After covering operant conditioning, ask your students to consider how government agencies could encourage more public transit use by using reinforcement. Give students a couple minutes to think about this on their own, then ask students to share their ideas in small groups. Next, ask each group to develop a plan where operant conditioning could be used to encourage the use of public transit. What is the operant (the behavior being targeted)? What will be used as the reinforcement? Will it be positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement? What schedule of reinforcement would you recommend? Variable ratio, variable interval, fixed ratio, or fixed interval? Once the group discussion has died down, ask each group to share their plan, ensuring that they have correctly identified the type and schedule of reinforcement. Wrap up the discussion by sharing that Miami has implemented such a program. Using an app called Velocia, Miami residents can track how they get around: walking, biking, carpooling, riding the bus/train (“Miami launches app that rewards citizens for ditching their cars at home,” 2019). The more you don’t drive solo, the more “Velos” points you earn. Each method is worth a different number of Velos points. For example, walking 5 miles in a week earns you 300 Velos. Those points can be redeemed for public transportation discounts. For example, for 450 Velos you can rent a CitiBike for 30 minutes. Even if you are not in Miami, you can download the Velocia app from Google Play or the App Store to see how it works. An article on the Mass Transit Magazine website provides a nice summary of some transit rewards programs that have been implemented around the world (Comfort, 2019).   References Comfort, P. (2019). Loyalty programs and gamification in public transit. Retrieved January 8, 2020, from http://masstransitmag.com/technology/passenger-info/article/13000010/loyalty-programs-and-gamification-in-public-transit Miami launches app that rewards citizens for ditching their cars at home. (2019). Retrieved January 8, 2020, from https://www.optimistdaily.com/2019/12/miami-launches-app-that-rewards-citizens-for-ditching-their-cars-at-home ... View more

Are you getting tired of your classical conditioning examples? Here are some new ones from FailBlog. You won’t be surprised to see that while the FailBlog post is called “29 people share the Pavlovian (reflex) responses they’ve developed,” not all of these are actually examples of classical conditioning. The key is that the response has to be involuntary. In several of these, the behavior is voluntary. For example, #21: “TV commercial, look at phone.” Since looking at phone is a voluntary behavior, this is operant conditioning where the TV commercial is a discriminative stimulus. There is negative reinforcement (removing the commercial) and positive reinforcement (something more interesting than a commercial on the phone). And #23 is a reference to The Office “mouth tastes bad” scene – which is still not an example of classical conditioning. (What’s the involuntary response? Now, if he salivated to the ding…) After covering both classical and operant conditioning, if your students are up for the challenge, ask them to work in pairs or small groups to identify the examples that are classical conditioning and the ones that are not. Read through all 29 of these before giving them to your students. The language and content of some may not be appropriate for your student population. Make sure you are comfortable explaining the classical conditioning behind the classical conditioning examples and explaining why the other are not examples of classical conditioning. Use only the ones you want. After the groups have had time to do their identifications, go through each example in turn. “Number 1: classical conditioning, which groups say yes?” You can do a show of hands, clickers, or some other polling method. Spend time discussing the ones that are not classical conditioning that students thought were. If time allows, or as a take-home assignment, assign each student group one or more of the classical conditioning examples. Their task is to identify the unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response in each of their assigned examples. ... View more

Cartoonists have pretty good insight into the workings of the human mind. How many of them took Intro Psych? These comics will jazz up your next research methods, cognition, personality, learning, and social psych lectures. Dilbert's boss does not have an operational definition of "employee engagement," and, thus, no way to measure it. Also, on the ethics side, no, it's not okay to make up data. Lio, having no trouble with functional fixedness, repurposes an object into a sled. Lio’s friends aren’t typical. His ingroups include monsters, aliens, and death himself. When everyone else sees those creatures as part of a threatening outgroup, to Lio, they are just his friends. Also, you don’t have to read through too many strips to see Lio’s strong internal locus of control. Rat in Pearls Before Swine can be counted on for a solid outgroup homogeneity bias. Jeremy’s mom in Zits provides a nice example of positive punishment. No, I don’t think he’ll forget his textbook at home again. Or, perhaps more likely, if he does forget it at home, he won’t ask his mom to bring it to school. After all, punishment makes us better at avoiding the punishment. Caulfield, the boy in Frazz, wonders if Santa has fallen victim to the just-world phenomenon. Pig in Pearls Before Swine, whose sweetness and innocence may be unparalleled in the comics universe, does not fall for the fundamental attribution error. Looking for more example from the comics? Here are some previous comic-focused blog posts: Spotlight effect Door-in-the-Face, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning Change blindness, priming, and positive reinforcement ... View more

If you want an entire country, state, province, territory, or city to stop ingesting certain consumables, you tax them. “Sin taxes” are applied to things like alcohol and cigarettes. The goal is to make these goods so expensive to purchase, people will stop purchasing them. Or, for those who continue to consume them, the tax they pay can go toward the public health coffers. The U.S. federal government, for example, has a tax of about $1.01 on each pack of cigarettes (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, 2017). Each U.S. state/territory can add their own tax on top of that. The national average is $1.79/pack with a low of $.17 (Missouri) and a high of $5.10 (Puerto Rico) (Boonn, 2018). Finally, cities can add their own taxes. New York City, for example, adds a $1.50 tax. If you want to buy a pack of cigarettes in New York City, you’re tax is $1.01 (federal) plus $4.35 (state) plus $1.50 (city) for a total of $6.86 (Mathias, 2017). And, then, of course, is the cost of the cigarettes themselves. Do sin taxes work? Does this added cost reduce consumption of tobacco? Using a list of tobacco taxes in the U.S. (Boonn, 2018) and a list of smoking rates in the U.S. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018), I ran the correlation: -.42. The higher the tax, the lower the smoking rates. Of course, correlation does not mean causation. Do higher taxes cause people to smoke less? Or is it the other way around? Are people in states where people smoke less more likely to vote for higher taxes on cigarettes? Or is there some third variable(s) that affect both the cigarette tax and the smoking rate? It doesn’t answer the question of causation, but the World Health Organization reported on interesting longitudinal data from South Africa (WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, 2008). When the tax was high, cigarette purchasing was low. From the mid-1980s through the late 1990s, South Africa reduced the tax, and gradually the cigarette purchasing rates climbed. In the late 1990s when they started raising the tax again, cigarette purchasing rates declined again. If “sin taxes” cause us to reduce our purchasing of “sin” products, then operant conditioning offers an explanation why. If a product costs a lot of money to purchase, we’ll be less likely to purchase it – especially if we are not financially well-off. Punishment is defined as anything that reduces a behavior. High prices are, well, punitive. Or at least that’s the idea. For a six tax to be punitive, the amount of additional tax has to be enough for us to actually reduce the behavior, i.e. stop purchasing the product. What that amount is for you may be different than what it is for me. For a 1-pack-a-day smoker in New York City, they’re paying $6.86 in tax alone for that pack of cigarettes. If they make $14.00 an hour, one half hour of work goes toward that cigarette tax. Every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if that smoker quite smoking, or at least reduced how much they smoke. For a different 1-pack-a-day smoker who makes $150 an hour, that $6.86 in tax doesn’t hurt so much. They can make that amount of money in less than 3 minutes. Every day. This is the discussion in Seattle right now around a year-old sugary drink tax. In the city, each sugary drink is assessed a $.0175 per ounce tax. That 16 ounce Coke you are buying with your lunch is now $0.28 more. “The city predicted the tax would cut soda consumption by 40 percent. But through the first nine months, the tax is  generating revenues  at a rate 52 percent higher than predicted — suggesting it’s possible it may be having no effect on Seattleites’ soda appetites whatsoever.” One possibility is that most of the city residents are making enough money that that $0.28 isn’t even felt (Westneat, 2018).  Like the rest of the city, that $0.28 is not going to stand between me and my Coke.* Here’s a quick classroom demonstration. Ask students to think about their favorite beverage. How much more would their drink have to cost for them to reduce how much they buy? Start at $0.25 and raise it by $0.10, then another $0.10, and so on. Ask students to raise their hands when the additional cost hits the point when they buy less of it and to keep their hands up until everyone has their hands in the air (or use clickers – “vote A when we hit your no-go tax.”) Reiterate that punishment is only punishment if it reduces the behavior. What that punishment point is differs by person. The other thing that punishment does is make us good at avoiding punishment. You shouldn’t be surprised to hear that there is a thriving black market for cigarettes in New York City. Of these smuggled packs of cigarettes, 30.9% have no state stamp; 44.7% carry a Virginia stamp where the state tax is $0.30 per pack, well-below the New York State/New York City combined tax of $5.85 (Mathias, 2017). If the tax is too high, people will find ways to not pay it. Conclude this part of your lecture by emphasizing the importance of understanding the principles of operant conditioning. From their pets to their dating partners/spouses to their children to the population of a city, state/province/territory, or country, operant conditioning is at work.   *Actually, I haven’t had a full-sugar Coke in years, but if they similarly taxed Diet Coke or Coke Zero, I’d have no problem paying that $0.28. Don’t tell the Seattle City Council.   References Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. (2017). Federal excise tax increase and related provisions. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.ttb.gov/main_pages/schip-summary.shtml Boonn, A. (2018). State cigarette excise tax rates and rankings. Washington, D.C. Retrieved from https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0097.pdf Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). Map of cigarette use among adults. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.cdc.gov/statesystem/cigaretteuseadult.html Mathias, C. (2017). Inside New York City’s dangerous, multimillion-dollar cigarette black market. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/cigarette-smuggling-new-york-_n_5041823.html Westneat, D. (2018). The city’s new soda tax is usurious — and also too low. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/story-of-seattle-the-citys-new-soda-tax-is-usurious-and-also-too-low/ WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic. (2008). Geneva, Switzerland. ... View more

Crows are smart. Never underestimate a crow. Comparative psychology is “the study of nonhuman animal behavior with the dual objective of understanding the behavior for its own sake and furthering the understanding of human behavior” (American Psychological Association, n.d.). The better that we understand how crows behave, think, communicate, and solve problems, the better we will understand both crows and ourselves. I have a short written assignment that my Intro Psych students do. After its completion, students have a greater appreciation for the crows around them. John Marzluff, a University of Washington zoologist, has made studying crows his life’s work. In his 22-minute TEDx talk, Marzluff shares what he thinks everyone should know about crows. I assign this during the thinking chapter in Intro Psych, after we’ve covered neuroscience and learning. It makes for a nice review of previously covered content. Here are the questions I ask my students to address: What three factors does Marzluff cite for the crow's problem-solving ability? Explain how each contributes to problem-solving skills. How do the brain areas of crows map onto the human brain? What do those brain areas do and why are they important? How do their brains differ from those of humans? Give an example from his talk of how the birds' behavior changed due to positive reinforcement. Give an example from his talk of how the birds' behavior changed due to observational learning. What is your reaction to this video?      Video Link : 2348   Reference American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Comparative psychology. Retrieved December 26, 2018, from https://dictionary.apa.org/comparative-psychology ... View more

At the end of each term, I ask my Intro Psych students for their top ten list of important concepts they learned in the course. Last fall, interestingly, none of my students put parenting styles in their top ten lists. This term, a quarter of my students did. The only difference between those classes is that this term I asked my students to read an Atlantic article on distracted parenting (Christakis, 2018). In our coverage of development I asked students, after they had read the article, whether they thought this is a new “parenting style” or if it fits one of the existing four: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, or neglectful. (Most students called it neglectful, but many weren’t quite ready to go all the way there and called it a “new branch” or a “type” of neglectful parenting.) The article makes for an excellent discussion starter for small groups after you’ve covered parenting styles in class. The discussion of the impact distracted parenting has on children will be meaningful to students since you would have just covered child development. Later when you cover operant conditioning – if you haven’t already done so – you can refer back to this section of the article. Young children will do a lot to get a distracted adult’s attention, and if we don’t change our behavior, they will attempt to do it for us; we can expect to see a lot more tantrums as today’s toddlers age into school. But eventually, children may give up (Christakis, 2018) If the adult drops the phone and attends to the child’s tantrum, the child’s tantrum behavior has been positively reinforced by getting attention, and the adult’s dropping-the-phone behavior has been negatively reinforced by stopping the tantrum. If the adult’s phone is more attention-grabbing than the child’s tantrum, then the adult will ignore the child. The result? Extinction. The child will no longer throw tantrums – or, perhaps, any other behavior that is a plea for adult attention. The author of the article cites two research studies. If you’d like to challenge your students’ research skills, ask them to find those studies. The study that took place in Philadelphia is a pretty easy find because the article’s author gives us the names of the researchers. The Boston research article is a little more challenging because we don’t have clues to the citation. I don’t want to give the reference here because it would make it too easy for your Googling students to find. I can give you a hint, however: it was published in 2014 in a highly-respected peer-reviewed journal. And, if you email me ( sfrantz@highline.edu ), I would be happy to send you either or both references – as long as I don’t think you’re a student. If you’d like to extend this activity, ask students to assess how well the article’s author did at describing those studies. Did the author hit the important high points? Was there other information in the research articles that would be important for a reader of The Atlantic to know? Reference Christakis, E. (2018). The dangers of distracted parenting. Retrieved August 29, 2018, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/the-dangers-of-distracted-parenting/561752/ ... View more

A young man, raising funds for his high school football team, knocked on the door of a Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) researcher. And not just any CTE researcher: a CTE researcher who looks specifically at teenage brains. The two sat down, and the young man learned about how concussions are not necessary to trigger CTE; repeated shots to the head will do it. The young man listened, and, in fact, chose CTE as his research project in English. When I read this NPR story, I was hoping for a better ending. And what did the young man decide about playing football? He’s still going to play. “This is something I love. I dedicate myself to [this]. This makes me healthier physically, mentally. I'm doing what I love, making friends, there's a lot of great experiences that I'm having from this.” He did decide, however, to cut back on boxing, so that’s something. When I read this article I was immediately struck by the power of immediate reinforcement over the potential of bad things happening at some unknown time in the distant future. [As an operant conditioning bonus, in the very first paragraph, the student gives us a great example of discriminative stimuli. “He’d look for lights on and listen for kids’ voices.” Those stimuli signaled a greater likelihood of receiving a donation.] But the reinforcement aside, I wondered about the social psychology of playing an intense team sport, like football. The student said, “I’m doing what I love, making friends, there’s a lot of great experiences that I’m having from this.” In Sebastian Junger’s book, War, the author writes about his experience spending 15 months with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan. Once, when out on patrol, the platoon got into a firefight along a road, taking cover behind a rock wall. Afterwards, Junger asked one of the soldiers if he was scared. He said he was. Junger asked why he didn’t run. He said he stayed because the soldier on his left stayed and the soldier on his right stayed.   While still considering the power of groups, my news feed produced a fascinating article on identity fusion. Research “suggest[s] that extreme self-sacrifice is motivated by 'identity fusion', a visceral sense of oneness with the group resulting from intense collective experiences (e.g. painful rituals or the horrors of frontline combat) or from perceptions of shared biology.” Once a person fuses their identity with the group, all it takes is a threat to the group to lead the person to self-sacrifice. And those groups need to be “local” groups, like a team or a platoon. “Extended fusion” to bigger groups like one’s country can happen, but it looks like it can only happen after “local fusion.” Those who have experienced identity fusion with a local group describe the others in the group as family. It’s common to hear teammates and platoon-mates describe each other as brothers (Whitehouse, 2018). What sacrifices are you willing to make for your family?   References Whitehouse, H. (2018). Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences . https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18000249 ... View more

I recently finished Sam Kean’s (2012),  The Violinist’s Thumb the history, the present, and the future of DNA research. Kean writes, “Genes don’t deal in certainties; they deal in probabilities.” I love that – and I’m using it the first day of Intro Psych next term: “Psychology doesn’t deal in certainties; it deals in probabilities.” I already talk about correlations as probabilities. The stronger the correlation, the higher the probability that if you know one variable, you can predict the other variable. In the learning chapter, it’s not unusual for a student to say, “I was spanked, and I turned out okay.” Now I can repeat, “psychology doesn’t deal in certainties; it deals in probabilities.” When children are spanked, it increases the probability of future behavioral problems (Gershoff, Sattler, & Ansari, 2017). It is not a certainty. Whenever aggression comes up as a topic, a student will say, “I play first-person-shooter games, and I’ve never killed anybody.” Again, “psychology doesn’t deal in certainties; it deals in probabilities.” Playing violent video games increases the chances of being aggressive. Watching violent movies increases the chances of being aggressive. Listening to violent-themed music increases the chances of being aggressive. (List is not exhaustive.) The more of those factors that are present, the greater the probability of behaving aggressively (Anderson, C, Berkowitz, L, Donnerstein, E, Huesmann, L, Johnson, J, Linz, D, Malamuth, N, & Wartella, 2003). It is not a certainty. A student says, “I was deprived of oxygen when I was being born, and I haven’t developed schizophrenia” (McNeil, Cantor-Graae, & Ismail, 2000). (Okay, I have never had a student say this, but I wanted one more example.) Being deprived of oxygen at birth increases the probability of developing schizophrenia. It is not a certainty. Any time a student reports an experience that does not match what most in a research study experienced, I can say “Like genetics, psychology doesn’t deal in certainties; it deals in probabilities.”   References Anderson, C, Berkowitz, L, Donnerstein, E, Huesmann, L, Johnson, J, Linz, D, Malamuth, N, & Wartella, E. (2003). The influence of media violence on youth: . Psychological Science In The Public Interest (Wiley-Blackwell), 4(3), 81–110. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2003.pspi_1433.x Gershoff, E. T., Sattler, K. M. P., & Ansari, A. (2017). Strengthening Causal Estimates for Links Between Spanking and Children’s Externalizing Behavior Problems. Psychological Science, 95679761772981. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617729816 Kean, S. (2012). The Violinist’s Thumb. New York City: Little, Brown, and Company. McNeil, T. F., Cantor-Graae, E., & Ismail, B. (2000). Obstetric complications and congenital malformation in schizophrenia. In Brain Research Reviews (Vol. 31, pp. 166–178). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(99)00034-X ... View more

One of the great joys of attending conferences – in this case, the American Psychological Association convention – is the conversations with both new and old friends. This morning I had breakfast with Linda Woolf (Webster University; an old friend). She posed an interesting question, and before my first full cup of coffee, it was a little unfair. She noted that in our professional circles we frequently talk about psychology books we think psychology majors should read. She wondered what non-psychology books I’d recommend. That’s both an easy and a difficult question. It’s easy to find book that contain psychology, but difficult in deciding of all the books out there, what books I’d recommend. The two that came pretty quickly to mind were: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel Brown. About the University of Washington men’s crew who rowed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the book gives us a healthy does of prejudice and perseverance. The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede. On 9/11/2001 when the U.S. airspace closed, planes flying west across the Atlantic had to land in Canada. Thirty-eight of them landed in Gander, Newfoundland. Almost 7,000 visitors literally dropped into a town of 9,000 for five days. DeFede restores our faith in humanity with story after story of altruism. The musical Come From Away expands on those stories including coverage of prejudice, stress and coping, and ingroups/outgroups. (Honestly, the book may do the same, but it’s been years since I’ve read it.) After having had my full dose of coffee and a few more hours to reflect – and a chance to review my Goodreads books, here are some more non-psychology books recommended for psychology majors. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah Noah grew up in South African as “colored,” the South African term for half white/half black. His experience gets wrapped up in ingroups/outgroups, both sorting out what that means for him and being on the receiving end of other people’s assumptions about his group membership. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson Starting with World War I, African Americans started in earnest to move out of the south to points west and north. Spotlighting three people who left different places at different times for different locales, Wilkerson helps her readers understand the prejudice and discrimination that drove African Americans from the south to the different-looking prejudice and discrimination of their new homes. Sally Ride by Lynn Sherr Becoming the first U.S. woman in space had its challenges. More prejudice, discrimination, and perseverance in this book. When asked at a crew press conference in 1982 “Dr. Ride, apart from the obvious differences, how do you assess the differences in men and women astronauts?” Dr. Ride replied, “Aside from the obvious differences, I don’t think there are any.” Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery Emma Gatewood in 1955 and at the age of 67 decided to hike the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. Alone. This one will make students rethink their assumptions about gender and age. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman Paul Erdös (pronounced air-dish) was a mathematical genius. But his biography is less about intelligence than it is about… well, it’s tough to describe. Being comfortable in your own skin, may be a good descriptor. Erdös was unapologetically Erdös. He couch-surfed from the home of one mathematician to another. His hosts didn’t know when he was coming until he appeared on their doorsteps, and they didn’t know when he was leaving until he left. He would ask strangers to tie his shoes. He offered cash to grad students to solve mathematical problems. The more difficult the problem, the greater the cash award. And Erdös published prolifically. Mathematicians have an Erdös number. If you published a paper with Erdös, your number is one. If you published with someone who published a paper with Erdös, your number is two. And so on. Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll [This book may not technically meet the requirements of the category given the amount of psychology in it.] This book contains everything you wanted to know about slot machines and then some. If you’re teaching that pushing buttons on a slot machine is an example of positive reinforcement, you’re wrong for a healthy chunk of slot machine users. Negative reinforcement would be a better characterization. Regular users of slot machines play not to win but play to enter the zone where they don’t have to think about problems at work, with their spouse, or with their kids. Winning just means being able to not think even longer. I managed to give you a list that is all nonfiction. Please share your recommendations in the comments – and I’d love to see some fiction in the list! ... View more

Originally posted on Quartz on July 2, 2017. I'm often asked how I was able to go from inactive academic to participating in invitation-only ultramarathons.  While it's no small feat, the three components of self-control--standards, monitoring, and strength--fortified my self-discipline. With those factors, and the additional and necessary support from my close relationships, practicing self-control ensured my success and gave me the opportunity to grow.  Read more about my running journey the factors of self control here.  ... View more

Here’s an interesting example of classical conditioning being applied to help solve a serious problem. The Military Suicide Research Consortium at Florida State University received a Department of Defense grant to find ways to prevent suicides by military members (Joiner, 2017). One avenue of research looked at ways of strengthening marriages, reasoning that those with stronger relationships are less likely to take their own lives (Improving marriages…, n.d.). Military marriages face a number of challenges, including lengthy deployments. While many factors influence decisions to divorce, spending months away from one’s partner is a likely contributing culprit. “[S]erving lengthy deployments increases the risk of divorce and that the longer the deployment, the greater the risk of divorce” (Improving marriages…, n.d.). Female military service members are almost three times as likely to divorce as their male counterparts. In 2016, for example, 7.7% of female Marines divorced compared to 2.8% of male Marines. Overall, 3.1% of military personnel divorced in 2016 (Bushatz, 2017).    Let’s make a quick digression to talk about divorce rates. “The military divorce rate is calculated by comparing the number of troops listed as married in the Pentagon's personnel system at the beginning of the fiscal year with the number who report divorces over the year” (Bushatz, 2017). These numbers cannot be compared to national data since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calculates divorce differently. Forty-five state health departments send the number of divorces in their states to the CDC. Because researchers at the CDC don’t know how many marriages were in each of those states to begin with, they can’t calculate a percentage of divorces like the military can. Instead, because the CDC researchers know the population of those 45 states, they can calculate a divorce rate per 1,000 people. In 2015, for example, those 45 reporting states had a combined population of 258,518,265. The number of divorces that year in those 45 states? 800,909. That works out to a divorce rate of 3.1 per 1,000 people (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017). Now, back to helping marriages succeed. Is there a low-cost way to strengthen relationships even when the marriage partners are separated by thousands of miles for months at a time? James McNulty, Michael Olson, and colleagues (2017) thought that classical conditioning could work. Couples, 144 of them, were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. Every three days for a total of 13 sessions, participants experienced 225 trials where images or words flashed on a computer screen either singly or paired. Participants were to hit the spacebar when something related to relationships appeared, such as a wedding cake. Embedded within those 225 trials were 25 trials where the participant’s partner’s photo was paired with another photo. Those in the experimental condition always saw the partner’s photo paired with positive stimuli, such as photos of puppies. Those in the control condition always saw the partner’s photo paired with neutral stimuli, such as photos of buttons.   Every two weeks from the start of the conditioning trials to two weeks post conditioning, participants completed a series of dependent measures. A priming task timed how quickly participants associated positive words with their partners. And researchers, well, just asked participants how they felt about their marriages. On the priming task, those in the experimental condition reacted faster when positive words were associated with their partner than those in the control condition. And the faster those reaction times, the more likely the participant was to say they were happy in their marriages.   Classical conditioning in the experimental condition                                 positive photos (UCS) --> positive feelings (UCR) partner photos --> positive photos (UCS) --> positive feelings (UCR) partner photos (CS) -----------------------------> positive feelings (CR) The researchers are careful to note that while looking at photos of puppies, sunsets, and other positive imagery paired with images of our partners boosts positive feelings toward our partners, this classical conditioning will not make us have positive feelings towards someone we really dislike. In other words, classical conditioning is not a panacea for fixing badly damaged relationships.  Consider using this experiment as another example in your classical conditioning lecture. Or provide students a summary of the research and ask them to work in pairs or small groups to identify the UCS, UCR, CS, and CR.     References Bushatz, A. (2017, April 28). Female troop divorce up slightly, male rate largely unchanged. Retrieved from http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/04/28/female-troop-divorce-up-slightly-male-rate-largely-unchanged.html Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2017, January 13). Marriages and Divorces. Retrieved June 23, 2017, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage-divorce.htm Improving marriages to decrease suicide risk. (n.d.). Retrieved June 23, 2017, from https://msrc.fsu.edu/funded-research/improving-marriages-decrease-suicide-risk Joiner, T. (2015, October). Military Suicide Research Consortium (Rep. No. W81XWH-10-2-0181). Retrieved http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a622687.pdf McNulty, J. K., Olson, M. A., Jones, R. E., & Acosta, L. M. (2017). Automatic associations between one’s partner and one’s affect as the proximal mechanism of change in relationship satisfaction: Evidence from evaluative conditioning. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797617702014 ... View more

In Improving How Universities Teach Science: Lessons from the Science Education Initiative, Carl Wieman—a Stanford physicist, Nobel laureate, and Carnegie U.S. University Professor of the Year (but let’s not feel intimidated)—advocates active learning, which in a recent NPR interview, he describes as teaching the thinking that you really want students to learn. How does a physicist think about a problem, or a chemist, and so on, and what decisions do they make, and then you break that problem down into student, bite-sized pieces. You give them to the students to work on. They usually work in small groups. The instructor is monitoring how the students are thinking. What's right, what's wrong. And then will periodically pull them back together every five or 10 minutes to discuss how they are coming along. Give them feedback on what thinking is right or wrong.   Mark Zuckerberg has a similar vision for public schools—for engaging students in self-directed learning, with guiding teachers at their sides.   The benefits of active learning are well-known to teaching psychologists. As Nathan DeWall and I note in our forthcoming Psychology, 12 th Edition, To master information you must actively process it. Your mind is not like your stomach, something to be filled passively; it is more like a muscle that grows stronger with exercise. Countless experiments reveal that people learn and remember best when they put material in their own words, rehearse it, and then retrieve and review it again.   For Psychology, 12 th Edition, and all of our texts, active learning—via “Concept Practice,” “Immersive Learning,” and “Assess Your Strengths” exercises, and also via simulations and adaptive quizzing—forms the heart of our online resources.   So take it from a Nobel laureate/professor of the year . . . or Mark Zuckerberg . . . or just from Dave and Nathan: To learn deeply and remember enduringly, learn actively. ... View more

National Geographic gives you 8 different scenarios in which you have (hypothetically) lied. Choose the most likely reason you lied. As a research methods booster have students discuss the validity of this measure – a measure that has not been used in formal research to the best of my knowledge. The basis for this quiz was recent research on lying. Communication Studies professor Timothy Levine and colleagues (2016) asked participants from five countries to recall a recent occasion when the participants had lied and then write about what took place. Trained coders read the accounts and categorized the motivation for lying. Levine, et.al. found that the most common reason was lying to gain something (45%) – to reap financial benefits (16%), to reap non-financial benefits (15%), to make a good impression (8%), to be humorous (5%). Another 36% lied for self-protection; 22% did so because of a personal transgression and another 14% did so to dodge people they didn’t want to interact with. The least common type of lying (11%) was designed to affect others in some way – to help them (5%), to hurt them (4%), to be polite (2%). Some lying appeared to be “without apparent motive or purpose, lies out of obvious delusion, or lying with blatant disregard for reality and detection consequences” (2%). The remaining 7% of participants didn’t give enough information to code the motive (5%) or the motive didn’t fit one of these categories (2%).   After covering operant conditioning, have students work in pairs or small group to identify if the teller of each of these kind of lies has been positively reinforced, negatively reinforced, positively punished, or negatively punished. Ask students to assume that the person has told this kind of lie before; perhaps this person has told this kind of lie many times before. Lied to cover up a personal transgression, e.g. lied to keep an affair from becoming public Lied to avoid someone, e.g., lied to get off the phone with someone you don’t want to talk to Lied for financial gain, e.g., lied on a tax return to get a bigger tax refund Lied for non-monetary benefits, e.g., lied to get people to vote for you Lied to make a good impression, e.g., lied on an online dating profile so people will view you as very attractive Lied to be polite, e.g., lied about liking someone’s shirt to avoid making the person feel bad After students have completed their discussion and if you use an audience response system, ask students to click in to vote for the type of operant conditioning associated with each kind of lie. Walk students through thinking about each type of lie to identify its type of reinforcement. This short activity will help students see that our behavior is often reinforced in unintended ways. References Levine, T. R., Ali, M. V., Dean, M., Abdulla, R. A., & Garcia-Ruano, K. (2016). Toward a Pan-cultural Typology of Deception Motives. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 45 (1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/17475759.2015.1137079 ... View more

One of my favorite sources for examples of psychological concepts are comic strips. Some of them get worked into lectures, others show up on exams, and sometimes I’ll offer them for a couple points extra credit, especially for new comics that harken back to content covered earlier in the course. Here are some May 14, 2017 comic strips that may be worth adding to your stable of examples. The Betty comic strip gives us a wonderful example of change blindness. Junior, Betty’s son, is dinking around on his phone while explaining his generation’s amazing ability to multitask. During his explanation, Betty calls in her husband to take her place. When Junior’s attention is returned to his parent, he sees his dad and is completely unaware that he had replaced his mom. In Frank and Ernest Frank has a young person working out on his farm. The young person, upon hearing “crop,” thinks cropping photos instead of crops that are planted. For someone who spends a lot of time in the digital world instead of a farming world, that person would be primed to interpret “crop” as photo manipulation. Frazz gives us commentary on the positive reinforcement provided by smartphones. Pick up your smartphone to get a jolt of pleasure in some form – text messages, phone calls, games, social media updates. Caulfield, the boy in the strip, says that his dad “calls them dopamine pumps.” (If you want to dive deeper into smartphone use, I wrote a post on stress and smartphones a few months ago.) Bonus comic strip. My favorite classical conditioning comic strip comes from Lio (November 14, 2009). A monster replaces Pavlov’s dogs, “Monsta Treats” replace meat powder, and the sound of a ripping bag replaces the tone. Do you have any favorite comic strips that illustrate psychological concepts?   ... View more

In today’s tech world, many students come equipped with laptops for “taking notes.” Actually, as I noted in an earlier blog post, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer have found that when it comes to remembering and applying concepts, “the pen is mightier than the keyboard.” With laptops, it is easy to take verbatim notes. When writing longhand, students more actively process the material, summarize it in their own words, and learn it more deeply. FatCamera/Getty Images  And as students sitting near the back of the classroom can vouch, their peers often aren’t taking notes. They’re checking Facebook, playing games, messaging, online shopping, and information searching (stimulated by the class, we can hope). So, does this multitasking during class time exact a cost?      When surveyed, students “report little or no effect of their portable device use on learning class material,” report Susan Ravizza, Mitchell Uitvlugt, and Kimberly Fenn from prior studies.   Really? To assess that presumption, Ravizza et al. secured the permission of 84 Michigan State introductory psychology students to have their class-time Internet use monitored. (The students afterward reported that their use was unaffected by the confidential monitoring.)   The results: During the 110 minute class, the average student did nonclass-related Internet browsing for 37 minutes. And the more the Internet use, the lower the final exam score—even after controlling for students’ intelligence (ACT score), motivation, and course interest.   The bottom line: “These findings raise questions” about encouraging students to bring laptops to class when not essential to class activities. ... View more