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

This is the fourth 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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In my last post, I wrote about how beliefs about aging can affect memory now and even a whopping 38 years later. Researchers have found similar results for physical functioning.

Becca Levy and  colleagues “found that those with more positive self-perceptions of aging in 1975 reported better functional health from 1977 to 1995, when we controlled for baseline measures of functional health, self-rated health, age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status” (B. R. Levy et al., 2002). Was it just that those with better functional health were more likely to have more positive age beliefs? Nope. Age beliefs predicted later functional health; functional health did not predict age beliefs.

If you’re sharing this research with students, invite students to work in small groups to create an operational definition of functional health. For that study, researchers used the Health Scale for the Aged (Rosow & Breslau, 1966). With only a few questions, it provides a self-assessment of functional health. For example, are you healthy enough, on your own, to walk up and down stairs or to walk half a mile. If you’re unable to access the original paper for the scale, Google Images returned an image of  the scale that was published in a more recent article (Slaninka & Galbraith, 2013).

Since the longitudinal study Levy and colleagues conducted was correlational, they wondered if functional health could be improved with a priming intervention in an experiment. Research participants over the age of 60 were subliminally primed with words associated with positive age stereotypes seven times over an eight-week period. Over the course of the study, the participants’ physical functioning (observed performance of strength, gait, and balance tasks) improved as compared to participants in the control group who received neutral primes. In turn, as the study progressed, the positive-prime participants expressed fewer negative attitudes about aging (B. R. Levy et al., 2014). When older adults are fed positive messages about aging, they regain physical functioning which results in fewer negative attitudes about aging.

Levy and colleagues conducted one more longitudinal study. Again, the results were nothing short of remarkable. Volunteers who were 70 years old and older were interviewed monthly for 129 months. At the beginning of the study, they were asked “When you think of old persons, what are the first 5 words or phrases that come to mind?” (B. R. Levy et al., 2012, p. 1972). Responses were coded, and participants were assigned a score from 1 (most negative) to 5 (most positive). Now, here’s the thing. Lots of bad stuff can happen to people in 129 months. The researchers selected a sample of 598 people from this larger study. To be included in the sample, the participants had to have experienced in those 10 plus years at least one month of disability (required help with bathing, dressing, walking, or moving from bed to chair). Get this. “Older persons with positive age stereotypes were 44% more likely to fully recover from severe disability than those with negative age stereotypes” (B. R. Levy et al., 2012, p. 1973).

“Age beliefs can be a source of security and strength as older people go through disability and eventual recovery” (B. Levy, 2022, p. 56). As I wrote in an earlier post, “Fostering positive attitudes about aging in traditionally-aged college students could result in those same students having a much higher quality of life when they reach older adulthood.” The impact, however, may be even more immediate. If one of your 18-year-old students adopts more positive attitudes about aging, their attitudes may affect the attitudes of their parents and grandparents.

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., Pilver, C., Chung, P. H., & Slade, M. D. (2014). Subliminal strengthening: Improving older individuals’ physical function over time with an implicit-age-stereotype intervention. Psychological Science, 25(12), 2127–2135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614551970

Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., & Kasl, S. V. (2002). Longitudinal benefit of positive self-perceptions of aging on functional health. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 57(5), P409–P417. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/57.5.P409

Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Murphy, T. E., & Gill, T. M. (2012). Association between positive age stereotypes and recovery from disability in older persons. JAMA, 308(19), 1972–1973. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.14541

Rosow, I., & Breslau, N. (1966). A Guttman Health Scale for the Aged. Journal of Gerontology, 21(4), 556–559. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronj/21.4.556

Slaninka, S. C., & Galbraith, A. M. (2013). Healthy endings: A collaborative health promotion project for the elderly. Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 24(9), 35–42. https://doi.org/10.3928/0098-9134-19980901-12

This is the third 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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When research participants over the age of 60 were subliminally primed with words associated with wisdom, e.g., sage, accomplished, astute, they performed better on memory tests. When primed with words associated with senility, e.g., dementia, confused, decrepit, the participants performed worse. When younger participants were primed with the same words, they showed no difference in memory test performance (B. Levy, 1996).

While that study demonstrated a short-term effect, Levy wondered how this would play out over a lifetime. Her daughter helpfully suggested that she use a time machine to go back many years to find out what people believed about aging before returning to the present to find out what those same people believed now (B. Levy, 2022). While a time machine would certainly speed up longitudinal research, our physicists have not yet created such a machine, as far as I know.

Levy did the next best thing. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) started in 1958. Their over 3,200 participants (About the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, 2018) are assessed with a battery of physical and cognitive tests every one to four years (BLSA Study Design and Measures, 2023). Levy learned that in its very first year, the researchers included the Attitude Toward Older Persons scale (B. Levy, 2022). Let’s pause for a minute to consider what a gold mine Levy discovered. In 1958, research participants shared their attitudes about aging, and then over the next 38 years, those same research participants took a whole host of memory tests. What Levy found was nothing short of remarkable (B. R. Levy et al., 2012). She writes, “[P]eople who held positive age beliefs from the outset went on to experience 30 percent better memory scores in old age than their peers with negative age beliefs…[T]his was even greater than the influence of other factors on memory such as age, physical health, and years of education” (B. Levy, 2022, p. 37).

Because the BLSA is an observational study, we don’t know for certain that attitudes about aging in early life caused strong memory test performance. However, when those results are combined with the experimental research, such as Levy’s 1996 priming study that opened this article, it gives one pause.

Fostering positive attitudes about aging in traditionally-aged college students could result in those same students having a much higher quality of life when they reach older adulthood.

While both of Levy’s studies discussed here would fit well in the Intro Psych lifespan chapter, they would also work in the research methods chapter as an example of how experimental and correlational research can work together to help researchers better understand people.

References

About the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. (2018, July 27). National Institute on Aging. https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/labs/blsa/about

BLSA study design and measures. (2023, February 22). National Institute on Aging. https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/labs/blsa/study-design-and-measures

Levy, B. (1996). Improving memory in old age through implicit self-stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(6), 1092–1107.

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., Zonderman, A. B., Slade, M. D., & Ferrucci, L. (2012). Memory shaped by age stereotypes over time. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 67(4), 432–436. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbr120

This is the second 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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Psychological scientist Becca Levy’s stereotype embodiment theory “proposes that negative age beliefs bring about detrimental health effects that are often, and misleadingly, characterized as the inevitable consequences of aging. At the same time, positive age beliefs do the exact opposite; they benefit our health” (Levy, 2022, p. 15).

Reread the above paragraph. The societal messages that tell us about the horrors of aging are slowly killing us.

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that we begin to internalize these messages in childhood, an internalization that continues through adolescence and adulthood.  This internalized stereotype operates below our conscious awareness. As we perceive the stereotype to be more relevant to us, it affects us even more. Lastly, and most importantly for the purposes of this blog post, stereotypes about aging “impact our health through psychological, biological, and behavioral pathways” (Levy, 2022, p. 15).

The American Psychological Association has identified seven integrative themes (APA, 2022), a structure that is very helpful for thinking about how and what we teach in Intro Psych. Of particular relevance to this post is theme #3: “Psychological, biological, social, and cultural factors influence behavior and mental processes.”

After discussing the reality of aging in the lifespan chapter of your Intro Psych course or as an example of theme #3 early in your course, introduce students to Levy’s stereotype embodiment theory. Next, share with students some of the cultural, social, psychological, and biological factors that contribute to it:  

Cultural factors: Many of us live in a culture where ageism is a socially acceptable prejudice (Weir, 2023). The message is clear: Being old is bad.

Social factors: When our friends, family, and acquaintances make dismissive “OK, Boomer” comments, older people feel less valued. In fact, that seems to be the goal of the person saying “OK, Boomer” (Frey & Bisconti, 2023).

Psychological factors: Once we internalize the cultural message that being old is bad, it is hard to feel good about oneself.

Biological factors: Levy and her colleagues have “found that negative age beliefs can increase biological markers of stress…Over time, more frequent and higher spikes in stress biomarkers can lead to earlier death” (Levy, 2022, pp. 18–19).

Talking about stereotype embodiment theory not only gets us to think about how our attitudes about aging affect our own life trajectory and outcomes, but also how our attitudes may affect others, including those we love dearly.

References

APA. (2022). Psychology’s Integrative Themes. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrad/introductory-psychology-initiative/student-learning-outcomes-poster.pdf

Frey, K. T., & Bisconti, T. L. (2023). “Older, entitled, and extremely out-of-touch”: Does “OK, boomer” signify the emergence of a new older adult stereotype? Journal of Applied Gerontology, 42(6), 1200–1211. https://doi.org/10.1177/07334648231154044

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.

Weir, K. (2023, March 1). Ageism is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices. Psychologists are working to change that. Monitor on Psychology. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/03/cover-new-concept-of-aging

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about aging. Several years ago, I had a friend in her 80s tell me that internally she didn’t feel any different than she did when she was in her 40s. While I’m gaining distance from my 40s but still quite a ways away from my 80s, I understand what she was telling me. I feel no different today than I did when I was in my 40s, and I don’t see that changing. What I do see changing is how others interact with the me that they I assume I am.

My wife read Becca Levy’s 2022 book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live and highly recommended it. The late career and retired educators affinity group through the Society for the Teaching of Psychology has had two synchronous meetings this year, and our discussions prompted me to pick up Levy’s book.

When I mentioned to a colleague that we should spend more time in Intro Psych talking about late adulthood, they said that that wasn’t necessary since late adulthood was so far away from where our typical college student is now. First, I taught in community colleges for over 30 years. I had many students who were deep into their 50s and older. This was not a hypothetical stage of life for them. Second, younger people interact with older people all the time—older relatives, older neighbors, older co-workers, plus older strangers on public transit, in restaurants, and in stores. Most importantly, younger people need to know that the first person who calls me “young lady” is going to get punched in the face. Okay, that’s unlikely. I’ve never hit anyone and am unlikely to start, but they need to know that I will really, really want to punch them in the face. But I’m ahead of myself.

Becca Levy teaches a Health and Aging course. She reports that she begins the course “by asking [her] students to think of an older person and list the first five words or phrases that come to mind. It can be someone real or imagined” (Levy, 2022, p. 9). What a great way to open a discussion on late adulthood in the Intro Psych lifespan chapter! Once your students have their lists, do as Levy does and ask your students to tally up how many of their items were positive and how many were negative. Next, invite students to work in small groups to identify how they may have developed their ideas about older adults. Once discussion dies down, ask a volunteer from each group to share where their ideas may have come from.

There are a number of factors that influence our perceptions of older adults (Gire, 2019). Largely, it comes down to who we see and what we hear. For example, if we live with an older adult who is physically and socially active, we are more likely to assume older adults, in general, are physically and socially active. Similarly, if our primary exposure to messages about aging comes from social media or mass media, then our attitudes are more likely to reflect those messages.

How we think about others certainly influences how we interact with them. However, the interesting thing about aging is that with some luck, we will become a member of that aged group. The next post in this series will explore the stereotype embodiment theory which describes how our beliefs about age affect our own health.

References

Gire, J. T. (2019). Cultural variations in perceptions of aging. In K. D. Keith (Ed.), Cross‐Cultural Psychology (pp. 216–240). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119519348.ch8

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.

What information do public policy makers need to help them decide if we should use public funds to pay people who are addicted to recreational drugs to stay clean?

Before giving students this question, provide a bit of background.

With opioid addiction, drug treatment providers have medications that can help suppress cravings. With reduced cravings, a person with the addiction can work on the life changes needed to stay off opioids for good. However, with some drugs, such as methamphetamine, there are no such medications.

Operant conditioning research tells us that if you want a rat to learn to press a bar, the initial bar presses must be reinforced immediately. If we wait until, say, bar press 78 to provide the first reinforcement, bar press 78 will never come. Our rat will have given up on bar pressing long before then. To bring this closer to the lives of your students, ask them to imagine having a job where they don’t get paid for a year. How long do they think they would continue working before giving up?

Similarly, there are inherent rewards that come with staying away from recreational drugs, such as stable employment, stable housing, and stable relationships, but there can be a long time between stopping drug use and reaping those rewards (78 bar presses!). Contingency management treatment provides rewards for those initial efforts at staying drug free and continues those rewards until the bigger rewards of life stability fall into place. We can think of such programs as a way to bridge the reinforcement gap. When program participants demonstrate that they have not used since their last test, they receive (what is expected to be) positive reinforcement.

Invite students to work in small groups to answer this question: What information do public policy makers need to help them decide if we should use public funds to reinforce people who are addicted to drugs to stay clean?

Students may want to know how much money it takes to provide reinforcement. The programs typically ramp up reinforcement with small amounts at the beginning and larger amounts the longer a person stays clear. As reported in a (gifted to you) New York Times article, program participants “typically come in twice a week for a urine drug screen. If they test negative, they are immediately handed a small reward: a modest store voucher, a prize or debit card cash. The longer they abstain from use, the greater the rewards” (Hoffman, 2025). One program reported in that article gave $10 for the first clean test and $12.50 for the second one later that week.

A meta-analysis of 23 studies (32 contingency treatments for a variety of drugs) found that 91% of the treatments increased the size of the reinforcement with each successful drug screening. The frequency of reinforcement was from one to seven times per week. The average amount of money that a person could earn over the span of the treatment was $914.46; the median was $466 (Ginley et al., 2021).

Students may want to know how many participants remain drug free after the program ends. One meta-analysis found that “participants who received CM evidenced a 22% greater likelihood of abstinence at a median of 24 weeks after reinforcement ended than participants receiving comparison treatments” (Ginley et al., 2021, p. 65).

If time allows, conclude this discussion by asking students to consider how contingency management treatments could work for other life changes, such as eating better or exercising more. These are areas of our lives where the inherent rewards of better health and greater mobility come much later—78 bar presses later. Invite students to work in small groups to design a research study that would investigate the use of contingency management for exercise or eating better. The design should specify reward frequency, reward amounts (increases over time?), the behavior being rewarded, length of the program, measure of effectiveness, evaluation of long-term effectiveness, and the identification of a control condition. At the conclusion of discussion, invite groups to share their research designs.

If you’d like your students to have some library database searching practice, ask students to find a study that addresses this research question. In a brief report, ask students how the study addressed each of the design elements asked above. The ones that are most likely to be missing are measures of long-term effectiveness and the presence of a control condition.

References

Ginley, M. K., Pfund, R. A., Rash, C. J., & Zajac, K. (2021). Long-term efficacy of contingency management treatment based on objective indicators of abstinence from illicit substance use up to 1 year following treatment: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 89(1), 58–71. https://doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000552

Hoffman, J. (2025, July 16). Upended by meth, some communities are paying users to quit. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/health/meth-addiction-treatment-contingency-management.html

Which do you see first? Rectangles or circles?

[Source: The Illusions Index]

Psychological scientist Anthony Norcia of The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute created the coffer illusion for the 2006 Illusion of the Year contest sponsored by the Neural Correlate Society. (Here is Norcia’s submission, which made their top ten list for that year.)

If you see the rectangles, you understand why it’s called the coffer illusion. Or at least you understand the coffer part if not yet the illusion part. A coffer is a chest. A coffered ceiling is made up of recessed rectangular panels such that it looks like a series of chests.

However, if you see the circles, all this business about rectangles and chests will mean nothing to you.

Before we go any further, let’s make sure everyone can see both the rectangles and the circles.

Now scroll back up to the original coffer illusion image. Can you now flip back and forth between rectangles and circles?

In preprint version 3, Ivan Kroupin and colleagues (2025) wondered if living in a world dominated by rectangles, e.g., rectangular buildings, would predispose viewers of the coffer illusion to see rectangles first. In contrast, they wondered if living in a world dominated by circles, e.g., round huts, would predispose viewers to see circles first.

The researchers asked online participants residing in the United States and the United Kingdom to report what shapes they saw. Researchers visited two locations in northern Namibia to ask participants in person. One location, Opuwo, is semi-urban while the other, Himba, was rural.

Once participants identified a shape (rectangles or circles), they were asked if they saw any other shapes. Participants could take as long as they wished to respond.

(Numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding.)

The researchers provide a wonderful example of the different lenses the participants and the researchers brought to the coffer illusion.

When the researchers asked one participant

“’What do you see here?’ our participant responded “Houses.’ This was a surprise to both the experimenter and translator since we assumed that she meant rectangles, and seeing rectangles first is very rare in the rural group (~4% in the final sample). However, when we asked her to point to the things she saw, she picked out all of the circles in the image. We asked her to draw what she saw and she drew a neat circle in the sand (n.b. this request to draw the image was not part of the final protocol). Clearly, the geometry we (the experimenter and translator) assumed to correspond to ‘houses’ is very different from the one assumed by our participant. Traditional Himba houses are circular” (p. 5).

The researchers report similarly stark differences in the perception of three other illusions: curvature blindness, café wall, and Gestalt shapes. All the results were fascinating, but the results that really struck me were from the Gestalt shapes illusion.

Participants were asked “What do you see here?” If they didn’t name a shape, the researchers prompted with “Do you see a [name of shape] here?”

The researchers note that “Urban environments are filled not only with angles but with standardized geometric shapes: perfect circles, triangles, and squares in everything from logos to packaging. Indeed, we explicitly teach our children to identify a range of these shapes in the visual environment” (p. 8).

The researchers note that while those living in the Himba village are more likely to see circular housing, that did not mean they were more likely to see the Gestalt circle. They wonder if seeing Gestalt shapes has less to do with squares, circles, and triangles, and more to do with a lack of exposure with inferring shapes from partial images.

The examples of cross-cultural differences in perception provided in this paper are just another set in a long line of examples (Phillips, 2019). It is, however, an excellent reminder that our environments shape what we perceive, and that you and I may not see things the same way.

References

Kroupin, I., Davis, H. E., Paredes Lopes, A. J., Konkle, T., & Muthukrishna, M. (2025). Visual illusions reveal wide range of cross-cultural differences in visual perception. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gxzcp_v3

Phillips, W. L. (2019). Cross‐cultural differences in visual perception of color, illusions, depth, and pictures. In K. D. Keith (Ed.), Cross-Cultural Psychology: Contemporary Themes and Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 375–397). Wiley Blackwell.

Intro Psych is the most difficult course we teach because we are not experts in the vast majority of the content. We rely on our Intro Psych textbooks—the one we adopted for our class and a stable of others that our students will never see—to help bring us up to speed in our weaker areas. Those who are lucky enough to have the funds go to conferences where they can hear experts who bring our knowledge up to date. For example at the 2025 Psych One Conference, we heard Kenneth Carter talk about how we can use high sensation-seeking behavior to help our students think about psychology’s big questions. We also heard from Kurt Gray about current research on morality. (I’m still thinking about the example he shared of people having sex with rotisserie chickens. Thanks, Kurt.)

Another rich source of knowledge are books written for a general audience by experts in psychology. If you weren’t in the audience for Carter’s talk, I encourage you to read his book Buzz! Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies. I’m about halfway through, and he has given me much to think about, especially as my wife and I work our way through all 37 seasons of The Amazing Race (streaming on Paramount+). We’re just finishing season 29. No spoilers, please!

If, a paragraph later, you, too, are still thinking about sex with rotisserie chickens, then I recommend Gray’s book Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. His book is next on my personal reading list.

Psychology high school teacher extraordinaire Christina Luzzi has her students write a review of a book that is heavily related to psychology but written for a general audience. If you’re interested in doing something similar, please check out Luzzi’s instructions. Or maybe you’re more of a book group kind of person. Here are some suggestions for running your own in-class book group(s). 

Even if you are just wanting to up your own Intro Psych knowledge, check out Luzzi’s list of over 100 books. Go to her instructions, and scroll down to the bottom of page 2. She has categorized the books by subject.

Not ready to spend (more!) money on books? Check your public or institutional library. If they don’t have the title you’re looking for, ask about interlibrary loan.