, researchers used Zeebo’s blue and white capsules. Zeebo markets themselves as “the world’s leading placebo brand.” Their placebos are considered a dietary supplement. I suppose they have to be something, and they’re clearly not a drug. The directions on the Zeebo bottle: “For bothersome symptoms. Take as needed.” Disclaimer: “You may or may not respond to placebo. Do not use Zeebo to replace or delay medical treatment.” And it was only after typing Zeebo four times did I finally realize it’s “placebo” without the “pla.” They’re not cheap at $24.45 for 45 capsules ($22.45 if you do ‘subscribe and save’). You can get a 30-count placebo pill made by a brand called Generic for $14.95. In short, expect to pay about 50 cents for each pill. Although the more expensive the placebo, the more effective it is (Díaz-Lago et al., 2023). Given that, I’d encourage Zeebo to add a more expensive placebo to their product line: Zeebo Extra Strength.   The non-deceptive placebos were effective in reducing COVID stress, overall stress, anxiety, and depression. The control group also experienced decreases in all four measures, but the decreases for the participants in the non-deceptive placebo were much greater (Guevarra et al., 2024). If you’d like to read more about non-deceptive placebos, here’s an open access review and meta-analysis from the journal Nature in 2023 (Spille et al., 2023).     References Ashar, Y. K., Gordon, A., Schubiner, H., Uipi, C., Knight, K., Anderson, Z., Carlisle, J., Polisky, L., Geuter, S., Flood, T. F., Kragel, P. A., Dimidjian, S., Lumley, M. A., & Wager, T. D. (2022). Effect of pain reprocessing therapy vs placebo and usual care for patients with chronic back pain: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry, 79(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.2669 Díaz-Lago, M., Blanco, F., & Matute, H. (2023). Expensive seems better: The price of a non-effective drug modulates its perceived efficacy. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8(1), 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00463-4 Guevarra, D. A., Webster, C. T., Moros, J. N., Kross, E., & Moser, J. S. (2024). Remotely administered non‐deceptive placebos reduce COVID‐related stress, anxiety, and depression. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, aphw.12583. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12583 Spille, L., Fendel, J. C., Seuling, P. D., Göritz, A. S., & Schmidt, S. (2023). Open-label placebos—A systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental studies with non-clinical samples. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 3640. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30362-z     ... View more

Here’s some experimental design practice for your Intro Psych students. This would work right after covering experiments in the research methods chapter or as an experimental design booster in the social psych chapter. Ask students to read this Science Daily summary of an experiment on grocery purchases (Shin et al., 2024), and then work in small groups to answer the following questions. The article does not explicitly say what the research hypothesis was. However, based on the information given, what do you believe their primary research hypothesis was? What was the independent variable? Identify each level of the independent variable. (The experiment used a within-participants design, meaning each participant experienced each level of the independent variable.) What was the primary dependent variable? Briefly summarize the results. This study was conducted in a virtual grocery store using virtual money. Can we assume researchers would see similar results in a real grocery store where consumers were using their own money? Why or why not? Using the same independent variable and dependent variable, describe how this study could be conducted in the field under real-life conditions. The original research article (Shin et al., 2024) includes photos of the online store, how the nutritional score was displayed for each item, and how the individual’s nutritional score was displayed. If time allows, share with your students that the participants were recruited from Facebook and Instagram, were all in Singapore, were 21 years of age and older, and were the primary shopper in their household. How might each of these factors influence the results? One last note about the within-participants design. The researchers noted this design as a study limitation in their research article (Shin et al., 2024). They acknowledged that there seemed to be carryover when participants saw nutritional labeling first followed by the control condition. Since the conditions were counterbalanced, the researchers also compared participants just based on the first store they saw. They still saw the effect of peer influence.     Reference Shin, S., Gandhi, M., Puri, J., & Finkelstein, E. (2024). Influencing the nutritional quality of grocery purchases: A randomized trial to evaluate the impact of a social norm-based behavioral intervention with and without a loss-framed financial incentive. Food Policy, 125, 102646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102646   ... View more

I’m a fan of infusing research methods throughout the Intro Psych course. We introduce psychology’s most common research methods early in the course, but we should revisit them every now and again in the context of psychology’s content to help make them stick. Think spacing effect.   First, a note on getting journal articles. For college and university faculty, accessing journal articles through their library’s databases is usually a pretty easy process. If your library doesn’t have it, you can request it through interlibrary loan (ILL). For high school teachers, getting research articles can be challenging. Some journals will make some articles freely available. Some authors make their articles freely available to download via ResearchGate. You will need a ResearchGate account, but it is free to join. Other authors—or the same authors, but different journal articles—will give you the option to contact them via ResearchGate for a copy of their article. If the author isn’t on ResearchGate, email them directly to ask for a copy of their article. Provide a full citation. Researchers may publish several articles on the same topic in the same year. Wherever you find an abstract, you can often find the email address of the lead author. If you can’t find the email address, you can usually find their affiliation. An Internet search of their name and affiliation will usually yield a page at their institution that includes an email address. Do not ever feel shy about contacting researchers to request a pdf of an article or to ask questions about their research. The vast majority of researchers, frankly, are thrilled to learn that someone is interested in their research. I’m not kidding. Interlibrary loan (ILL) may be another option for you. Ask your public library librarians if they do ILL for journal articles. Also, don’t be afraid to ask your friends who are college or university faculty. Just be sure to rotate your requests through your network. You don’t want to wear out your welcome with one person with a single request for a dozen articles! Finally, be aware that some of the classic case studies discussed in Intro Psych textbooks are not good examples, such as Phineas Gage. “Recent historical work, however, suggests that much of the canonical Gage story is hogwash, a mélange of scientific prejudice, artistic license, and outright fabrication,” writes one of my favorite science writers, Sam Kean (Kean, 2014). (If you have not yet read Kean’s book The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, I highly recommend it. Kean dives into each major area of the brain, discussing both its history and current research.) Below are some case study examples, organized by pillar (Gurung et al., 2016). As with all research articles, you don’t have to understand every word to get the point. That’s probably a message worth communicating to our students. Researchers write journal articles for other researchers who are doing research in their same area. They are not writing for a general audience. Even researchers who work in other areas of the field may not grasp every word. And that’s okay! If you can get enough of the big picture to share the research with students—even if it’s in broad strokes—you are good to go. Here's an example of where I needed help with the big picture. I wrote a blog post recently on how the mapping of the motor cortex that we’ve taught for decades is wrong (Frantz, 2024). It was based on fMRI findings researchers published in the journal Nature (Gordon et al., 2023); the article is freely available. The lead author, Evan M. Gordon, is a radiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine. I am absolutely certain radiologists would understand just about every word in that article. I, however, am not a radiologist. I’m not even a biopsychologist; my background is in social psychology. With a rudimentary understanding of biology, however, I could grasp most of the article, but there were places where I struggled enough that I could not quite see the big picture. So, I did the only reasonable thing. I emailed Gordon. He replied very quickly—and graciously. It took an exchange of just a few emails for me to get it. The result was that blog post.   Biological Stevens, J. A., Cole, W. G., & Vishton, P. M. (2012). Using touch or imagined touch to compensate for loss of proprioception: A case study. Neurocase, 18(1), 66–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/13554794.2011.556124. [Download full text via ResearchGate.] Feinstein, J. S., Adolphs, R., Damasio, A., & Tranel, D. (2011). The human amygdala and the induction and experience of fear. Current Biology, 21(1), 34–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.042. [Full text available.] Tuckute, G., Paunov, A., Kean, H., Small, H., Mineroff, Z., Blank, I., & Fedorenko, E. (2022). Frontal language areas do not emerge in the absence of temporal language areas: A case study of an individual born without a left temporal lobe. Neuropsychologia, 169, 108184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108184. [Download full text via ResearchGate.]   Cognitive Linden, M. V. (1996). Semantic memory and amnesia: A case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13(3), 391–414. https://doi.org/10.1080/026432996381953. [Download full text via ResearchGate.] Gould, C., Froese, T., Barrett, A. B., Ward, J., & Seth, A. K. (2014). An extended case study on the phenomenology of sequence-space synesthesia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00433 [Download full text.]     Developmental Kocabaş-Gedik, P., & Ortaçtepe Hart, D. (2021). “It’s not like that at all”: A poststructuralist case study on language teacher identity and emotional labor. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 20(2), 103–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2020.1726756 [Request full text from the authors via ResearchGate.] Nelis, P., Pedaste, M., & Šuman, C. (2023). Applicability of the model of inclusive education in early childhood education: A case study. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1120735. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1120735 [Download full text.]     Social & Personality Herrick, S. S. C., Rocchi, M. A., & Couture, A. L. (2020). A case study exploring the experiences of a transgender athlete in synchronized skating, a subdiscipline of figure skating. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 44(5), 421–449. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723520919816. [Request full text from the authors via ResearchGate.]   Ferguson, D., & Martin-Dunlop, C. (2021). Uncovering stories of resilience among successful African American women in STEM. Cultural Studies of Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-020-10006-8. [Request full text from the authors via ResearchGate.] Leporelli, E., & Santi, G. (2019). From psychology of sustainability to sustainability of urban spaces: Promoting a primary prevention approach for well-being in the healthy city designing. A waterfront case study in Livorno. Sustainability, 11(3), 760. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030760. [Download full text via ResearchGate.] Hu, X., Sidhu, G. K., & Lu, X. (2022). Exploring positive psychology factors in the quality of English as a foreign language classroom life: A case study. Environment-Behaviour Proceedings Journal, 7(22), 17–22. https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v7i22.4153. [Download full text via ResearchGate.]   Mental & Physical Health Black, Z. A., & McCarthy, P. (2020). A case study of a trainee sport psychologist adopting a person-centred approach with a professional basketball player. Sport & Exercise Psychology Review, 16(2), 74–83. https://doi.org/10.53841/bpssepr.2020.16.2.74. [Author’s accepted manuscript.] Borg, M. B. (2002). The Avalon Gardens Men’s Association: A Community health psychology case study. Journal of Health Psychology, 7(3), 345–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105302007003226. [Request full text from the author via ResearchGate.] Blackwell, S. E., & Holmes, E. A. (2017). Brightening the day with flashes of positive mental imagery: A case study of an individual with depression. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 73(5), 579–589. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22455. [Download full text.]     References Frantz, S. (2024, July 20). The classic motor cortex map is wrong. Macmillan and BFW Teaching Community. https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/psychology-blog/the-classic-motor-cortex-map-is-wrong/ba-p/21746 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, 617(7960), 351–359. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05964-2 Gurung, R. A. R., Hackathorn, J., Enns, C., Frantz, S., Cacioppo, J. T., Loop, T., & Freeman, J. E. (2016). Strengthening Introductory Psychology: A new model for teaching the introductory course. American Psychologist, 71(2), 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0040012 Kean, S. (2014, May 7). Phineas Gage, neuroscience’s most famous patient. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/phineas-gage-neuroscience-case-true-story-of-famous-frontal-lobe-patient-is-better-than-textbook-accounts.html ... View more

“’You never know if your perception is a normal perception or if it’s a particular perception that differs from other ones,’ says Fabien Hauw, a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist” (Makowski, 2024a). Many years ago, after I finished a short lecture on synesthesia in Intro Psych, one of my students raised her hand. She said, “I have synesthesia.” She went on to say that she didn’t know it was an unusual thing until a few months earlier when she was standing with a group of friends, and one was talking about this peculiar thing he had just learned about in his (my) Intro Psych course. As he explained that some people see colors when they hear sounds, my current student said, “Doesn’t everyone experience that.” All eyes turned her. No, no, they don’t. Some number of terms later, I shared with students that sometimes when it’s quiet—most commonly before falling asleep—a sudden noise results in a flash of a light pattern, such as a bright hashtag/pound sign or checkerboard. My (now laughable) mistake was that I assumed this was an experience everyone had. The looks on my students’ faces made it clear that it is not. Interestingly (or not), I haven’t had this experience in at least five years—neither the flash of light nor those looks on my students’ faces. With that as my mental backdrop, I read with great interest an article in the July/August 2024 issue of Scientific American about ticker tape synesthesia, aka ticker taping (Makowski, 2024b). The article is available freely online (Makowski, 2024a). It’s especially interesting because the writer—a copy editor for Scientific American—has ticker tape synesthesia. The name ticker tape synesthesia is unfortunate, because to explain what this is to our students we first have explain what a ticker tape is. The Wikipedia article on ticker tape will get your students (and you?) up to speed quickly. We already have to explain what a cocktail party is when describing the cocktail party effect, so we’re used to this sort of problem. Sir Francis Galton described ticker tape synesthesia in 1883. While he didn’t call it that, he did reference the telegraph technology that made ticker tapes possible: Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered; they attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the words, and they read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic instruments. The experiences differ in detail as to size and kind of type, colour of paper, and so forth, but are always the same in the same person (Galton, 1907, p. 67). In short, ticker tape synesthesia is personal captioning—words that are heard become words that are seen. As a person with this form of synesthesia hears someone speaking—including themselves (Hauw et al., 2023), their brain automatically generates text. Some people describe the text as scrolling across their mind’s eye, like a ticker tape. Others describe it as a few words appearing and then being replaced with the next set of words. Others describe the text as coming out of the mouth of the person who is speaking. What if the person doesn’t know how to spell the word? The word may appear as fuzzy text. What if two people are speaking? There are two streams of text in different locations (Makowski, 2024b). Some people with ticker tape synesthesia report that the written words may look different depending on context. For example, if the speech they are hearing is particularly emotional, the words may take on a different color, may tremble, or may be larger. Some report that louder voices result in larger words. What about words that are sung? The words may be less visible or may “undulate according to the melody” (Hauw et al., 2023, p. 171). And what about numbers? They typically appear as Arabic numerals rather than written out as words (Hauw et al., 2023). I wonder if someone who is well-versed in APA-style would see numbers one through nine as spelled out rather than as Arabic numerals. And if they would apply the exceptions, such as “6 cm.”   Research into the underlying brain mechanisms of ticker tape synesthesia is just getting started, but as you might imagine initial results show increased activity between the areas of the brain associated with seeing written words and the areas associated with processing speech (Hauw et al., 2024). Even though ticker tape synesthesia is currently thought to be rare, I suspect that the more people hear about it, the more people will say, “I experience that. Doesn’t everybody?”     References Galton, F. (1907). Inquiries into human faculty (2nd ed.). https://galton.org/books/human-faculty/text/galton-1883-human-faculty-v4.pdf Hauw, F., Béranger, B., & Cohen, L. (2024). Subtitled speech: The neural mechanisms of ticker-tape synaesthesia. Brain, 147(7), 2530–2541. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awae114 Hauw, F., El Soudany, M., & Cohen, L. (2023). Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia. Cortex, 160, 167–179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005 Makowski, E. (2024a, July 1). My synesthesia transforms speech into text I ‘see’ in my head. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/my-synesthesia-transforms-speech-into-text-i-see-in-my-head/ Makowski, E. (2024b, August). Speech transforms into text I “see.” Scientific American, 331(1), 90–92.   ... View more

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