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In: 08. Memory & Cognition, Intro to Psych, Teaching Thoughts

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 differentRead More →

Black cube

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In: Teaching Thoughts, Technology for Academics

  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 willingRead More →

AI-generated image of a child hunched over, leaning on a cane with wild grey hair and cardigan

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In: 06. Development, 11. Social Psychology, 12. Stereotypes, Prejudice, & Discrimination, Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych

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. **** Ageism is alive and well. In Breaking the Age Code (Levy, 2022), I learned that some K-12 schools celebrate the 100th 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 beliefsRead More →

teacher giving the test results to his students

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In: Intro to Psych, Teaching Thoughts

  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 conceptRead More →

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In: Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych, Teaching Thoughts

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 theirRead More →

man in gray long sleeve shirt sitting on brown wooden chair

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In: 06. Development, 10. Emotions & Motivation, 12. Stereotypes, Prejudice, & Discrimination, Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych

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. **** 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 livesRead More →

shallow focus photography of black microphone

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In: 02. Research Methods, 06. Social Perception, 11. Social Psychology, Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych

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 audioRead More →

brown wooden park bench under green leaf tree during sunset

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In: 06. Development, 14. Therapy, Intro to Psych

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. **** 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 inRead More →

modern dna sculpture in valencia science museum

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In: 03. Biopsych, 06. Development, Intro to Psych

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. **** 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 inRead More →

American Psychologist header

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In: Intro to Psych

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 isRead More →

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