Red Bull crew member looking at Red Bull logo

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In: 10. Emotions & Motivation, Intro to Psych

It’s not unusual to see professional athletes lose their composure. Given the intensity of emotions athletes may experience during competition, it’s a wonder that more athletes don’t lose their cool or that it doesn’t happen more often. During the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix, Red Bull’s driver, Max Verstappen, lost his cool. After a series of frustrating incidents on the track, Verstappen intentionally rammed another car (Gitlin, 2025). After describing the following five emotion regulation strategies (McRae & Gross, 2020), invite students to work in small groups to identify which strategies Verstappen could have used in the moment that may have helped him not attack anotherRead More →

Exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education

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

While in Washington, DC, for the Association for Psychological Science annual convention, I took an afternoon to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I was especially interested in seeing the exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education which features the Mamie Phipps Clark doll study (Concourse C, Level 2: “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom, 1876-1968”)–and it was her study. In a later interview, Kenneth Clark said, “the record should show [it] was Mamie’s primary project that I crashed. I sort of piggybacked on it” (Rothberg, 2022). While what is here at the museum is largely—but not entirely—accurate, I’m sorry that they didn’tRead More →

red white and black labeled box

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In: 02. Research Methods, 05. Attitudes, Behavior, & Persuasion, 11. Social Psychology, Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych

Unnamed researchers at the University of Zurich created 34 false Reddit accounts that represented diverse demographics, such as “a male rape survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black person who disagreed with the Black Lives Matter movement” (O’Grady, 2025, p. 570). From these accounts, the researchers posted AI-generated content in the changemyview subreddit. Their hypothesis was that if AI used information about the person who originally posted their point of view, AI could create a more persuasive argument. After 1,500 posts over four months, the researchers reported that their AI-generated posts resulted in more deltas, which are what readers give for posts that were influentialRead More →

close up shot of a toddlers feet

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In: 02. Research Methods, Intro to Psych

In Agnes, a comic strip by Tony Cochran, the protagonist is an eccentric little girl who lives with her grandmother and who often shares her quirky ideas with her best friend, a girl nicknamed Trout. In the May 17, 2025 strip, Agnes is sitting on the floor of her classroom with her shoes off. When asked to get back into her seat, Agnes explains that she was just “giving the toes a bit of the old ‘tug-a-roo’ because doing so “aids cognition and promotes relaxation.” The last panel is a common one for Agnes—she is visiting the principal’s office. In Intro Psych, after covering experimentsRead More →

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In: 02. Research Methods, 05. Consciousness, 06. Development, 07. Learning, 10. Emotions & Motivation, 11. Social Psychology, Intro to Psych

In this New York Times article (gifted to you), the writer Frances Dodds tells us the tragic story of how her sister’s four children came to live with the writer’s parents, the children’s grandparents (Dodds, 2025). Grandparents being responsible for raising their grandchildren is not an unusual occurrence. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that in 2023, 2.1 million grandparents were doing so. With very little effort, I can think of many “grandfamilies” I currently know or have known, including neighbors, my extended family, colleagues, and students. In my teaching and writing, I try to honor such families by referring to caregivers rather than parents. WhenRead More →

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In: 05. Attitudes, Behavior, & Persuasion, 11. Social Psychology, Intro to Psych, Principles of Social Psych

Regardless of which side of the political divide you or your students stand on, here is a real-world example of cognitive dissonance. “[F]rom 2012-2023, about half of all new [electric vehicle] registrations in the U.S. went to the 10% most Democratic counties” (Davis et al., 2025, p. 1). However, an early 2025 poll found that only 12% of Democrats have a favorable opinion of Elon Musk (Kiley & Asheer, 2025), the owner of Tesla, Inc. Those data make it unsurprising that Tesla sales are in down in states that lean politically toward Democrats, such as California (Sriram, 2025). If the politics of a company’s ownerRead More →

KADAMS flip timer with pen in foreground for scale

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In: 04. Sensation & Perception, Intro to Psych

I am spending so much time looking at my computer screen these days that I was really feeling it in my eyes. Eye strain is real. My eyes were feeling tired and achy. I’ve known how to prevent eye strain for years, but I’ve never needed it. The 20-20-20 rule is straightforward. Every 20 minutes, look at least 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds. Easy peasy. I have a big window in my home office, so it’s easy to look 20+ feet away. I can count to 20, so I had the 20 seconds covered. Now, how best to remind myself to doRead More →

notebook

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In: 05. Consciousness, Intro to Psych

When I cover chronotypes in Intro Psych, I tell my students about the research that found that employees whose work schedules match their chronotypes have higher work satisfaction (Amini et al., 2021). I’ve always been a morning person. Even as an adolescent, I routinely awakened at 6am without an alarm. Now, deep into adulthood, I routinely awake around 4:30am. Interestingly, to me anyway, that time had been 5:30am, but my brain seems to have never adjusted after last fall’s time change. So, 4:30am it is. As a college student, I preferred taking the early morning classes. As a college professor, I preferred teaching the earlyRead More →

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In: 03. Biopsych, 08. Relationships, Intro to Psych

The National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP) is later this week. I’ve previously written (Frantz, 2023): I’ll confess that well before I retired my primary purpose for attending conferences was to meet with my friends and make new friends. In SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the author and Roman historian Mary Beard tells us that Polybius (200 BCE – 118 BCE) supposedly advised a young man, “Never come back from the Forum…until you have made at least one new friend” (Beard, 2016, p. 184) I was reminded of this recently when I read the (freely available) Working Life essay at the endRead More →

people in a concert

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

My wife and I took a cruise in 2024. On the last evening, several members of the crew put on a show. Groups of crew members who shared a home country performed popular national dances. This got me thinking about whether the United States had something that could be considered a national dance. If you’d like, take a few minutes to discuss. Does the U.S. have something that could be a national dance? Years ago, we had a friend who visited India. The group she was visiting showed her how to do one of their national dances. Afterwards, they asked her to teach her aRead More →