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 →

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 →

close up photo of person holding pizza

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In: 07. Learning, 13. Psychological Disorders, Intro to Psych

It’s another fall Sunday in the U.S., so it’s another day of TV commercials featuring NFL players. I know that being a middle-aged woman does not make me the target demographic, but the Little Caesars ad featuring George Kittle still rankles. Let me get this out of the way first. Yes, that is Caesars plural, not Caesar’s possessive. I can make peace with that. I can believe that there are a bunch of little Caesars, not just one who has pizza. Now for the commercial. Give it a watch. Again, I recognize I’m not the demographic, but I don’t understand how watching 11 people (includingRead More →