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Teaching Psychology Through Film, Video
You've been working your fingers to the bone all semester and it is time for a break. So, you come up with the great idea to show a film. One of your colleagues has recommended one highly. You plan to dim the lights, hit the play button, and quietly sit in the back of the classroom wishing for some popcorn. Sounds great - what could go wrong? The film starts and before you know it you find yourself wondering - how does this fit with the material I've been presenting? This question is reinforced when one of your better (and braver!) students asks the same question as the lights go up.
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Creating Cooperative Learning Environments
Cooperative learning is: a waste of time. a great way to avoid the hard work of lecturing. an ideal paradigm for lovers of social loafing. another left-wing harebrained idea advocated by aging hippies. some or all of the above. If you responded like many psychology professors, you agree that there is too much material to cover in your classes to waste time on cooperative learning, and you might want to add that students paid to learn from a real professor, not another (equally ignorant) student. Lecturing "works," so "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." In fact, lecturing does work well for some educational goals.
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People Would Rather Let Bad Things Happen Than Cause Them, Especially if Someone Is Watching
People are more comfortable committing sins of omission than commission—letting bad things happen rather than actively causing something bad. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that this is because they know other people will think worse of them if they do something bad than if they let something bad happen. “Omissions and commissions come up relatively frequently in everyday life, and we sometimes puzzle over them,” says moral psychologist Peter DeScioli of Brandeis University, who conducted the study with John Christner and Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Therapist-free therapy
The Economist: THE treatment, in the early 1880s, of an Austrian hysteric called Anna O is generally regarded as the beginning of talking-it-through as a form of therapy. But psychoanalysis, as this version of talk therapy became known, is an expensive procedure. Anna’s doctor, Josef Breuer, is estimated to have spent over 1,000 hours with her. Since then, things have improved. A typical course of a modern talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, consists of 12-16 hour-long sessions and is a reasonably efficient way of treating conditions like depression and anxiety (hysteria is no longer a recognised diagnosis). Medication, too, can bring rapid change.
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Secret to a happy marriage? Delusion.
The Boston Globe: We’ve all seen those mismatched couples — where the husband is 10 times better looking than the wife. Or where she’s an absolute sweetheart, and he’s a total jerk. What does she see in him?, we think. What does he see in her? If the couple is happily married, it could be that the better half of the couple has an idealistic vision of the lesser half. New research published in Psychological Science oddly enough finds that people who were, well, a bit delusional about their partners when they got married were more satisfied with their marriage three years later than those see-it-like-it-is realists. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Born-Again Feminism
Newsweek: Among life’s surreal experiences, few can compare with finding myself seated on a baroque bench, one of dozens lining the perimeter of an ornate drawing room in the palace of Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak in Abu Dhabi, chatting it up with three Ph.D.-endowed women sheathed in black abayas, sipping sweet hot tea and eating candies. “I think you Americans do not enjoy being women as much as we do,” said one, peering into my face with an earnestness one usually associates with grim news delivered to next of kin. Say what? Read the whole story: Newsweek
