It must have been in my first year of full-time teaching. I was sitting in the faculty break room feeling nervous about seeing my student evaluations of teaching when I heard from down the hall, “I found it!” My colleague Larry came into the break room holding a piece of paper in the air. Gamely, I asked, “What did you find?” A negative evaluation. He found a negative evaluation. One of his core teaching goals was to challenge his students to think differently. He didn’t ask students to adopt his view of the world, but he did want them to see the world from different perspectives. As we all know, seeing the world through different lenses can be deeply unsettling. Some students embrace that experience. Others? Not so much. If Larry did not get at least one evaluation from a student railing against said experience, he did not feel like he was doing his job.

And just as Larry did with his students, he—albeit, inadvertently—encouraged me to look at course evaluations from a different perspective. My experience of looking through a different lens, though, was not deeply unsettling. It was deeply liberating.

I had taught for a few years, first as a grad student and then as an adjunct before landing my first full-time job. I had enough experience with course evaluations to be familiar with the negativity bias, although I didn’t know the term at the time. As Roy Baumeister and colleagues noted, “The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes” (Baumeister et al., 2001, p. 323). That one negative evaluation stands out amongst a sea of glowing evaluations.

Part of my ruminations over that one (or two or three) negative course evaluations was that I could not address the student’s (or students’) issues, concerns, or outright complaints. The evaluations are anonymous, and the course is over. What’s an instructor left to do but ruminate?

Here are a few strategies.

1. Remember the negativity bias. Even if you can’t take your focus off the negative entirely, naming the bias for what it is may help mitigate its impact.
2. Take some time to focus on just the positives. What did your students especially appreciate about your teaching? Your students learned something in your course. How did you help them do that? Write down these major themes and post them in your office where you can easily see them. Glance at them often. Remind yourself that you are having a positive impact.
3. For each of the negative comments, decide if they are valid. If so, is there something you can learn from them? Write down the lessons learned and how you plan to address them next term. For example, I had a course evaluation very early in my teaching career, back when the only option an instructor had was to write on a blackboard. The student wrote on an evaluation (paraphrasing!), “She should write more than just the outline on the board. When it came time to study for the test, all I had was the outline.” I spent a lot of time thinking about that one. What finally shook me out of my rumination was the realization that this student didn’t know how to take notes. I had assumed that all college students knew how to take notes. Since they clearly don’t, I had to build the teaching of note-taking skills into my course.
4. Consider doing mid-term evaluations next term. Even if you don’t know who made what comment, you can address any themes with the class during that term. For example, if a few students think your course requires too much work, what may need to change is student expectations of workload, not the workload itself. You can walk your students through an explanation of Carnegie units. If it helps, I explained them in this blog post (Frantz, 2017). Next, take your students through the Course Workload Estimator 2.0 as it applies to your course. At minimum, your students will see that you are thoughtful about the work you are asking them to do. And, of course, if you discover that the work in your course is much higher than warranted, adjust the workload.

That is one of the great joys (and curses) of teaching. We have the opportunity for a next-term redemption right up until the last class we ever teach.

But please remember that it is not your job to make every student happy. It can’t be done anyway. Some of your students are there just for a decent grade on their transcript. They’re not especially interested in learning. For them, no coursework and an automatic A is what would make them happy. But also in your class are students who want to learn. For them, no coursework and an automatic A would make them deeply unhappy.

Accept that you will always have some negative student evaluations of teaching. And don’t let the negativity bias keep you awake at night.

References

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is Stronger than Good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323

Frantz, S. (2017). How much work is in your course? https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-psychology-community/blog/2017/12/28/how-much-work-is-in-your-course

Like everybody else, I’ve been thinking about AI. I use Google NotebookLM to pull information from a finite set of documents. I use Perplexity to answer questions I used to ask of search engines. For example, I use macros with some of my spreadsheets. Where I used to search for code and reconfigure it for my specific situation, I can tell Perplexity (or a host of other AI tools) what I want the code to do, and it generates the code for me. Very handy. No question.

When my affiliate university (New Mexico State University) offered me a free Grammarly account, I was willing to give it a try. I appreciated the comma help Grammarly provided, but, more problematically, it also wanted to change my words. It wanted to remove the color from my writing, replacing my idiosyncratic voice with soulless corporate-speak. A tool that was supposed to be a helpful adjunct to my writing became the Borg that kept trying to turn me into someone that sounded just like everyone else it had already taken over. I had to fight to keep my voice. I did the only reasonable thing: I uninstalled Grammarly.

Side note #1: I still needed comma help, so I installed the free LanguageTool for Windows instead. They also have a Borg version that will encourage you to sound like, well, Grammarly, but you have to pay extra for that service.  

Side note #2: If you are unfamiliar with the Borg, this Perplexity summary will help. If AI is our version of the Borg, then my asking Perplexity for a summary is ironic.

I have a colleague who has been sending me email replies that have been written by AI. Her voice has been replaced with this generic, Borg-like corporate-speak. In some circles, such language is called “professional.” To me, reading such emails is like shaking hands with a dead fish. They leave me feeling cold and slimy. And dismissed. Nothing says “I don’t value you and what you have to say” faster than a Borg-generated reply. Truthfully, I’d prefer no reply at all.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published the obituary for David Bellos, a renowned translator of books (Risen, 2025). When he was asked if he thought AI would remove the need for human translation, he said, “Machines may produce an accurate translation of words, but they could never make the subtle choices among hundreds of possibilities that go into rendering an accurate, nuanced meaning.”

This is the nature of human writing. We make “subtle choices among hundreds of possibilities.” AI writing tools encourage us to all make the same choices. Every time we accept the AI version in our own writing, another little piece of us is erased. Our individual voices are gradually being scrubbed away. We are being assimilated into the Borg.

And the Borg is not just coming for your writing voice. You can now use tools like Cluely to listen in on your conversations, including virtual meetings, job interviews, and oral exams. When you are asked a question, Cluely will provide you with a response that you can read off your screen. “The assumption behind Cluely is that letting an AI pull a Cyrano yields better interactions than relying on your own brain” (Beck, 2025).

Side note #3: If a person resides in an all-party consent-to-record state, they need to get the consent of all parties before using a tool like Cluely or other meeting recorder, such as Otter.ai. How long until we get our first instance of criminal charges or a civil suit being brought against a student during an oral exam or an applicant during a job interview where the student or interviewee used Cluely to answer questions while one or both parties were in an all-party consent-to-record state?

A few years ago, I read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. While it is indeed a very good book, I learned that novels about the dystopian future aren’t for me. As more of our colleagues and more of our students cede their voices to the Borg, I feel like the dystopian future is closing in. An actual dystopian future is not for me, either.

While the Borg insists that resistance is futile, it is not. We do not have to be assimilated. Resistance begins with using our own voices. 

References

Beck, J. (2025, November 18). How to cheat at conversation. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/11/cluely-ai-cheat-everything/684913/

Risen, C. (2025, November 20). David Bellos, 80, dies; wrestled French wordplay into English. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/books/david-bellos-dead.html

This is the eighth in a series of posts based on Becca Levy’s book Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live.

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Ageism is alive and well.

In Breaking the Age Code (Levy, 2022), I learned that some K-12 schools celebrate the 100^th day of school by inviting students to dress up as a 100-year-old person. Because, you know, if you’re going to teach age stereotypes, you should make it fun.

Show students these costume ideas on the School Run Messy Bun website (Becker, 2023). Working in small groups, ask students to identify the ageist beliefs they see in the costumes. Ask volunteers from each group to share what they found.

Being this far into Breaking the Age Code (see my other blog posts based on Levy’s book), I’ve learned how our age beliefs can affect how we age. I wasn’t surprised that our beliefs affect us, but I was quite surprised at the size of the effect. It’s easy to think there’s no harm in kids playing dress-up. Until you realize that you are further instilling in them ageist beliefs that could harm them in a multitude of ways as they themselves age. Never mind how they may spread those same ageist beliefs to others.  

If there is a child in your life who attends a school that has such a dress-up day, here are some additional costume ideas.

• Wear a parachute. Just a couple of months ago, Jimmy Hernandez celebrated his 100^th birthday by going skydiving (Felts, 2025).
• Wear F1 racing gear. To celebrate her 100^th birthday, Manette Baillie drove a Ferrari around Silverstone, home to the British Grand Prix (thank you to Drive to Survive for expanding my knowledge of the F1 circuit). She hit 130mph (209 km/h) (BBC, 2022). And how did I find this story? It was a link from a story about how she went skydiving to celebrate her 102^nd birthday (Cunningham, 2024)
• Wear a bungee jumping harness. S.L. Potter celebrated his 100^th birthday by bungee jumping for the first time. From a 210-foot tower (Granberry, 1993).
• Wear running gear. At the age of 100, Fauja Singh completed the 2003 Toronto Waterfront Marathon. He started running when he was 89 (Buendía-Romero et al., 2025). And then there is Lester Wright, who ran the 100-meter dash at the age of 100 in 26.34 seconds (OlympicTalk, 2022).
• Wear cycling gear. At the age of 105, Robert Marchard set the 60-minute cycling record for distance covered on a bicycle in the 105 and older age group: 22.547km (Tremblay, 2017). Granted, he is the only person in that category.
• Wear a swimsuit. At the age of 100, Bill Lambert went scuba diving. He started scuba diving when he was 98 (Gillespie, 2020).

Invite your students to find other stories of people over the age of, say, 90 who are living life to the fullest. They can even use their favorite AI tool to help them search. Work with your students on crafting effective prompts and researching the sources.

References

BBC. (2022, July 27). Woman races Ferrari at Silverstone as 100th birthday approaches. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-northamptonshire-62309918

Becker, A. M. (2023, November 7). 12+ Adorable 100th Day of School Old Lady Costume Ideas To Recreate! School Run Messy Bun. https://schoolrunmessybun.com/100th-day-of-school-old-lady-costume/

Buendía-Romero, Á., Higueras-Liébana, E., Alegre, L. M., Ara, I., & Valenzuela, P. L. (2025). Centenarian athletes: The paradigm of healthy longevity? The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging, 29(10), 100665. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnha.2025.100665

Cunningham, A. (2024, August 25). Woman, 102, becomes Britain’s oldest skydiver. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0n431gddlo

Felts, C. (2025, September 2). WWII veteran celebrates his 100th birthday by skydiving with his son and grandson. Capradio. https://www.capradio.org/210335

Gillespie, A. (2020, September 11). 100-year-old becomes world’s oldest diver. Scuba Diving. https://www.scubadiving.com/100-year-old-becomes-worlds-oldest-diver

Granberry, M. (1993, October 14). Free fall at 100: Age doesn’t slow S. L. Potter, who bungee jumps from 210 feet. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-10-14-mn-45507-story.html

Levy, B. (2022). Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live (First edition). William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

OlympicTalk. (2022, May 2). 100-year-old breaks 100m record at Penn Relays. NBC Sports. https://www.nbcsports.com/olympics/news/100-year-old-race-penn-relays-meters-lester-wright

Tremblay, P. (2017, January 4). 105-year-old cyclist sets hour record covering 22.547 km. Canadian Cycling Magazine. https://cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/news/105-year-old-cyclist-sets-hour-record-covering-22-547-km/

For my books, my wife reads every chapter I write before I send it to my editor. We’ve been together for over 25 years. I’ve had occasion to mention a little something every so often about psychology. Let’s just say that she has learned a lot of psychology. Occasionally, she will ask me some version of this: “What’s that thing called where [perfect description of that thing]?” And then I’ll name the thing, e.g., counterfactual thinking, variable ratio schedule of reinforcement, source amnesia. However, sometimes I struggle to come up with the term. I know that I know it. I’ve taught the dang concept for 30 years, of course, I know it, but I can’t, in the moment, get the right neurons to fire. My nonconscious brain keeps working on it while I move on to other tasks, like sleeping. At 3 am, my brain spits it out. Thanks. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for my brain’s work, it’s just that 12 hours earlier would have been a bit better.

Psychology instructors love our vocabulary. We love it so much that often the bulk of our multiple-choice exams is about vocabulary. Here’s a definition; which term does it match? Here’s an example; which term does it match?

I first started wrestling with this as I watched my students design perfectly good experiments while answering an essay question, but then mix up the naming of the independent variable and dependent variable.

Since about 95% of our Intro Psych students are not going to major in psychology, which is more important? Their ability to design a good experiment—and recognize a good (and bad!) experiment when they see one—or their ability to accurately name the variables?

Even for our psychology majors, how important is it that they understand the variables in their Intro to Psychology course? I bet they’ll be in Research Methods shortly, where the names of the variables will be hammered into their heads by brute force.  If your psych BA program is one of those that does not require Research Methods, I’d love to have a conversation with you about why you’ve dropped it as a requirement. I have some guesses. I also have some stories about how graduates from such programs have fared in grad school. It’s not good.

In any case, I bet students can miss questions about the independent variable and dependent variable on your Intro Psych exam and still pass the course with flying colors. I’m not entirely sure that I had them straight after taking Intro. I am certain I did after Research Methods, though!

What might it look like if we zoomed our testing lens out just a bit so that we have less focus on terminology and greater focus on the concepts themselves? Here are a few examples.

Let’s start with an experimental design question that does not focus on terminology. This first example is based on this blog post.

A psychological scientist wants to test this hypothesis: The quality of a person’s microphone during an interview affects the likelihood of the person being hired. Which would be the best design for the experiment?

1. Ask one volunteer to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic and then listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask the volunteer which person they would prefer to hire.
2. Ask 50 volunteers to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic and then listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask each volunteer which person they would prefer to hire.
3. Ask one volunteer to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic, and ask a second volunteer to listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask each volunteer which person they would prefer to hire.
4. Ask 25 volunteers to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic. Ask a different set of 25 volunteers to listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask all 50 volunteers to rate how likely they would be to hire the interviewee.

Instead of focusing on the term egocentrism, the following question zooms out to the importance of a caregiver knowing that their toddler cannot see the world through someone else’s eyes.

A 3-year-old shoves another child out of the way and takes their cookie.

1. This behavior is expected of young children because they cannot take the perspective of another person.
2. This child is intentionally bullying another child.
3. We expect that this child will grow up to be a narcissist.
4. Both B and C.

Instead of focusing on the term availability heuristic, the following question zooms out to a social media user knowing that how often they hear about something can influence their perception of how often that thing occurs.

On social media, our friend has just watched at least five videos where people were cooking chicken with Nyquil (a very dangerous practice!). Our friend says, “This is great! We must try this! Everyone is doing it!”

1. Our friend is overestimating how often an event occurs based on how available it is in their memory.
2. While it’s unlikely that everyone is doing it, based on our friend’s sample, it is likely that most people are doing it.
3. If we show our friend evidence that this is a dangerous activity, our friend will undoubtedly change their beliefs to ours.
4.  Both B and C

Instead of focusing on the term sensorineural hearing loss, the following question zooms out to a music listener knowing that playing their music through headphones at maximum volume can cause permanent damage and why.

Playing music through headphones or earbuds at maximum volume…

1. Will not cause hearing loss
2. Will cause hearing loss because of damage to the auditory nerve
3. Will cause hearing loss because the loud sound waves damage the cilia in the cochlea
4. May cause ringing in the ears (tinnitus)
5. Both C and D

Instead of focusing on the terms systematic desensitization and extinction, the following question zooms out to a person’s understanding of how to lessen a fear.

Our friend has a fear of needles that is so bad that they refuse any treatment that requires getting a shot. Based on what is known about classical conditioning, what is the most effective way for our friend to reduce their fear?

1. Our friend should continue to avoid needles.
2. Our friend should get a lollipop after every shot.
3. Our friend should have gradual exposure to needles.
4. We should punch our friend in the arm every time they show a fear of needles.

In conclusion, I’m not suggesting that we stop talking about terminology. Giving something a name turns it into a meaningful thing. However, as I consider what my neighbor needs to know about psychology, I’m more interested in the concept and its application rather than what we call it. If these kinds of questions were on a final exam, I wonder how our students would perform and how they would perform if they took that same exam again four years later.

As we witness the proliferation of AI, faculty are returning to in-class assessments. Faculty chatter on social media and the sudden increase in blue book sales provide the supporting data (Shirky, 2025).

I have been a long-time fan of a modified interteaching model (Frantz, 2019). Students would be given a list of essay questions based on the chapter to be read for the coming week. They would answer the questions and bring their answers to class. Students would then work in small groups to identify the questions that gave them the most difficulty, and that’s what I would lecture on. Students would then revise their answers and submit them the following week for a grade. I would choose two questions to score, but the students wouldn’t know which two questions, so all their answers had to be good.

Using this pedagogical strategy in the Age of AI would be challenging. I would imagine that I’d ask students to use AI to answer the questions, and then I’d ask students to revise AI’s answers based on their reading of the textbook. Even then, I imagine students feeding PDFs of the textbook into AI and asking AI to critique its own answers.

The next time I teach, I’ll be returning to in-class testing. Frankly, that will probably take the form of multiple-choice tests. I do this with the full acknowledgment that R. Eric Landrum at Boise State University is correct: Taking multiple-choice tests is the one skill that no employer wants (Landrum, 2016). On the other hand, writing skills were once highly valued by employers. I’m not sure that is still the case. AI may not produce the most eloquent prose, but what it does produce may be just fine for most business situations.

However, one skill that I’m sure employers do still value is the ability to work together in teams. The one thing that kept me giving multiple-choice tests a little longer than I really wanted to was the post-test group test that I used, because I found that so much learning  occurred through it.

Here’s how it worked in my 2-hour-long classes. Students would first take the test solo. After everyone had submitted their completed bubble sheets, students would receive a brand-new bubble sheet. (I used ZipGrade, so I provided the bubble sheets.) Students would answer the test questions again, but this time they could work together, use their notes, and consult their textbooks. Since everyone had their own bubble sheets, they didn’t have to come to a consensus on the answers. If I were to use this technique in the Age of AI, I would not allow the use of the Internet, so students would not be able to use their e-books. I would, however, bring a few print copies of the book to class for students to use.

While I had some students who would work solo during the group test, most students would work in small groups. If a group couldn’t decide on an answer, they’d ask another group. I recall at least one instance when the entire class discussed a question. For that discussion, I left the room to make it easier for students to share their thoughts without worrying about what I might be thinking.

The greatest value of group testing is that students who understand a concept can explain it to those who don’t. That not only helps the students who didn’t understand the concept, but by teaching it, it strengthens the knowledge of that concept in those who do.

As an added benefit, during a group test, students with strong multiple-choice test-taking skills can model to other students how to think through a multiple-choice question. (There’s a question for anyone looking for a scholarship of teaching and learning research project: Does taking group tests improve a student’s multiple-choice test-taking skills?)

When I did this, my solo tests were worth 50 points and my group tests were worth 25. Because of how much students learned during the group tests, if I were to use them now, I’d probably make both worth the same number of points.

One caveat. Not all multiple-choice tests are created equal. So many of our psychology tests are vocabulary tests. In an upcoming blog post, I’ll share some thoughts on a different approach to multiple-choice tests.

References

Frantz, S. (2019, July 30). Interteaching: Shifting responsibility for learning from instructor to student. Macmillan and BFW Teaching Community. https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/psychology-blog/interteaching-shifting-responsibility-for-learning-from/ba-p/6899

Landrum, R. E. (2016, April 27). It’s time: Getting serious about national advocacy for undergraduate psychology majors. Western Psychological Association Terman Teaching Conference, Long Beach, CA. https://westernpsych.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Terman-Schedule-2016-Long-Beach.pdf

Shirky, C. (2025, August 26). Students hate them. Universities need them. The only real solution to the A.I. cheating crisis. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/opinion/culture/ai-chatgpt-college-cheating-medieval.html

This is the seventh in a series of posts based on Becca Levy’s book Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live.

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Ask your students to rank order these longevity-lengthening factors from least impact to biggest impact.

Low cholesterol

Low blood pressure

Low body mass index

Not smoking

Positive beliefs about aging

And the answer is…

Low body mass index (BMI). On average, a low BMI tacks on only one extra year of life. This is one reason BMI is a poor measure of health.

Not smoking comes in second. Non-smokers, on average, extend their lives three years.

Low blood pressure and low cholesterol tie for third place. Both give us, on average, an extra four years.

Holding positive age beliefs is our big winner. It gives us, on average, a whopping additional 7.5 years (B. Levy, 2022).

Phrased the other way around, holding negative age beliefs lopped 7.5 years off people’s lives. Invite students to work in small groups to discuss why negative age beliefs could shorten a person’s life or why positive age beliefs might extend it.

After the discussion has waned, ask a volunteer from each group to share their ideas.

One possible explanation for why negative age beliefs would decrease longevity is stress. If you think that becoming older is a horrific thing, then every passing year will bring you closer to the inevitability of your worst nightmare. And the research bears this out. In a longitudinal study, volunteers over the age of 50 who had positive age beliefs showed no change in cortisol levels over the next 30 years. In contrast, volunteers who had negative age beliefs showed a steady increase in cortisol levels over that same period. In fact, cortisol levels in this group rose 44% (B. R. Levy et al., 2016).

“[P]eople with negative age beliefs, compared to those with positive age beliefs, are less likely to engage in healthy behavior, since they regard it as futile” (B. Levy, 2022, p. 99). It didn’t take me long to think of people in my life who hold negative age beliefs and who eschew preventative medical care and other behaviors that benefit health, such as regular exercise, healthy eating, and good sleep. I can also think of many who hold positive age beliefs and who engage in healthy behaviors.

We also cannot dismiss the power of having a reason to live. In cultures that are more collectivist, people are more likely to live in multigenerational households where elders are more likely to be highly respected. “Japanese children…are taught to enjoy and look forward to spending time with their elders…and many characters in folktales for children are older people who give off a sense of infectious happiness and contentment” (B. Levy, 2022, p. 106). There are some examples of valued elders in American and British literature, but they stand out because they are the exceptions, such as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, Dumbledore and McGonagall in Harry Potter, and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. None of these characters, though, is your average grandparent. They all have special skills.

Conclude this class discussion by asking students to work in small groups to generate three to five ideas for how they could develop more positive age beliefs, or if they already have positive age beliefs, how they could encourage others to develop them.

References

Levy, B. (2022). Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live (First edition). William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Levy, B. R., Moffat, S., Resnick, S. M., Slade, M. D., & Ferrucci, L. (2016). Buffer against cumulative stress: Positive age self-stereotypes predict lower cortisol across 30 years. GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry, 29(3), 141–146. https://doi.org/10.1024/1662-9647/a000149

During the COVID lockdown, Yale psychological scientist Brian Scholl “found himself reacting unexpectedly to two of his colleagues. One was a close collaborator with whom Scholl usually saw eye to eye, and the other was someone whose opinions tended to differ from his own. On that particular day, though, he found himself siding with the latter colleague” (Nuwer, 2025, p. 18). After the meeting, it occurred to Scholl that his close collaborator “had been using the junky built-in microphone of an old laptop, whereas the one with whom he typically disagreed had called in from a professional-grade home-recording studio” (Nuwer, 2025, p. 18). Could audio quality affect our perceptions of others?

Give your students this scenario.

You have a big job interview coming up. It is going to be held on Zoom. For your classes that are held using web conferencing apps, you’ve been using your laptop’s built-in microphone. It doesn’t sound very good, but it gets the job done. For this interview—and potentially other interviews—is it worth paying for a higher quality mic?

Researchers wondered the same thing. Could the quality of our microphones affect how other people perceive us?

Ask students to work in small groups to design a study that would test this. First, students need to decide on their dependent variable(s). What kinds of perceptions do they think might be influenced by mic quality? And then they need to create operational definitions for each dependent variable.

Next, their independent variable will be microphone quality. Students need to decide what levels they will have for their independent variable and the operational definitions for each level.

After the discussion has died down, invite volunteers from each group to share their experimental designs.

Next, share with students this open-access study conducted by researchers at Yale and the University of British Columbia (Walter-Terrill et al., 2025). Researchers randomly assigned volunteers to hear either a clear recording made with a high-quality mic or a distorted recording. The recording was the same one. For the distorted version, the researchers manipulated the clear recording to emulate poor mic quality without compromising comprehension. (Download the clear and distorted recordings.) For this study, the dependent variable was hireability: “What is the likelihood that you would hire this person?” (Walter-Terrill et al., 2025, p. 5). The volunteers were shown a bar and were asked to use a mouse to slide a marker on a scale that was anchored on either end with “Very Unlikely” (0) and “Very Likely” (100). The volunteers who heard a clear recording rated their likelihood of hiring, on average, at 76. Those who heard the distorted recording rated the person’s hireability at 68.5.

The researchers went on to do additional studies that evaluated audio quality on judgments of romantic desirability, credibility, and intelligence. In all cases, the clear recording was rated higher than the distorted recording (Walter-Terrill et al., 2025).

If time allows, ask students, based on this research, if they think the quality of the instructor’s microphone could affect student perceptions of instructors? Or could the quality of a student’s microphone affect instructor perceptions of a student? Do you have any students who might be interested in taking on either or both research projects?

References

Nuwer, R. (2025). Mic drop. Scientific American, 333(1), 18–19. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican072025-OLZyx4Fhf28IWyWOQWuMi

Walter-Terrill, R., Ongchoco, J. D. K., & Scholl, B. J. (2025). Superficial auditory (dis)fluency biases higher-level social judgment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(13), e2415254122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2415254122

This is the sixth in a series of posts based on Becca Levy’s book Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live.

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Near the end of chapter five, which is on mental health, Becca Levy introduces us to Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench. The idea came from Dixon Chibanda, one of only 12 psychiatrists in Zimbabwe, a country of 14 million people. After realizing that grandmothers were a reliable yet untapped resource, “He came up with the idea of teaching grandmothers to offer villagers talk therapy on a park bench in a safe and discreet outdoor place in the community” (Levy, 2022). In Zimbabwe, older adults are greatly respected. People will listen to them. The Friendship Bench grandmothers receive eight days of training by the “clinical team in the evidence based Problem Solving Therapy approach” (FAQ, n.d.). (Read more about problem solving therapy.) The Zimbabwe Friendship Bench has been so successful with its 800 volunteer grandmothers that the model is now used in Malawi, Botswana, and Zanzibar (Levy, 2022).

Questions for classroom discussion

1. Have you ever gone to a grandparent or other similarly-aged older adult for advice? Why or why not?
2. Would a Friendship Bench staffed by grandmothers and grandfathers be successful in your community? Why or why not?
3. Would a Friendship Bench staffed by grandmothers and grandfathers be successful on our campus? Why or why not?
4. If there were a Friendship Bench program on campus, identify the three best locations for the benches. Explain.

As I sat down at my computer to write this post, The Washington Post dropped this article into my inbox. The article describes the Misericordia Place Life Advice Line.

You can call 204-788-8060 and hear prerecorded messages from the residents on various topics. Press 1 for Carl’s advice on following your dreams. Press 3 for Randy’s wisdom on how to grow in new ways (he joined some clubs and got a girlfriend). Press 4 for guidance on surviving Winnipeg winters (if possible, don’t be there). Press 0 for Cheryl’s tips on being true to yourself (“it’s you who has to live with yourself later”) (Penman, 2025).

“Misericordia Place is a 100-bed warm and inviting personal care home, providing quality care 24 hours a day” (“Misericordia Place,” 2025).

For those of you wanting to build more authentic assessments into your courses, here’s an idea. Ask students to work in small groups to identify questions students might like some advice on. Invite students to find people over, say, 80 years old to answer the questions. For example, for relationship questions, the student could visit a local senior center and invite someone who has been married for over 50 years to share their advice. Your institution’s center for alumni might have people on its contact list who would be willing to answer career questions.

The answers are recorded, either video or audio. Be sure your students get permission from each interviewee to use their recording. If your institution does not have such a release form, here is a sample video release document.

Students, next, will edit their recordings to be no more than, say, three minutes long. Review each recording to make sure the content is appropriate and that the interviewee has not revealed anything overly private.

Once the recordings have been approved by you, the groups will need to post their recordings to a publicly accessible location, such as a private YouTube channel, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Next, students will need to create a QR code for each recording. (If students use short.io to create the QR codes, they can track the number of views.) For each recording, students will design a poster for each question that includes, at a minimum, the question or topic and the QR code. Work with your institution to find out how to get your student groups permission to put up the posters.

Could such a project reduce ageist beliefs amongst your students? Or amongst those who watch the recordings? Those are empirical questions worthy of publication.

References

FAQ. (n.d.). Friendship Bench. Retrieved September 14, 2025, from https://www.friendshipbenchzimbabwe.org/services-faq

Levy, B. (2022). Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live (First edition). William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Misericordia Place. (2025). Misericordia Health Centre. https://misericordia.mb.ca/programs/long-term-care/misericordia-place/

Penman, M. (2025, September 12). Need advice? Call these older folks for tips on love, dating and moose hunting. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2025/09/12/seniors-hotline-advice-misericordia-place-canada/

This is the fifth in a series of posts based on Becca Levy’s book Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live.

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Our risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease is influenced by the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene. The three most common variants of the gene are ε2, ε3, and ε4. The e2 variant, which occurs in about 10% of the population (B. Levy, 2022), is protective. It reduces our risk of developing Alzheimer’s. The ε3 variant is the most common, and it seems to have no impact on developing Alzheimer’s. The ε4 variant, which occurs in 15% to 25% of the population (ALZinfo.org, 2024), however, increases our risk and is associated with more severe symptoms (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2025). “Having at least one APOE ε4 variant doubles or triples the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease. Having two APOE ε4 variants increases that risk even more. Someone with two APOE ε4 variants is 8 to 12 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease” (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2025). That’s sobering.

While having APOE ε4 increases our risk for Alzheimer’s, it doesn’t guarantee we will develop it. Becca Levy wondered if positive age beliefs could be one reason why. She and her colleagues analyzed the data from 4,765 people who were 60 years old or older and who showed no signs of dementia at baseline. Through genetic testing, they found that 26% of their participants (n=1,250) had at least one APOE ε4 variant (the one that increases risk). Four years later, some of the participants in the survey had developed symptoms of dementia. But get this. “Among those with APOE ε4, those with positive age beliefs were 49.8% less likely to develop dementia than those with negative age beliefs” (B. R. Levy et al., 2018, p. 1). Reread that sentence. That is nothing short of astounding. One explanation Levy offers is that the culprit may ultimately be stress (B. Levy, 2022). If we believe that aging will be a horrific experience, each passing year will be dreaded more than the last. I can see where that would wear on a person. However, if we believe that aging will be a positive experience, each passing year will be welcomed as an additional year of wisdom and experience. Positive age beliefs may flip the epigenetic switch such that the APOE ε4 gene expression is turned off (B. R. Levy et al., 2018).

Levy wondered if positive age beliefs could boost the protective effects of the APOE ε2 gene. She and her colleagues analyzed the data from 3,895 people who were 60 years old or older and who had 8 years’ worth of cognitive assessments. From this group, they found 13% (n=490) had at least one APOE ε2 variant (the one that decreases risk for Alzheimer’s disease). While positive age beliefs were associated with stronger cognition scores for those who did not have the ε2 variant, positive age beliefs were associated with even stronger cognition scores for those who had the ε2 variant (B. R. Levy et al., 2020).

Regardless of which APOE variant we have, positive age beliefs benefit us. The more I read about positive age beliefs, the more convinced I am that we need to scrub the ageist crap from our interactions with our students, our family, our friends, our casual acquaintances, and our own self-talk.

References

ALZinfo.org. (2024, May 15). A new genetic form of Alzheimer’s disease? Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation. https://www.alzinfo.org/articles/diagnosis/a-new-genetic-form-of-alzheimers-disease/

Levy, B. (2022). Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live (First edition). William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Pietrzak, R. H., & Ferrucci, L. (2018). Positive age beliefs protect against dementia even among elders with high-risk gene. PLOS ONE, 13(2), e0191004. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191004

Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Pietrzak, R. H., & Ferrucci, L. (2020). When culture influences genes: Positive age beliefs amplify the cognitive-aging benefit of APOE ε2. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 75(8), e198–e203. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbaa126

Mayo Clinic Staff. (2025, April 24). The role of genes in your Alzheimer’s risk. Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/in-depth/alzheimers-genes/art-20046552

I’m thrilled to announce that this article just published: 

Bernstein, D. A., & Frantz, S. (2025). Teaching an introductory psychology course that matters. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001597

If you don’t have access to the American Psychologist, you can access the article on ResearchGate. The American Psychological Association added a pdf of the article to the page. To access it, scroll down on the ResearchGate page and click on the “Publisher Full-text” tab.

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog or have heard me speak in the last few years, you know that I’m a proponent of Intro Psych reform. This blog is called Psych Matters because psychology does matter, and the Intro Psych course is where we can convey that message to the most people. But the content we teach is not always the content which matters most.

We have all fallen into the trap of teaching certain content because that’s what other faculty teach or because that’s what is in the textbook we use. A lot of what we have historically taught has good value, but not all of it. As you teach the course this fall, ask yourself as you prep for each class, “Do people really need to know all of this? And what I am not teaching that my students really need to know?”

Our time with our students is finite. “Whenever we choose to teach something in a course, we are choosing not to teaching something else” (Bernstein & Frantz, 2025, p. 7).

Postscript: I am deeply grateful to my friend Doug Bernstein for his masterful research and writing skills and for insisting that this was a worthwhile project.

Reference

Bernstein, D. A., & Frantz, S. (2025). Teaching an introductory psychology course that matters. American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001597