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 →

person going up the stairs

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In: 02. Research Methods, 04. Self, 06. Development, 12. Stereotypes, Prejudice, & Discrimination, Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych

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. **** 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 etRead More →

side view photo of elderly man holding a paint brush

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In: 02. Research Methods, 06. Development, Intro to Psych

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. ******* 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 playRead More →

photo of old woman sitting while talking with another woman

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In: 01. Welcome to Psych, 06. Development, 12. Stereotypes, Prejudice, & Discrimination, Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych

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. ******* 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 weRead More →

smiling man and woman wearing jackets

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

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 BreakingRead More →

American dollar, money & banking

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In: 07. Learning, 14. Therapy, Intro to Psych

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 barRead More →

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In: 04. Sensation & Perception, Intro to Psych

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,Read More →

assorted books on shelf

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In: 01. Welcome to Psych, 02. Research Methods, 03. Biopsych, 04. Sensation & Perception, 05. Consciousness, 06. Development, 07. Learning, 08. Memory & Cognition, 09. Intelligence & Language, 10. Emotions & Motivation, 11. Social Psychology, 12. Personality, 13. Psychological Disorders, 14. Therapy, Intro to Psych

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 thinkRead More →