Week 6 Blog Prompts

These prompts are for 9/29-10/6.

Option 1:

Recently, several states have legalized recreational use of marijuana. This has lead to both celebration and condemnation depending on who you ask. Medicinal use of marijuana is still controversial as well. In your blog post, take a position on both medical and recreational use of marijuana. Should they be legal or not? Find a source to support your arguments and a source that summarizes the opposite position and discuss both in your post. Make sure to critique how trustworthy each of the sources are.

Option 2:

In this TED talk, Russell Foster outlines 3 prominent theories about why we sleep. Watch the talk and argue for the theory you find the most convincing. Include a link to another source that provides more information about the theory you choose, summarize the information from that source, and critique how trustworthy you find the source.

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Week 5 Blog Prompts

For your blog prompt this week (9/23-9/30), you are to choose one of the following TED talks:

Each talk focuses on a different aspect of the brain. In your response, address the following issues:

  • What drew you to choose the talk you did?
  • Briefly summarize the talk.
  • What did you find most interesting about the talk?
  • How trustworthy did you find the presenter and the information she or he presented? Explain why.(Note: you must go beyond talking about the reputation of TED talks in general)
  • Come up with a research idea of your own based on the information presented in the talk and briefly outline how you would conduct it.
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Week 4 Blog Prompts

Here are the options for this week’s blog prompt:

  1. Assess the reliability of parenting advice on the internet. You will find a website or news story offering parenting advice (include a link to the site in your post) and critique the advice it gives based on the information in Chapter 3 and lecture this week. You may not be able to judge the truth of all pieces of advice, so be sure to point out what looks like good advice, what looks like bad advice, and what is undetermined. Make sure to tie your assessments back to information in the book or lecture.
  2. In 2012, a high school commencement speech went viral because the speaker (David McCollough, Jr.) told the students “You’re not special.” Watch his speech here. React to what you heard. It was not long ago you were at your own graduation ceremony. What would it have been like for you to hear this message? Given what you’ve read about teenagers’ cognitive, emotional, physical, and moral development in Chapter 3, how effective a message is this for teenagers?
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Week 2 Response

Here are this week’s blog prompts.

I’m going to cheat a little bit and write about a theorist we didn’t talk about in class. I’m choosing her because she is a great example of how one’s personal life can influence the professional life, I want a chance to talk about her in Gen Psych, and I make the rules so I grant myself an exception.

The theorist I’m going to discuss is Dr. Marsha Linehan. As you can see from Dr. Linehan’s CV on her website, she is a prolific scholar with numerous professional accolades and accomplishments. I’m going to focus on her development of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which is currently the treatment of choice for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Prior to Dr. Linehan’s efforts, effective treatments for BPD were severely lacking, and many considered the disorder untreatable. Her theory of treatment grew out of her work with clients who had ongoing issues with suicidal ideation and self-harming behaviors. Dr. Linehan practiced Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy CBT, which has strong research support, but she found this population was not responding well to the interventions. To help her clients, Dr. Linehan incorporated other ideas into CBT and packaged them together to form DBT. The primary addition was a focus on acceptance of the present while still seeking to change the future, which may seem contradictory at first, but that’s where dialectics comes into play. Dialectics involves embracing both aspects of seemingly contradictory concepts, and helps people become more flexible in coping with their environment. 

That this theory intersects with Dr. Linehan’s personal life was not apparent until she revealed in 2011 that she herself had been diagnosed with BPD. Here is a New York Times story detailing her history and her decision to come out. Struggling through multiple hospitalizations and suicide attempts, Dr. Linehan was only able to turn her life around when she began to accept herself, and she wanted to see if others could use the same strategy to begin the long path to healing. She incorporated other aspects she found personally useful (like Zen philosophy and meditation), and wove together a treatment that has been shown to be effective in 10 randomized controlled trials

Not every theorist has such a dramatic connection to the topic she or he studies, but Dr. Linehan is a fantastic example of how our lives influence our intellectual inquiries. Psychology Today ran a story in 2008 with other examples of what has been termed “mesearch.”

How will your life influence what you study, your career, and your legacy?

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Week 3 Blog Prompts

Here are the options for this week’s blog post:

Option 1

For this week’s discussion, I want you to design a research study about a topic you find interesting in psychology. You can choose any topic you would like as long as you relate it to something from our textbook. In your post make sure to do the following:

  • List your research question
  • State your hypothesis (what you think the outcome would be and why)
  • Decide which methodology you would use (i.e., survey, observation, etc.) and explain your choice
  • Describe your procedure (what you would have participants do, how you would recruit participants)

Make your research idea something feasible that you could actually do as a student researcher. In other words, assume you have a fairly small budget and a limited amount of time. If you’re a psychology major or minor, you will eventually take Research Methods and have to conduct a research project, so this is great practice to start thinking about what you might want to do.

For your comment on a classmate’s post, I want you to make a suggestion about a way to improve the study he or she described. I also want you to say why the suggestion would be useful.

Option 2

Mythbusters is a popular TV show on the Discovery Channel which tests popular ideas using scientific methods. The show generally does a pretty good job, but now that you’ve read the chapter and discussed the scientific method, you are in a good position to critique the show. Select one of the minimyths (short clips from the show) below and critique the methods used to test the myth. Remember, critique means list the strengths and the weaknesses. For each weakness, discuss why it is a problem and suggest a solution.

Is Yawning Contagious?
Is Talking on a Phone While Driving as Dangerous as Driving Drunk?
Do Beer Goggles Really Exist?
Is it Dangerous to Drive in Heels?
Are Women Better Than Men at Reading Emotions?

 

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Week 2 Blog Prompts

There are two options for this week’s blog prompt:

  1. The major schools of psychological theory were introduced in class this week. Typically students feel drawn to some theories more than others. Based on what you’ve learned so far (as well as any other knowledge of these theories), select the theory you think is best. In your post, make a case for why this theory is superior to the others. I also want you to select the theory you think is worse than the others and explain why. For this assignment, you must choose only 1 theory to be best and worst. As we will discuss in class, each theory has limitations and strengths, so it is up to you to try to balance these factors. The second part of this assignment is to find a resource which would help us all learn more about the theory you selected as the best. For example, you could find a scholarly journal which publishes research from that theory, a website with more information about the theory, etc. Put a link to the resource in your post, explain what the resource offers, and explain how trustworthy you think the resource is. For help on evaluating sources, see the guide on Abell Library’s page.
  2. Psychological theories are highly influenced by the lives of the people who come up with them. For your post, I want you to research the personal life of one of the major theorists we discussed in class and make connections between that person’s life and the theory he or she developed. Make sure to use trustworthy sources and include your references in your post.
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Introductory Blog Post

The prompt for the week is available here.

As the instructor for the course, this initial prompt is a little difficult for me to answer in the same way as my students, but I’ll give it a shot. The reason I’m in the course is because I’m teaching it, obviously. The reason I teach General Psychology, however, is because I truly enjoy being able to expose students to the field of psychology. I remember hearing about all the cool things psychologists have learned about the ways humans think, feel, and behave, so I consider it a privilege to be the one who provides the same service for others. Also, on a selfish note, it helps me stay connected to developments outside my specific discipline of counseling psychology and see new ways to think about the material as students bring their unique perspectives.

It’s really tough for me to pick the three topics that I’m most excited for this semester. If forced to choose, I suppose I’d select Sleep, Coping with Stress, and Experimental Design. I’m not going to elaborate too much, since I don’t want to give away what we’ll be doing yet, but these classes are very applied and it’s my hope that students can take what they learn and put it to immediate use in their own lives.

It’s impossible for me to pick 3 classes I’m least excited for; since I picked the topics I think they’re all great! There really is so much ground to cover in this class that I’ve had to cut a number of fascinating topics I’d love to include. Maybe I should talk to my department about making this a 2 semester class…Well, I probably don’t need to do that, since we have a great list of 200-level courses to provide introductions to specific sub-fields, but I get greedy sometimes. Again, since I don’t want to post a cop-out answer, I guess I’ll list the topics I feel challenged to cover. Perhaps this will be a surprise to you, but the mental health-related topics are sometimes the most difficult for me in General Psychology because I want to cover so much (it is my specialty!) and I’ve had to learn not to jam too much into those sessions.

The question I want to be able to answer by the end of the semester is how can I improve this class? I look forward to your feedback throughout the semester and through the formal evaluations at the end.

I look forward to reading why you took this class and get a glimpse into your expectations for the semester!

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Introductory Blog Prompt

Here is the prompt for Week 2:

For the first blog entry, I want you to explain:

  • Why you chose to take this class
  • Which 3 topics from the syllabus look the most interesting to you (and why)
  • Which 3 topics from the syllabus look the least interesting to you (and why)
  • What one question you want to be able to answer by the time this class is over

I look forward to seeing what you think!

Note: For those of you not in the class, I have attached the syllabus so you can see what all the fuss is about  PSY101C_fa14_macfarlane

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