Author: Roslyn Green

Multiple choice with others

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April 16, 2015

2:19 am

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For those who would like to swot up a bit for the Unit 1 exam:
♦General revision handout
♦Buzz words handout with sample questions

Of course, there are some Kahoots below that might help you to hone your multiple choice skills:

Playing kahoots

I am by no means sure that I can justify the use of Kahoots in my classroom. They are too much fun and students don’t even moan when I say, “We’re having a Kahoot today”. Instead, they make up ever more absurd nicknames for themselves and groan or cheer their way through my questions. Surely Kahoots can’t be educational. 

Fortunately there is an option for students to complete Kahoots at home alone, which significantly reduces their entertainment value. By providing my Kahoots here, I can deceive myself that all that reading of multiple choice questions, whether in the company of others or alone, will benefit my students in the long, frenetic lead-up to the VCE exams. 

By using the “Preview” version, a student can play a Kahoot on one device. The simulated smartphone shown on the screen is the mode provided for inputting answers.

In case other psychology teachers find this post and would like to use my Kahoots for their students, I am also providing links for the classroom versions of each one.

•If playing alone, create a free account at this link: https://getkahoot.com/ .

•Alternatively, if playing in class, each student needs to go to http://kahoot.it/ to enter the game pin.

 

Psychology 1 – Buzz Words

 •Play alone with the PREVIEW version 

 •Play in class with the normal version

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Download: PDF of questions and answers

Development and the Human Lifespan

Please note: I was hamstrung in writing these questions by the limitations in length allowed by the Kahoot website. Therefore some are not as elegantly and precisely expressed as I would have liked. The Kahoot website kept truncating my flowery prose. In any case, that’s my excuse for any substandard expression.

•Play alone with the PREVIEW version

•Play in class with the normal version

Game-Pin: 311-250

Download: PDF of questions and answers

Piaget and Cognitive Development

Play alone with the PREVIEW version

Play in class with the normal version

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Buzz Words 2

Play alone with the preview version

Play in class with the normal version

Screen Shot 2015-05-27 at 7.43.03 pmIntelligence, IQ, Theorists and Problems

Play alone with the preview version

Play in class with the normal version

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Research Methods for Year 11 Psychology

Play alone with the preview version

Play with the class version

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VCE Psychology 2015 – Unit 2

Play alone with the preview version

Play with the class version

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Stories, theorists and definitions – getting started in Psychology…

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February 18, 2014

12:47 am

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Psychology has many hats. There are many fields of knowledge that it touches on and connects with: for instance, philosophy, biology, neurology, education, health, business, sport and criminology. I hope you find the diversity of the subject stimulating and thought-provoking.
Psychology has many hats. There are several fields of knowledge that it touches on and connects with: for instance, philosophy, biology, neurology, education, health, business, sport and criminology. I hope you find the diversity of the subject stimulating and thought-provoking.

The quiz below will help you get a feel for the variety, the words and the human stories in psychology. Every now and then I hope to nip back to Learningapps.org, where I concocted the quiz, and add a question, another story or an extra comment. In this way the quiz will continue to develop, just like your knowledge and understanding of psychology.

There are a few simple questions in the quiz about research methods, as well as on topics such as memory, visual perception and the pioneers of psychology. You’ll learn just or much (indeed, perhaps more) by getting the questions wrong, because there are many explanations of both right and wrong answers.

I actually like the idea of learning by getting answers wrong. When Piaget talked with children, he  focused on  the reasoning behind their wrong answers; that’s how he came by many of his deepest insights.

There’s something to be said for getting something wrong and having to think it through. We really should allow ourselves to get things wrong more often. Except in exams, of course.

Kind regards,

Ms Green

PS Sophia and Mikaela designed the visual stimulus below, which illustrates the ideas of the Gestalt psychologists. It can be perceived in various ways, depending on which part of the stimulus you focus on; if you focus on the star, that becomes the figure; if you focus on the storm, the star becomes the ground.

Perhaps your dominant perception could even show whether you’re naturally optimistic or naturally pessimistic – but to ascertain that would of course require systematic empirical research.

In any case, the Gestaltists are famous for having identified the principles by which we organize the visual world. The figure-ground principle was a central idea of theirs. Thank you, Mikaela and Sophia!

A stimulus illustrating the principle of figure-ground, created by Mikaela and Sophia
A stimulus illustrating the principle of figure-ground, created by Mikaela and Sophia

Visual perception – individual, changeable and potentially illusory

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February 19, 2013

2:29 am

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I’m a big girl, sure, but in reality I’m not bigger than my husband, who is cowering over in the corner… This Ames Room in the north of England made me look like a giant, while he suddenly transmogrified, at least in the eyes of a perceiver, into a midget.

Visual perception is a paradox.

On the one hand, we have remarkably stable perceptions despite the rapid and bizarre changes in our retinal image.

On the other hand, our perceptions can be flawed. Sometimes the rules that normally allow us to view the world quite accurately lead us to make perceptual errors. For instance, we assume that the Ames Room is square and regular in shape and this leads us to perceive the two people at opposite corners as a giant and a midget. We know the perception is wrong. But the illusion is unavoidable. You can watch Phillip Zimbardo’s video explanation of this illusion at this link.

To find out more about visual perception, try these links and pages on this blog:

The wonderful human eye

A simple test of your blind spot (recommended by Dewansh)

Last year’s students – their visual stimuli for the first outcome 

Introduction to visual perception

The Müller-Lyer Illusion

A brief introduction to visual illusions and other perceptual phenomena

We hope you enjoy this topic and occasionally catch yourselves in the act of perceiving.

Kind regards,

Ms Green and Ms Bottrell

Revision Handouts for Unit 2 Exam, 2012

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November 14, 2012

10:12 pm

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Thanks for a very good year, Year 11 students. We wish you the very best for your exams and next year.

Dear Year 11 students,

These three documents should help you to prepare for the exam. You could use a kind of traffic light method to determine your priorities for revision. A green dot beside a topic means you feel totally confident about it, a yellow one means you’re not so sure, and a red one, in the memorable phrase used by Ms Simkin, means “freak out”!

Then become your own examiner. As you tackle the more difficult content for the exam, try to dream up all kinds of nasty questions. What are the questions that you, as a vicious and punitive examiner, a kind of exam-writing superego, would ask?

Kind regards,

Ms Green

 

Measuring kindness

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September 9, 2012

7:31 am

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In what circumstances does one person help another? What personal qualities and external circumstances make kind actions more likely to occur?

Dear Year 11 students,

As you have no doubt realised after a year or more of study, psychologists like to assign numbers to seemingly immeasurable qualities, just to show that every human behaviour can be studied in some way. It seems that even kindness can be quantified.

Kindness may not seem a very scientific concept, but if you call it prosocial behaviour instead, generate precise definitions of what constitutes it and set up experiments to discover when people show it and when they don’t, you can begin to get a handle on this nebulous idea.

Prosocial behaviour means helping another person or, in a broader sense, acting in a way that benefits society as a whole. It encompasses activities such as helping an old person across a road, donating money to charity, giving aid when someone is injured or even donating a kidney to a person with kidney disease. In other words, prosocial behaviour is a phrase for the act of being kind to the other people who inhabit the world.

Not surprisingly, research psychologists have come up with some entertaining and occasionally alarming ways of studying prosocial behaviour. For instance, in the footage below, which is completely silent but strangely compelling, you can observe whether a person, when left alone, decides to report a fire. You can then watch how a person in a group reacts to exactly the same stimulus: that is, smoke pouring into the room. Whether the person is alone or not affects the reaction, as you will see. The possible reasons for the different response are introduced in the slideshow beneath the footage.

Having observed this relatively old study, you might like to attempt the true/false quiz in the slideshow below, then watch a recent study about rats, one of my favourite animals. As you will see, the rats in this study showed that humans have no monopoly on kindness. Of course, the researchers did not call it that. Their name for it was “empathically motivated helping behaviour”.

Kind regards,

Ms Green

Prosocial Behaviour

Perceptive students…

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March 15, 2012

2:38 am

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Student Work

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So far the outcomes on visual perception that I have corrected have been eye-catching. Below are some of the year eleven students’ clever visual illusions or ambiguous stimuli. Test your own visual tendencies or leave an admiring comment.

Here is the first stimulus, a painting by Emma, whose work also appears in an earlier post.

Part of Emma's comment on her work: "The ambiguous stimulus I have created can be interpreted in two main ways...Notice that when you focus upon the couple, what used to be part of the figure becomes part of the ground." A remarkably effective and slightly spooky artwork, Emma - brilliant!

took quite a different course in developing his visual stimulus. You can view it below:
Jamie’s Visual Stimulus

Bridey and Steven, meanwhile, applied some Gestalt principles to an icon in the history of psychology. I was impressed by their ingenuity as well as by Steven’s description, which is shown below the picture. The only thing missing from the stimulus is the ubiquitous cigar…

An old man, a famous psychologist or some lines of text? - A visual stimulus created by Bridey and Steven

Steven’s description:

“The Gestalt principles play a huge role when observing this picture, as the brain has a tendency to organise and group many small objects (words or letters) into one larger object (a man’s face). The figure-ground principle is vital in determining what an observer sees in this image.

“If the figure (the focus point) is the image as a whole, the observer will most likely see a face. If the observer looks more closely and makes the figure a small section of the image, they are more likely to see lines of text. Humans also group visually similar objects together. This is why we can differentiate between the lighter areas of the text (for example the beard) and the darker areas (for example the glasses). Here the observer groups the elements of visual similarity (lighter text or darker text) together to form recognisable objects. The proximity of the letters and words is also key in the perception of this image. If the letters and words were further apart the observer would be far less likely to see a face…”

Finally, the photo below shows Lizzie’s version of the hallway illusion. Although a tall girl, Lizzie looks somehow not quite so tall in one part of the picture. The reasons include our use of depth principles such as relative size and linear perspective, as well as other pictorial cues.

In my mind, of course, wherever she stands and whatever she does, Lizzie will always be tall…

In every picture you see, the monocular cues to depth help you to interpret the picture as a 3D scene. Sometimes these cues can lead you astray, especially if someone doctors what you see.

Revision topics for the first test – Year 11 Psychology

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February 26, 2012

5:30 am

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Even clever, quick-witted rats need to revise the twists and turns of the maze frequently. I'm guessing it's the same for you humans.

Below is a list of the topics that will be covered in the first test. The test is quite long but not particularly hard – especially if you work through each dot below with a conscience.

An important hint:

Psychology teachers and examiners get all worked up when you define a word by using the word that you are actually meant to be defining:

e.g. “Behaviour is, like, well, you know, behaviour that you do when you do something.”

No, no, no! You must use different words!

An improved version:

Behaviour means observable actions or responses by an organism.

e.g. “Naturalistic observation means, you know, you observe people or animals in their natural habitat.”

Nope, that won’t work either.

An improved version:

Naturalistic observation is a research method in which psychologists watch the behaviour of humans or animals in their normal environment, without intervening or influencing them in any way.

Emma sat in my lessons last week, doing all the set work AND creating remarkable drawings, including ambiguous stimuli that astounded me and impressed the whole class. Watch this space for more of her drawings. She doesn't even seem to have to try... Sigh.

See also the downloadable handouts on this blog at this link:

https://psychologyrats.edublogs.org/about/downloadable-handouts

Topics for first test:

  • Definitions of psychology, behaviour, empirical research

  • Differences between psychology and psychiatry

  • Different fields of psychology: eg. clinical, educational, organisational, forensic, sport, research, counselling, community, health

  • Different methods of research in psychology, and the advantages or usefulness of each

  • The scientific method: seven steps of psychological research

  • Control and experimental groups; why experiments usually have both

  • Quantitative and qualitative data

  • The work and contribution of ONE of the great psychologists in the history of psychology: e.g. Freud, James, Ebbinghaus, Piaget, Watson, Rogers

  • The differences between visual sensation and visual perception

  • The processes of visual sensation (reception, transduction and transmission) and visual perception (organisation and interpretation)

  • The structures of the eye and their functions: the cornea, pupil, iris, lens, optic nerve, retina, rods and cones

  • The Gestalt perceptual principles: figure-ground organisation, closure, similarity and proximity

    Finally, a little quizlet to help you embed the new words and terms of psychology in your long-term memory:

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A Rat’s History of Psychology – Part 2

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February 12, 2012

7:33 am

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Continuing my fearless exposé of rats' contributions to the history of psychology...

Part 2 in our series: Psychology from the point of view of a humble – but opinionated – rat

Little Albert and the Rat

I have to say this right from the start: I never meant the little guy to get upset.

This is what really happened. John Watson wanted to show that he could create fear where no fear had been before. For some reason, he figured that a young baby would be the perfect experimental subject. Weird.

That little boy, Albert, wasn’t even one year old, but he was already a nice little kid – gentle, friendly and not in the slightest bit worried about me scurrying around nearby. He and I were getting along just fine. Then the big guy, Watson, decided to scare us both to death by whacking a steel bar with a hammer. Well, of course Albert was upset. I was pretty shocked myself. He burst out crying. I reckon it took him a few minutes to calm down.

Then every time I went near the little fellow I heard that awful loud noise. Soon Albert didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. Even when there was no sound at all, Albert jumped violently and began to cry whenever he saw me. I hadn’t even so much as nibbled his cute, fat little cheeks!

Look, I understand the theory of the experiment, but why did I have to be the fall guy? And why was that innocent, defenceless little baby chosen as the lead participant?

In psychological terms, this is what happened: that little baby had acquired not just a physical reaction but an emotion that he now connected with me, even though he hadn’t been afraid of me at all at the start. He had linked that loud, scary noise, which naturally frightened him, with me, a harmless furry creature with a friendly nature and a-maz-ing intelligence. Even without the loud sound, Albert had learned to fear me.

This is a form of classical conditioning, an automatic form of learning. You don’t have to think about it to form an association between two stimuli. If those stimuli are presented together enough times, bingo, you have learned something. You can’t stop yourself. That’s horrifying, if you think about it. The emotion that Albert learned is called a conditioned emotional response or a phobia. Humans have developed a conditioned emotional response when they feel scared at the sound of a dentist’s drill or happy at the sound of an old song to which they once danced with a loved one.

We rats don’t have to worry about dentists, of course, and the advertisers who use classical conditioning to sell everything from Coke to underpants don’t care about us. But I still feel pretty bad about little Albert. You see, when his mother found out what was going on, she took Albert away. His fear was never extinguished. Wherever he is, he might still be scared of white furry things – like me and Santa masks. Poor little kid.

There’s nothing scary about me, honestly. But some research psychologists are downright spooky.

Extra reading: http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html

A simple flowchart: before, during and after conditioning

A Rat’s History of Psychology – Part 1

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December 23, 2011

6:38 am

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Part 1 – Rat feeding time

Your teachers may seem knowledgeable about psychology, but if you want to hear from someone who has experienced the subject from the inside, ask a rat.

Like me, for instance. I can tell you, I’ve run mazes with the best of them. Pressed levers too. I was lucky that they left me out of the brain surgery group. Fortunately, my hypothalamus is still intact. If it weren’t, I’d be in no shape to be the mascot of this blog.

Psychology is a relatively young science. Luckily for us rats. It wasn’t really until the nineteenth century that people began to study human behaviour using the kind of scientific approach that modern psychologists like to imagine they bring to their work.* Of course, there had been philosophers long before that time who had ruminated on the nature of consciousness. But the people who began to study human thought and behaviour scientifically, using a systematic method that could be repeated by others and written up in dusty journals, emerged only in the nineteenth century.

This history is not about Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Sigmund Freud or even Jean Piaget. Forget about Hermann Ebbinghaus. This is a rat’s history.

You may be shocked to learn of the cruel exploitation of rats in the history of psychology. If you’re sensitive, don’t read on.

For example, we rats were part of a study in 1943 that showed how vital the hypothalamus is to the experience of hunger. Rats with a lesion (in this case an injury caused by surgery) in one part of this tiny structure in the brain showed little or no interest in eating. They had to be fed intravenously; otherwise, they would have died. When a different part of the hypothalamus was cut or lesioned, the affected rats couldn’t stop eating. They no longer knew when they’d had enough. The first kind of rat became emaciated, the second obese (Brobeck, Tepperman and Long, 1943).

I feel great compassion for the rat comrades who were subjects in that experiment. Is that kind of suffering ever justified? 

That study provided all sorts of information about the role of our hypothalamus. The human hypothalamus is similarly important. It’s about the size of a kidney bean but it is vital to the regulation of basic biological needs. One of its key functions is to control the autonomic nervous system. It is consequently vital in regulating the so-called four f’s: fighting, fleeing, feeding and mating.

So, you see, that experiment provided insight into many topics that you will encounter in your years of psychology study:

*The brain (view 3D pictures of the brain online at the Genes to Cognition website)
*The hypothalamus
*The autonomic nervous system
*The regulation of hunger and other biological needs
*The fight-or-flight response
*Sex, arousal and so on

I need hardly say that as a rat I feel torn. On the one hand, we have contributed to the development of human knowledge. On the other, we have suffered for it.

Kind regards,

The Rat

*Wilhelm Wundt established the first formal laboratory for research in psychology at the University of Leipzig in 1879 and the first scientific journal in 1881. He viewed psychology as the scientific study of conscious experience and he founded a new science that drew from both philosophy and physiology but modelled itself, at least in theory, on the scientific method of fields such as physics and chemistry.

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