Four stick figures with empty speech bubbles

In this fun article from the New York Times*, the writer introduces us to the concept of familect (or, if you prefer, familylect) (Abebe, 2026). Yes, this post is about language, and I know that survey research tells us that only 41% of Intro Psych instructors cover language (Richmond et al., 2021), but I also have a place for this in the social psychology chapter. Stick with me! A dialect is language shared by people who live in or come from the same region. In 2013, the New York Times published a dialect quiz for people who live in the United States. I grew up in western PennsylvaniaRead More →

assorted books on shelf

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

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 →