I am totally stealing this idea from the US Government Teachers Blog--they did a version of this on a recent blog. I changed the search terms and found all the AP Psych Review Books online via Google Books. While the content is limited by the copyright holder, a large part of the review books are made available through this service. Click here to access the AP Psych content.
"Patients often have difficulty getting the help they need — partly because therapists tend to regard borderline patients as manipulative and demanding of an inordinate amount of time and attention." A nice column in the NYT by Jane Brody on borderline personality disorder. Questions can be left for a BPD expert here and she'll provide answers to some of them next week. "I am not trying to say cats are stupid, just they are different." A British researcher finds cats none too bright in her little tests. (No word as to whether she was clawed to death shortly after publishing her findings.)
One of the most celebrated findings in modern psychiatry — that a single gene helps determine one’s risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job or another serious reversal — has not held up to scientific scrutiny, researchers reported Tuesday.
Really, I swear this one will work! The next big weight-loss craze involves sprinkling stuff on your food to enhance the smell and taste ... so you eat less.
But now researchers are beginning to unearth clues as to how savants' formidable brains work, and that in turn is changing our view of what it means to be a savant. Also, see this related link of art done by savants (like the one at the top of this post).
How does language shape thinking? Great essay here by a Stanford prof whose research finds evidence for the old (and new again?) Whorf hypothesis.
Finally, I just found this (thanks to the fabulous Mindhacks) and haven't had a chance to check it out -- so please, if you do, leave your thoughts in the comments! -- but here is Weird Al and Al's Brain, a 3-D Journey into the Human Brain. (P.S. I love the t-shirt below if anyone's looking for the perfect birthday present ...)
I watch quite a bit of television, but I try to find shows that can assist me in illustrating concepts in my psychology classes. Of course, this last spring, "Lie to Me" was my new favorite.
I have a new summer favorite, "Mental" on Fox (Tuesday nights). It is an hour-long drama that deals with the life and in-hospital exploits of an unusual therapist who changes things up and questions the status quo for treatments as the new director in a psychiatric ward (who has a schizophrenic sister). You can watch episodes at: http://www.fox.com/mental/
In the first four episodes, he deals with grief-induced catatonia, schizophrenia, fictitious pregnancy (by proxy), childhood bipolar disorder, along with a variety of treatments to assist patients-while avoiding psychopharmaceuticals. While I agree that this is modeled after House, M.D., I still like it--the main character is engaging and tries to get into the heads of his patients, rather than treating them as a diagnosis and then letting the psych techs deal with them. Very Humanistic in his treatment style. There are episodes available online at the Fox.com site as well as imdb.com.
No, I am not getting kickbacks from Fox on this one :-D
I just really like the show.
Dave Waltman, one of our AP Psych colleagues in Western New York is quite the tech guru. In addition to teaching psych, he is also a techie with his own tech blog called "TechnoCoach."
A few short months later, there are more than 300 entries using the search term "psychology."
In addition to University of California-Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, and other universities have placed lectures and interviews onto both YouTube EDU as well as the regular YouTube site.
iTunes U also offers video and audio options. Just within psychology, there are 90 offerings with multiple resources. Open university offers substantial content. Others offer speakers corners and faculty forums. Some courses even offer transcripts of their content. There appears to be so much content on iTunes U that I could probably spend the next ten years focusing solely on learning from this site/application.
Whether we are viewing for our own learning or finding resources for our students, both these resources are fantastic sources that we did not have even five years ago.
Starting this week PitN will come out on a regular-ish schedule on Mondays and Thursdays. Like what you read? Post a comment below or send me (ashejones@gmail.com) a note! --Steve
"The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process." -- Great column from Nicholas Kristof that examines various issues such as group polarization, moral values, disgust and more. There are also links to yourmorals.org (where one can take online tests in areas such as personality, war and peace, and disgust) and civilpolitics.org on moral psychology.
“Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.” Another fascinating column by Kristof that looks at the work of Richard Nisbett (new book is Intelligence and How to Get It) on how groups such Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks "help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect."
"There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. In a fascinating new article in Psychological Science, Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig turned the old aphorism on its head: One head can be nearly as good as two."(Scientific American)
From BoingBoing: "Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities."
I used excerpts from the book in class this past semester with great success and now someone has typed in all 50 with brief synopses. Excellent! Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (from Robert Cialdini et al.)
Utrecht University sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst surveyed 604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period. (via Freakonomics)
Finally, Lehrer also discusses the above dancing video (also here if the link ist kaput) in relation to Stanley Milgram's experiment on conformity where he had confederates in New York City stop and look up and then compared the number of people who also stopped and looked. And the video below (also here) is a modern re-creation of that experiment.
The wonderful weekly email called "The Scout Report" from the people at University of Wisconsin. The Internet Scout Report finds and share incredible web resources on a wide variety of topics.
This week, scientists met at the annual Associated Professional Sleep Societies meeting in Seattle, and they were working on the problem that has bedeviled many college students, long-distance truck drivers, and others for decades: too little sleep. More and more people in the United States are getting inadequate sleep, and there are a number of culprits (including television and the demands of work) to blame. A chronic lack of sleep has some troubling repercussions, including an increased risk of depression, diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. If that wasn't enough, a lack of sleep can also impair cognitive functioning and the body's metabolic rate. Fortunately, there are some potential solutions, including a "power-down" hour which basically means cutting off email use, cell phones, and other constant companions for at least an hour before retiring to bed for the night. The National Sleep Foundation also recommends that people decrease their caffeine intake and also work to maintain a regular schedule. [KMG]
The first link will lead visitors to an article from Melinda Beck, which appeared in this Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. In the piece, Beck talks about her own experience with a sleep study at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The second link whisks users away to a piece from the LA Times health weblog "Booster Shots" that talks a bit about some other findings from the recent meeting in Seattle. The third link will take visitors to a press release from Science Daily which talks a bit about some recent research on obstructive sleep apnea. Moving on, the fourth link leads to the homepage of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Here, visitors can learn about their work and also find information about sleep centers. The fifth link leads to an excellent resource on understanding sleep from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders. The sixth link leads to some fine tips on getting better sleep from the Mayo Clinic. Finally, the last link leads to a complete version of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. For those of you who are getting adequate sleep, this volume may come in handy.
This post's title is the question posted today by Steven Levitt on the NYTimes' Freakonomics blog. Ah, the Hawthorne effect, whose mere mention often sends shudders down the spine of veteran AP Psych teachers who recall this term appearing out of the blue on some mid-'90s exam. Since then some (including your correspondent) often feel the need to almost shout it out the door as the students are leaving to take the test -- "and don't forget the Hawthorne Effect was ...!"
Levitt and John List took a new look at the data which originally suggested that any change made at the Hawthorne plant, particularly in terms of lighting, led to an increase in productivity. The conventional wisdom gleaned from the study was that scientists need to be cautious about unintentionally interfering with an experiment because the mere fact that subjects know their behavior is being observed would make change their behavior, and in this case, work harder. The economists re-analyzed the old findings and found that the changes themselves did not make productivity increase but that the differences emerged because the changes in production were compared to the wrong standards. Here are two examples:
Changes typically took place on a Sunday and then the productivity of the workers was compared from the day before (Saturday) to the day after (Monday). But when the data from Mondays alone was dissected, in turns out that every Monday had greater output that every Saturday -- workers tended to be most productive early in the week and then slack off as the week progressed. (No wonder since they had a six day work week!)
Another observation found that worker productivity went down significantly after the experiments ended, leading to the conclusion that the presence of the researchers increased output and their absences led to a decline. But what Levitt and List found was that the research stopped in the summer, and every year there was a decline in production during the summer, perhaps because of the heat.
You can read more about this work in this brief Economist article. The full paper is available here but it looks like it'll cost you $5. A nice online exhibit from Harvard Business School is here.
Michael Britt, on his most recent podcast "The Psych Files" goes into historical and modern detail about the original Milgram study on obedience. Given the widespread knowledge of the obedience study, despite ethical restraints, and despite changes in society, how might a 2008 study replicating the original study come out? Would we be more or less obedient or about the same? How would the new study be handled by the researchers and university? What strange coincidence occurred with Milgram's heart attack and death.
Oh, would you like some great resources including a PowerPoint to help teach the Milgram obedience study? If so, check out Dr. Britt's newest podcast and page link.
There are also links to books, videos, ABC television demonstrations of a replication, other additional resources and much more. If you are into social psychology, ethics, or just like people to be obedient, this is a great podcast to check out.
The new revision (May 2010/May 2011) of the AP Psychology Course Description Book, commonly called the "Acorn Book", includes listings of important psychologists. In the past, many of the names were embedded within the content description. This time there are many more names and they are listed as part of a learning objective at the end of each topic description.
I've created a PDF document that lists all of the important names by units. The document can be downloaded at http://www.4shared.com/dir/10555367/29577282/sharing.html If your school's blocking system will not allow access to the 4Shared website, please look through the comments to this posting to see if anyone has uploaded the document on their website. Unfortunately, I am limited to six documents on my school's website.
I've always wanted to start a collection of "Bad Psychology" along the same lines as Phil Plait's excellent Bad Astronomy homepage. That page gathers popularized accounts of astronomical findings that get the research wrong in key ways and explains/debunks the claims
Our students could do this, I think. Once they learn some important research concepts (e.g. the importance of control groups, operational definitions, correlation not being confused with causation, etc.) they should be able to spot some "bad psychology" out there in popular media. If they do, please post it here (or elsewhere) for the rest of us to see!
My contribution might be a little controversial, but I'll take a shot at it. As far as I can tell, the popularized concept of "learning styles" (e.g. visual, auditory, kinesthetic) don't really measure or predict anything "real" about learning, other than maybe a learning preference. I first heard about this skepticism in a graduate cognitive psych class, and then found a couple other compelling discussions of it:
- Michael Britt interviewed Daniel Willingham about the topic on the Psych files (an excerpt: “It’s worth thinking about not matching the child’s supposed learning style to how they are supposed to learn, but rather think about the content and what is it about this content that I really want students to understand and what’s the best way to convey that.” - Dr. Willingham)
- a great, comprehensive article that summarizes the research well: “Different Strokes for Different Folks?” American Educator (that link is a .pdf of the article)
When I talk about this with other teachers (and students), I get a lot of resistance. People seem darn attached to the idea that these learning styles exist and that they matter in how to most effectively learn/teach. What do you all think?
Starting this week PitN will come out on a regular-ish schedule on Mondays and Thursdays. Like what you read? Post a comment below or send me (ashejones@gmail.com) a note! --Steve
This post's title is the question posted today by Steven Levitt on the NYTimes' Freakonomics blog. Ah, the Hawthorne effect, whose mere mention often sends shudders down the spine of veteran AP Psych teachers who recall this term appearing out of the blue on some mid-'90s exam. Since then some (including your correspondent) often feel the need to almost shout it out the door as the students are leaving to take the test -- "and don't forget the Hawthorne Effect was ...!"
The new revision (May 2010/May 2011) of the AP Psychology Course Description Book, commonly called the "Acorn Book", includes listings of important psychologists. In the past, many of the names were embedded within the content description. This time there are many more names and they are listed as part of a learning objective at the end of each topic description.
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