Category Archives: Blog Prompts

Spring 2016 Week 1 Blog Prompts: History of Psychology

Hand writing on a notebook Regardless of which prompt you choose, please use the Tag "History of Psychology" on your post. Here are the prompts for this week:

  1. The history of psychology in your textbook is overwhelmingly about male figures. Yet women made important contributions even early in psychology's history. The website Psychology's Feminist Voices documents the contributions and milestones of women in psychology. Using this page on their site, select one of the women who received her PhD before 1950 and provide an overview of her career. Make sure to list your sources at the end of your post.
  2. While you may not have personal ties to psychology's history just yet, your birthday probably does. The website Today in the History of Psychology is sponsored by the American Psychological Association and allows you to input your birthday (day ...

Introductory Blog Post Guidelines

Hand writing on a notebook

Welcome to PSY 101 everyone!

It's spring semester 2016 and I'm very excited to get to know all my new students. This first blog post will be pretty easy and give your classmates, readers, and I a bit of information about how you're approaching this class. To that end, please include at least the following information in your first post on your blog:
  • Why you chose to take this class?
  • What do you associate with the word "psychology"?
  • 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?
You are of course encouraged to add additional information about yourself as well. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing ...

Finals Week Blog Prompt

This is the prompt for finals week. You must post by 1 am Friday, 5/15 to receive credit (comments will be accepted until 5 pm on Friday, 5/15). This prompt can only be used to replace a non-zero post from earlier in the semester. If you have a score of 9 or better on all 8 blog posts, you can earn up to 2 extra credit points for your post. Same criteria for the comments (score of 4.5 or better on all 8 comments). Return to your introductory blog post where you described the 3 topics you were most and least excited ...

Week 14 Blog Prompt: Topic – Mental Health

Option 1:

Your textbook lists 4 major types of psychotherapy (psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, and humanistic/existential). Rank these types of therapy according to how helpful you think they would be if you needed therapy and explain what it is about each one that you like/dislike. For your highest rated therapy, find additional information about it from a web source (include a link to the source and discuss its credibility).

Option 2:

There is a new campaign targeting increased awareness of mental health issues that has received a lot of support from First Lady Michelle Obama called Change Direction. ...

Week 13 Blog Prompts: Topic – Social Psychology

Option 1:

As mentioned in class, the Implicit Association Test (which can be accessed through this link) is a tool to identify biases which may be outside your conscious awareness. The results of this test cannot determine whether or not you are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., but they are useful to help you understand yourself and how you interact with others. For this post, you must take two separate IAT tests from the link above. You do not need to share your results if you don't want to, but you need to talk about the ...

Week 12 Blog Prompts

Option 1:

Stress is something all too common in college students’ lives, but what if you could change your relationship with stress. Kelly McGonigal discusses doing just that in her TED talk “Making Stress Your Friend.” Watch the video, share your reactions, discuss how reasonable you find its message to be, and discuss how you could implement some of the ideas into your life.

Option 2:

We all have different methods for coping with stress. For this prompt, please discuss your typical strategies for dealing with stress and evaluate how well they have worked for you this semester. Next, ...

Week 11 Blog Prompt

Option 1: We all want to enjoy life and seek ways to make ourselves happy. Indeed, we spend much of lives chasing the goal of happiness. But how good are we at actually finding it? Dan Gilbert discusses the ways in which we sabotage our own happiness in his TED talk. Watch the video, share your reactions, and discuss ways in which you can incorporate more synthetic happiness into your life. Option 2: Motivation is not a stable force, but often waxes and wanes. Throughout your time at Austin College, your motivation for school will undoubtedly be higher at some times and lower ...

Week 10 Blog Prompts

Option 1:

One of the most commonly discussed dimensions of personality is introversion vs. extroversion. In many ways, US society values extroverts more highly, but Susan Cain discusses the Power of Introverts in her TED talk. Watch the talk and discuss my assertion that extroverts are more valued in the US. What about Austin College? Are there advantages to being either introverted or extroverted here?

Option 2: One popular form of assessing personality is the MBTI. In fact, many of you took the MBTI before you came to AC as part of the process of assigning you ...

Week 9 Blog Prompts

Here are the blog prompts for Week 9:

Option 1:

Many people consider intelligence to be largely determined by genetics, but there is substantial evidence that the environment and social processes play a large role as well. Since schools are a place where children try to determine how smart they really are, it is important for educators to understand the impacts of their subtle or not-so-subtle interactions with students. Watch these three videos: Jane Elliott's classic blue eyes/brown eyes experiment, Claude Steele explaining stereotype threat, and Rosenthal & Jacobson's discovery of the Pygmalion effect. ...

Week 8 Blog Prompts

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 ...