The Teaching HS Psych Store

Recently, we began a business relationship with Amazon.com.  By that, I mean that they have opportunities for people like us (bloggers, organizations, website owners, etc.) to create accounts through which viewers can make their purchases from Amazon, but by using the links directed through our site, we can earn Amazon credits to be able to create more giveaways to our readers. 

So far we have a few hundred items on our site divided into a few categories.  Rather than adding items at will by keyword, we've decided to add only the items that we or people whose judgment we trust to be added to the site.  So everything in the store has been hand-picked.  There are certainly more items to add.  If you have recommendations, please email Chuck.

Our store can be found here:
http://astore.amazon.com/highschoolpsychology-20

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Personality Tests Published Online

Last year, as part of Wikipedia's entry on the Rorschach Inkblot test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test), Dr. James Heilman, an emergency-room physician in Canada, posted all ten inkblots along with the most common responses to each. A controversy erupted from the posting. Many felt, not only were copyright laws violated, the integrity and validity of the test had been compromised. During the uproar, Dr Heilman was investigated for unprofessional behavior by his local medical association.

If you go to https://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1109032158 you will find a posting for a discussion group on Antipolygraph.com in which the person listed the first 75 questions of the MMPI-2. Here, too, questions of ethics and copyrights can be raised.

While I am not advocating the use of these items in your classroom, that is a question for each teacher to individually answer, I am suggesting both postings can make for a very interesting class discussion on testing, copyrights, ethics, keeping things confidential in the internet age, etc.

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Birth Order and Personality

Samantha Murphy has created a very informative website on birth order and personality. The site provides a basic summary of what birth order is and what personality traits tend to be correlated with each position. From my limited knowledge of birth order, the site appears to be fairly accurate and can be found at http://www.birthorderandpersonality.com/index.html

If anyone has further information on the accuracy of the site and/or information on Samantha Murphy's background, please post a comment below.

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Phonemes and Morphemes & Two PowerPoints

I posted these two ideas on the AP Psych listserv this week.  Thought it would be a good idea to share the information here.
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Thanks loads to my CLAD trainer Kathleen Kenfield—she is the source of the information below.  If my notes are accurate, that would be good as well.
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Phonology: system of sounds
Phoneme: a sound unit
Morphology: word formation
Morpheme: smallest unit of meaning (prefix, root word, suffix)
Syntax: word order and grammar
Semantics: word meaning
Pragmatics: system of language—situationally appropriate

A.      What is the first sound in the word, “cut”?  What is the final sound?  What’s the medial sound/vowel sound?  Now, what’s the first sound in the word, “cute”?  The final sound?  The vowel (medial) sound?

B.     What is the first sound in the following words?
a.       Easy
b.      Judge
c.       Psychic
d.      Pneumonia
e.       Civic
f.       Apple
g.       Chutzpah

C.     What is the final sound in the following words?
a.       Judge
b.      Cheese
c.       Long
d.      Niece
e.       Checked
f.       Watch
Note:  The following letter combinations in English make just one sound: ch sh th ng ph

D.     How many phonemes (sounds) are in these words?
Chin (3)     Habits (5)                    thing (3)                       thought (3)       psychology (8)
Three (3)    hopes (4)                     weigh (2)                     please (4)         sun (3)
Wish (3)     enough (4)                   nation (5)                     quickly (6)       laughed (4)

Some parts snipped out

Part 2: Morphology
Morphology is the study of the structure of words and of how words are formed.  A morpheme is the most elemental unit of meaning.  In English, a morpheme is a prefix, a root word, and a suffix.  Morphemes cannot stand alone, that have no meaning unless they are attached to another morpheme are called “bound morphemes.”  Morphemes that can stand alone are called “free morphemes.”  So in the word “reader,” “read” is a free morpheme while “-er” is a bound morpheme.

How many prefixes or suffixes can be added to the words, “read” or “develop”?

How many morphemes in the following words?
People (1)
Redevelopment (3)
Swimming (2)
Orange (1)
Literally (2)
Erasable (2)
Reddish (2)
Radish (1)
Language (1)
Grandmother (2)
Waited (2)
George’s (2)—the “-‘s” is a morpheme
Desirability (3)
Education (2)
Unhappy (2)
Remain (1)
Misspell (2)
Water (1)
Higher (2)
Finger (1)
Houseboat (2)
Antidisestablishmentarianism (7)

Hope that this helps everyone with this bit of language.
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As you may have guessed by my last post, I’m a little bit into language.  As such, a while ago, I created PowerPoints, one dealing with the concept of linguistic relativity, cognitive maps, the role of language in our lives, etc.  I also created one on periphrastics (this is the use of big words when little ones could suffice).  Those PPTs along with some other documents are available here if you’d like to take a gander.

https://sbhs-sbhsd-ca.schoolloop.com/blogdocs

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UC Berkeley Webcast Psychology of Personality

The University of California at Berkeley provides a webcast for many of their courses including Psych 150: Psychology of Personality for the 2005 Fall semester. While probably not something you would show to high school students, the twenty-eight videos provide a good background to what is currently being taught at the upper division undergraduate level. The Psychology of Personality videos can be found at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978253

Every semester a large number of courses are recorded and posted to the web. To find out more go about Berkeley's webcast program go to http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

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How would Freud make a PB&J sandwich?

I just saw this great post about how various characters from "Lost" would make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I thought wow, how easy it would be to do something like this in psychology! Maybe as an end of the year review activity of famous psychologists, or as a wrap of a unit (like personality or development) with lots of theories.

So here goes ...

• Freud's would be in three parts with a much larger part below the table.
• Loftus's would be --- wait, she thought she made one, but she really didn't!
• Asch's would require you to check out others were making their sandwiches first, and if they were making theirs wrong, what would you do?
• Rorschach would make disturbing pictures in the jelly and ask you what you saw.
  
• Walter Freeman's wouldn't involve cutting the sandwich but would require an ice pick.

Add more below! Or suggest other ideas besides "making a PB&J sandwich."

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Set your DVRs: Temple Grandin on HBO

Since reading Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars I have been fascinated by Temple Grandin. As many of you know Temple is a woman with autism who has had enormous success in her career as a professor at Colorado State and as one of the foremost authorities on the design on livestock facilities. Her rare ability to share the way her brain works -- thinking in pictures, she calls it -- has always been compelling to me and I have used her writings in every psychology class I've taught.

Among her works:

• Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
• Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism
• The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's
• Emergence: Labeled Autistic
• Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

So I was thrilled today to see that the HBO film "Temple Grandin" debuts Saturday, February 6 at 8 pm. You may be surprised to see that Claire Danes stars as Temple but after viewing the trailers I was convinced that except for the physical differences (the dainty Danes playing the broad-shouldered Grandin) that she did a good job. And I got all verklempt seeing those pictures in the trailers that only lived in my head -- Danes as Grandin down on all fours in a livestock pen, seeing the world from a cow's point of view, for example.

For more info on Temple Grandin check out these links:

• TempleGrandin.com
• A making of the movie interview on Huffington Post
• A 2006 interview with Ira Glass on NPR's Science Friday
• A movie preview from the Missouri Beef Council ("HBO Biopic Features Beef Industry," no lie!)

Check out the trailer and tease below and post your thoughts in the comments. Does she pull it off? Are you as excited as I am?

Trailer

Tease

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Personality Theories Website

Dr. C. George Boeree from the Psychology Department at Shippensburg University in PA, has developed an electronic textbook (e-text) designed for a post-secondary level personality theory course.

The text provides a good background to many of the personality theories discussed in a high school psychology course. The main page for the text can be found at http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/perscontents.html The writings are available online or as a PDF file as well as in Spanish or German.

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Schemas--a great demo

I posted this recently on the AP Psych Listserv:

Schemas are a core concept that I have in all my psych classes--they are the key idea around which I create everything else (except biology).  I use the Drew Appleby Demo on Déjà vu, not for that concept, but for the creation of a false memory based upon our schemas.  The PPT I use is here:
https://sbhs-sbhsd-ca.schoolloop.com/blogdocs

Description of the activity I give I created for a textbook video lessons project and can be found on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVEu3OVh3Uw&feature=related

The debriefing is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2nEM-oT0Kw

The demo has worked perfectly for the past 15+ years.  Feel free to use and adapt.

For an assimilation example, I use "Monster's Inc." and the little girl "Boo" who calls Sully a "kitty."  He's obviously a monster to us, but she does not yet have that in her schema, so she uses what she has available already--furry, with ears, four legs and a tail means "kitty."  So far as I could tell, she never accommodated the idea of monster with Sully--she only had that with Randall.  She distinguished the two.

Chuck

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Psych Test Prep Tools from The Psych Files

Back in early May we told you about a new reviewing technique Michael A. Britt, host of The Psych Files podcast (www.thepsychfiles.com), was developing called MAPPR or Make a Personal Psychology Review. In a MAPPR, Michael combines a concept map with audio explanations for each idea presented.

Since May, Michael has changed the MAPPR name to "The Psych Test Prep Tool" and created a number of new tools including two for the personality unit. All of the Psych Test Prep Tools can be found at http://www.thepsychfiles.com/mappr/

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