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 →

Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research

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In: 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

Are you looking for new ways to introduce original psychological research to your Intro Psych students? In this freely available journal article, authors identified 14 articles from the open access Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, each relevant to one of 14 typical chapters in an Intro Psych textbook (Rouse et al., 2025). For each identified article, the authors provide the reference information for the article, the abstract, key terms, and five questions. The questions are intended to be used by an instructor to prompt students to reflect on each of the sections of a journal article. For example, for an article on procrastination (GregoryRead 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 →

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 →

Cannabis silhouette clip art psd

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In: 05. Consciousness, Intro to Psych

An estimated 43.6 million people in the U.S. who are 12 or older—that’s 15.4%—reported using marijuana in the last month. The largest group of people who used in the last month? They would be 18 to 25 year olds; 25.2% (8.6 million or so) (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024a). How about daily use? In 2023, an estimated 15.7 million people in the U.S. who are 12 or older—that’s 5.6%—reported using marijuana daily or almost daily. The largest group of daily users? Yes, that would be 18 to 25 year olds again; 9.2% (3.1 million or so) (Substance Abuse and Mental Health ServicesRead More →