Handbook of Demonstrations and Activities in the Teaching of Psychology

Volume III: Personality, Abnormal, Clinical-Counseling, and Social

Mark E. Ware, David E. Johnson, Mark E. Ware, David E. Johnson

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317759379
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For those who teach students in psychology, education, and the social sciences, the Handbook of Demonstrations and Activities in the Teaching of Psychology, Second Edition provides practical applications and rich sources of ideas. Revised to include a wealth of new material (56% of the articles are new), these invaluable reference books contain the collective experience of teachers who have successfully dealt with students' difficulty in mastering important concepts about human behavior. Each volume features a table that lists the articles and identifies the primary and secondary courses in which readers can use each demonstration. Additionally, the subject index facilitates retrieval of articles according to topical headings, and the appendix notes the source as it originally appeared in Teaching of Psychology --especially useful for users needing to cite information. The official journal of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Division Two of the American Psychological Association, Teaching of Psychology is a highly respected publication devoted to improving teaching and learning at all educational levels. Volume III consists of 95 articles about teaching personality, abnormal, clinical-counseling, and social psychology. Divided into four sections (one for each specialty), the book suggests ways to work with case studies, advocate a research perspective, use the arts and literature as teaching tools, and otherwise facilitate understanding of theoretical concepts.

Section IV:
Social

Focusing on Experimentation

Sandra Carpenter helped students examine societal trends in stereotyping by engaging them in a content analysis research project. Students identified a research problem, then collected data from sources such as music videos and magazines. This process enabled students to learn a variety of methodological concepts without the requirement of sophisticated technology. It also sensitized them to the ways that the media portray ethnic and minority groups.

Neil Lutsky devised a research paradigm for use in undergraduate laboratory experiments in social psychology. Students compared the responses of control subjects on a survey question to those of experimental subjects who had been exposed to contrived responses of another person to the same question. This methodology allowed the students to extend the scope of their studies to topics such as social comparison, impression management, and self-persuasion.

Daniel Wann asked groups of students in an undergraduate social psychology class to select two interesting experiments and develop a dramatic script to describe the research. Students located the props necessary to implement the experiment and performed the play for the class. Students enjoyed the exercise and believed it enhanced their learning and interest in psychological research.

Diane Symbaluk and Judy Cameron used a replication of Asch's (1946) and Kelley's (1950) classic studies on impression formation to help students learn about the process of conducting research. The technique involved the students in all aspects of research including collecting data and data analysis.

In the Laboratory in Social Psychology course, David Sattler, Sudie Back, and Harriet Pollitt asked students to design and implement an exit survey of graduating psychology majors. Students learned many aspects of survey research including choice of topics to measure, item wording, administration procedures, and data analysis. The activity also benefited the department in its development of an exit survey for graduating seniors.

Emphasizing Writing and Literature

Sara Snodgrass described several ways she facilitated students' writing in an introductory social psychology course. Students kept a journal, wrote analyses of published articles, implemented an observational study, and wrote a formal research report. The techniques described in this article can be applied to any course in psychology.

In a journal writing activity, Stuart Miller asked students to apply social psychological concepts to specific experiences in their lives. Evidence suggested that students gained significant self-knowledge as a result of the exercise.

Don Osborn used the Utopian novel, Erewhon, to illustrate a variety of social psychological concepts and to enhance the liberal arts value of his social psychology course. The novel afforded numerous examples of social psychological concepts such as attribution theory, interpersonal attraction, and the motivation for consistency between actions and attitudes. The author gave several helpful tips to instructors who might wish to adopt a similar strategy.

Illustrating Concepts in Social Perception and Social Cognition

Juli Eflin and Mary Kite gave students a series of premises and conclusions on index cards and asked them to construct an Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE), a type of inductive reasoning. Students constructed the IBEs by combining the premises and conclusions that each possessed on the index cards. This activity improved students' scientific reasoning by focusing attention on the causal, explanatory nature of psychological theories.

Francis McAndrew asked students to grade exam papers of fictitious students. The patterns of responses on the "exams" reflected either an ascending or descending level of performance. Students expressed a significant primacy effect in the way they evaluated the intelligence and performance of the test taker. The exercise facilitated discussion of key issues related to experimental design and attribution theory.

Michael White and Debra Lilly presented Kelley's (1973) covariation attribution model by showing students videotaped behavior rather than the more traditional written descriptions. The videotape contained sets of sequentially presented behavioral situations that led students to analyze behavior using Kelley's model. Students easily made the appropriate attributions and applied them to everyday situations.

Donelson Forsyth and Katherine Wibberly developed an effective demonstration of the self-reference effect, which occurs when individuals show superior memory for information that pertains to their self-schemas. Students evaluated whether or not each adjective in an orally presented list was self-descriptive. After a delay, they attempted to recall all the adjectives from the list. Memory for self-referent terms was superior to memory for terms that were not self-referent. The authors suggested that the exercise offered an effective demonstration of schematic processing under normal classroom conditions and confirmed predictions derived from depth-of-processing and schema-based memory models of social cognition.

Su Boatright-Horowitz developed a demonstration of Nuttin's (1985) name letter effect for use in the classroom. Students organized themselves into pairs with one "experimenter" and one "subject." Experimenters measured the subjects' preferences for letters of the alphabet, some of which were contained in the subjects' name. Results indicated that subjects showed a preference for letters contained in their names which replicates the name letter effect.

In order to demonstrate the over justification effect, Harry Horn gave students descriptions of Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett's (1973) research and asked them to predict the outcome of the various conditions. Students predicted the outcome of the conditions quite poorly and this promoted discussion of these counterintuitive effects.

Joy Berrenberg demonstrated several impression formation principles by asking students to bring photographs of an acquaintance to class, having other students relate their first impressions of the persons in the photos, and assessing the accuracy of those impressions. The exercise gave students an opportunity to examine their own impression-formation processes. This activity can illustrate other processes such as the origins of implicit personality theories, person prototypes, and the accuracy of first impressions.

Robin Lashley asked her students to complete a simple personality inventory about their instructor. The student responses served as discussion points that illustrated several social psychological concepts such as stereotypes, impression formation, actor-observer bias, and implicit personality theory.

Demonstrating Bias in Social Perception and Social Cognition

Mary Kite outlined three activities that demonstrated common perceptual errors described in the social psychological literature; the actor-observer effect, the false consensus bias, and priming effects. These activities produced reliable and robust results and demonstrated how cognitive shortcuts can result in inaccurate judgments.

To demonstrate the social desirability bias in survey research, Randall Gordon administered a questionnaire to students to assess their oral hygiene practices. The method used to reduce subjects' response bias involved a manipulation of the questionnaire's instructions. Both instructions asked subjects to respond but not to sign their names. The modified instructions also contained information such as the assurance of anonymity, the need for accurate information, and the role of the subject as a contributor of valuable information. The results of the two forms of questionnaires differed as a function of instructions.

George Demakis used the Simpson criminal trial as a vehicle to demonstrate the hindsight bias. Some students made pre-verdict predictions about the outcome of the trial and others made post-verdict judgments of what they would have predicted before the verdict. Students exhibited considerable hindsight bias. Demakis suggested that this technique could be used for a wide variety of events (e.g., athletic contests and elections).

C. R. Snyder demonstrated the unique invulnerability effect in a simple demonstration in which students were told the average longevity for persons in the U.S. and then asked to predict their own age of death. In two classes, students overestimated their age of death by nine years, even though the second class had been informed that the demonstration would show their sense of unique invulnerability.

Dana Dunn asked students in a social psychology class to list their strengths and weaknesses. The exercise generated a self-serving attributional bias, that is, students' self-descriptions revealed a bias toward reporting positive attributes. The instructor used this bias to guide a discussion about motivational and cognitive processes in attribution.

James Friedrich designed a simple demonstration of the self-serving bias by asking students to rate either the likelihood that they would rate themselves as better than average or that the average person would do so. Consistent with the self-serving bias, students rated themselves to be less likely to rate themselves above average if, in fact, they were not. This effect existed even though the self-serving bias had been thoroughly explained to the students prior to the demonstration.

Teaching about Attitudes and Persuasion

David Carkenord and Joseph Bullington induced cognitive dissonance in students by pointing out inconsistencies between their behaviors and attitudes. The procedure assessed students attitudes on four issues (e.g., world hunger) after which they publicly proclaimed their adherence to the expressed attitudes. Students believed the experience enhanced their understanding of cognitive dissonance and provided selfinsight.

To help students identify major persuasion techniques employed in advertisements, Vivian Makosky used several activities that required students to locate and analyze prototypical examples. Students collected the advertisements according to four different variations developed by the author.

D. W. Rajecki asked students to rate the desirability of a snack that was progressively contaminated by contact with human residues (the instructor's coffee cup and a comb). Repeated measurements showed progressive contamination. The students' ratings revealed quick and statistically reliable shifts from accepting (liking) to rejecting (disliking) the snack. The author listed several courses that could benefit from this demonstration including research methods, learning, and motivation.

Exploring Aggression

To introduce the concept of aggression, Ludy Benjamin gave descriptions of several incidents (e.g., a spider eats a fly or a girl kicks a wastebasket) to students and asked them to determine if the incidents constituted aggression. The activity generated discussion about the definition of aggression and related issues of causation and control. It also provided a context for discussion about disagreements among psychologists on the operationalization of variables.

Dana Dunn's students read the 1932 "Why War?" correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and composed letters responding to the letter. This assignment allowed students to explore several perspectives about the origins and functions of human aggression. The author described additional variations for the exercise.

William Davidson gave his social psychology students a list of 12 aggression instigators and asked them to find scenes of violence in movies that illustrated the effects of these instigators. Students attempted to find a scene that included the maximum number of instigators. The student who found the scene with the most instigators received bonus points on the exam that covered aggression.

David Rainey devised a simple method to demonstrate a gender difference in the acceptance of aggressive behavior during sport competition. Students read descriptions of behaviors from six sport competition situations and judged those behaviors as acceptable or unacceptable. Men endorsed significantly more aggressive acts than did women. The author examined several significant issues to guide classroom discussion.

Examining Group Processes

Blaine Peden, Allen Keniston, and David Burke gave students direct experience with the tensions that exist between outcomes based on individual versus collective decision-making. Based upon two different protocols, students chose to receive bonus points on their exa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Section I: Personality
• Section II: Abnormal
• Section III: Clinical-Counseling
• Section IV: Social
• Table
• Appendix
• Subject Index