Links to Related Resources
Chapter 1: Introduction: What Is Psychology?
American Psychological Association
: Has information on various specialties within psychology, career
planning, etc.
PsychRef:
Resources in Psychology on the Internet : Has links to a variety
of psychology-related sites.
The Psychology
Hall of Fame : Has biographies of famous psychologists, and related
links.
Mission: Critical is a website developed by San Jose State University's Institute for Teaching and Learning to teach and encourage critical thinking. It includes not only information on the need to think critically and pitfalls in critical thinking (such as logical fallacies), but also a number of exercises that let you test yourself easily. Some of these are a little simplistic, but it's a really neat way of applying these principles and getting immediate feedback.
Chapter 2: How Psychologists Do Research
Research Design Explained : I don't know who these people are, but they've put together a very nice guide to research design that's pretty easy to use.
Statistics on the Web : Includes links to various organizations, consulting groups, publishers and educational resources, but of particular note are the online stats texts and web courses and links to statistics discussion groups. Or, if you're in the middle of a project already and want a quick guide to which statistics to choose, go to Selecting Statistics, a program that asks you questions like number of dependent and independent variables, and tells you what you should use.
And now that you have those parts down, learn about Pitfalls of Data Analysis (subtitled "How to Avoid Lies and Damned Lies").
For a fun look at using the scientific method, check out The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project.
Chapter 4: The Brain: Source of Mind and Self:
Basic Neural
Processes Tutorial : Diagrams, quizzes, etc about neural processes
(i.e., the action potential).
Dissections
of the Human Brain : Definitely not for a lunchtime break, but
great for learning a lot about brain structures.
Conversations
with Neil's Brain : Kind of cool, if you have the time to read
a lot - describes various medical/surgical procedures as it takes you on
a tour of the brain.
The Whole
Brain Atlas is a wonderful site with lots of information about the
structures and functions of the brain.
In our very own department, Dr. Gary Dunbar's Brain
Research Laboratory is an active center for all sorts of brain stuff,
especially related to Huntington's Disease.
To see the demonstration of the reuptake process (including what between-neuron transmission looks like) on the Zoloft website, go to this page and click on "Click Here" in the box with the little neurons.
If the whole brain/nervous system idea scares, you, you might want to try Neuroscience for Kids - it's a neat site that doesn't talk down, but rather carefully and easily explains various concepts. It also includes a bunch of mini-experiments and games to help you understand the material, as well as links to other resources.
I debated putting this here or in the social/cognitive sections, but decided you could refer back if you wanted. Here's a great article in the New Yorker on various brain structures implicated in certain kinds of decision-making, including several things we talk about later in the term (such as loss aversion). It's called Mind Games.
Chapter 10: Memory
Want to read the full article on the Magic Number Seven? Here it is: Miller, G.A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, Psychological Review, 63, pp. 81-97.
If you want to participate in some online memory experiments, there are a bunch. (These do NOT count as extra credit studies! But they can be fun, and for some you are contributing to an actual research project. Same is true, by the way, for the sensation/perception studies above....) Here's one on Memory for Written Words by Mark Steyvers at Indiana University, one with photos and stories by Bem Allen at Western Illinois University, one on spider-related words by Jason Armfield at The Flinders University of South Australia.
Here's another Exploratorium site: The Memory Exhibition. It has some really interesting information and games about memory, as well as useful tips, such as the best way to rob a bank and not be remembered by a witness....
Chapter 3: Genes, Evolution, and the Environment
For tons of information on DNA, visit the Dolan DNA Learning Center, part of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (home of DNA discovery).
For various resources on evolution, go to the National Academy's website.
Chapter 12: Motivation
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has an online publication called BASIC BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE RESEARCH FOR MENTAL HEALTH, which includes a chapter on Emotion and Motivation that is relevant to our class discussions (for both Chapters 11 and 12).
For a diagram showing how glycogen is converted to glucose, go here to see a page from the 1992 Physiology or Medicine Nobel Poster.
Here's a survey on Irrational Food Beliefs.
Chapter 6: Sensation and Perception
Want to see some really cool perceptual effects? The Exploratorium (a wonderful place in San Francisco, by the way: definitely get there if you're at all in the area) has a bunch at their online Digital Library .
Here's a very extensive page on Vision Science. And here are some demonstrations on Auditory Perception.
For tons of information on various sensory-related issues, try Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling the World - it's a very nice site that's full of good scientific information, but in an easy-to-read way.
If you've got 8 minutes to spare, you can participate in a study of the Mueller-Lyer Illusion conducted by the students of Michael Birnbaum at Cal State Fullerton.
There's also a study on Simulated Visual Motion by Heiko Hecht at the University of Bielefeld - I didn't try this one because the Java script crashes my computer. But if you've got a better computer, let me know how this one is.
If you get really into these online perception studies, check out Studies in Progress at the Perception Lab at St. Andrews University, Scotland - they have different studies at different times.
Chapter 7: Learning and Conditioning
You can read the original article describing the Little Albert study here, or by going to the library and getting: Watson, John B. & Rayner, Rosalie. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3, 1-14. (You can get many other full original articles online at Classics in the History of Psychology; another related example is Skinner's paper describing how he got pigeons to act superstitious: Skinner, B.F. (1948). Superstition in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172.)
The same NIMH publication linked in Chapter 12 has a chapter on PERCEPTION, ATTENTION, LEARNING, AND MEMORY.
For more information on positive reinforcement, as well as some "self-instructional exercises" that show how some behaviors can be positive reinforcers in some situations but not others, go here for a site developed by Dr. Lyle Grant at Athabasca University.
Do you want to apply what you're learning? Toward the bottom of this site on dog training is a long list of websites showing how to use operant conditioning to train your dog. Of course, for those of you who are more cat people than dog people there are other ways to put that conditioning knowledge to good use: How to Toilet-Train Your Cat.
Chapter 8: Behavior in Social and Cultural Context
Here is a brief history of the social comparison effect since Asch's original study, put together by a professor at the University of Exeter in the UK. For lots of current applications of Asch's work, visit the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania.
If you're interested in social cognition, you should definitely check
out the Social
Cognition Paper Archive and Information Center. For more on social
psychology in general try the Social Psychology Network,
a searchable database with tons of resources on various social psych topics.
For an overall look at some of the principles of influence and persuasion, try Influence
at Work which focuses largely on Dr. Robert Cialdini's work (referred
to in your text). To see more about
how the business world uses social psychology principles, go to Using
Influence Skills to Increase Customer Referrals; although not in much
depth, this site does go into the reciprocity principle and how to make
use of it. A similar example can be found on a site for public affairs
officers of the Civil
Air Patrol.
Here's a short news story on The Killing of Kitty Genovese , the classic example of diffusion of responsibility. There's also a more detailed story that appeared in the NY Times, also describing the failure of bystanders to intervene. For a somewhat different perspective, you can read a discussion on philosophical/legal/ethical views on one's obligation to help, apparently written by a student at the University of Virginia. Finally, although in previous classes it was fairly apparent that folk music isn't that popular amongst students here, here's a song (text, not sound file, but it does give the chords...) by Phil Ochs (a very famous folk singer) called Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends that refers to the Kitty Genovese case in the first verse.
The Milgram obedience studies are among the most well known psychological studies, and certainly among the most interesting to students I've seen here. To read a little more about what the studies were actually like, including transcript dialog from some participants, go to "The Perils of Obedience" as it appeared in Harper's Magazine, an abridged and adapted version of Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram. It was put on the web by an professor at Miami University. This same professor has also put together a really nice and easy-to-read discussion on the Jim Jones/Guyana tragedy in which hundreds of people took their own lives under one man's influence. This discussion includes descriptions of how Milgram's work, as well as related theories such as the cognitive dissonance and social conformity (Asch's studies) theories in the previous chapter apply to such an event.
There's another site discussing Milgram's studies, with pictures of some of the equipment and procedures, by Grant Baxter at the University of Otago, with a mirror site in case the first one isn't available. There was a really great site at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~lpr5c/milgram.html that included wav.files so you could actually hear what the confederates sounded like as they feigned pain at the various shock levels. For some reason, it seems to be restricted access now, but I'm including it here anyway in case that changes back again.
For some specific examples of the "foot-in-the-door" and "door-in-the-face" methods of persuasion, as well as a clear discussion of them, check out Sequential Requests, put together by a professor of communications at West Virginia University. Also, at the end of that page you can click on a Table of Contents link, which you can use to find similar discussion pages on other aspects of persuasion (including cognitive dissonance and attribution theories).
There are a bunch of sites looking at the Prisoner's Dilemma, from a number of different angles. Here's one that transforms the dilemma into a kids' game (although as this is a UK site, the language is slightly different than we're used to...). For an economic perspective, try this piece from the New Zealand Political Review . And my very favorite Prisoner's Dilemma site: A fiendish cyberspace wizard has locked you and Serendip into a diabolical game that you play online. The discussion at this site also provides further resources on the dilemma and on game theory.
The Seeds of Peace camp in Maine takes some of the concepts of cooperation and reducing cultural conflict and puts them to the test by bringing together kids from opposing sides of ethnic conflicts (such as Arab and Israeli children), so that they can get to know each other and learn that the "enemy" is as human as they are.
Chapter 9: Thinking and Intelligence
There are a bunch of online demonstrations of the Stroop Effect. One I like a lot is at http://palomar.edu/more/beh_sci/STROOP.HTM - It's a little different than the demonstration we did in class, because instead of comparing your time to color-name color- vs. non-color words, you're comparing reading color words with color-naming. On the other hand, when you're done, there's a nice explanation of the effect. The one at http://www.psy.uq.edu.au/highschool/Diduknow/stroop.html is a little more like the one we did in class, and also starts with a short explanation. There are a bunch of others as well, including sites that discuss more the way the Stroop Effect has been used, for example, in experimental psychopathology or attention studies. In these studies, instead of having nonsense words or just random non-color words compared with color words, the comparison is between words that might be relevant to a particular problem, and thus that a person might have a more difficult time not attending to. For example, if you were very socially anxious, words like HUMILIATION and BLUSH might be considered "threat words" that you'd attend to more than words like ANTICIPATION and RUSH, and so it might take you longer to color-name the "threat words" than the neutral ones.
The University of Victoria has a really great Writer's Guide online, which I'd recommend for browsing through in its entirety, just for the material on writing well. But I'm including it here specifically for its section on Logic , which covers some of the material in this chapter on ways you can make errors using both deductive and inductive reasoning. The syllogism section is especially easy to follow.
For a fairly detailed description of various reasoning errors we make due to biases such as the confirmation bias or the availability heuristic, check out Human Inferential Shortcomings , apparently put together by someone in marketing who is a big fan of Kahnemann and Tversky.
For a brief yet fascinating piece on how concepts such as cognitive dissonance are not only familiar to, but in fact manipulated by, businesses and other marketers, check out this article by Marketing Madness, a consulting company. Another way of looking at cognitive dissonance can be found here, where the author (I have no idea who this is) analyzes the movie 2001 in terms of cognitive dissonance theory. It's a really interesting (albeit somewhat sexist in the writer's choice of language!) article. My personal favorite cognitive dissonance site, however, is by Patty Barrera, a student at Southwestern University. Patty's site includes a brief review of cognitive dissonance as a concept, and ways of reducing cognitive dissonance. If you click on the Examples section, you'll see these principles demonstrated through Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.
Niko's proposed Test Links : I don't know who Niko is, other than someone with clearly a little too much time on his hands, but he's compiled a bunch of IQ tests. I am NOT recommending this for any sort of valid testing (especially since I haven't looked at most of them in detail), but thought you might find it interesting.
Chapter 14: Development Over the Lifespan
Well, I can't get this whole
site to work well, but I think that's because my computer's old and the Java
program crashes it. However, from what I've seen, the Basic Embryology Review Program
at U of Penn includes some nice descriptions of prenatal development, including
lots of details and possibly even video clips.
For everything Piaget-related, try the The Jean Piaget Archives at the University of Geneva.
Did you read The Chocolate War as a kid? If so, you may be interested in this essay on The Psychological Changes of Adolescence: A Test of Character, which is a literary analysis of The Chocolate War based in part on the theories of Erikson, Kohlberg, and Gilligan. It's written by a psychology instructor at Youngstown State University.
If you're interested in temperament, there's some good information at temperament.com, although it's a horribly designed site, so you need to be willing to put up with annoying layouts and colors to get to the info you want.
The Lab for Developmental Studies at Harvard is one of the leading research centers of current work on infant/child development. Liz Spelke's work in the lab was just profiled in the Sept 4th (2006) edition of the New Yorker, in a really interesting article that did a great job of explaining much of what we talk about in class.
Chapter 11 - Emotion
Here is an article in Mother Jones on Lie Detector tests - read this one and the text chapter together - it's kind of startling how much overlap there is!
Chapter 13: Theories of Personality
For more about psychoanalytic views:
The American Psychoanalytic Association
has a brief description called About
Psychoanalysis. Alternatively, you can read Freud's entire
Interpretation
of Dreams and/or
The
Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis. NOT brief. Or, if you
really want more on Freud, try FreudNet.
Al though we don't really cover Jung in this class, you can find out more on your own by going to the website for the C.G. Jung Institute.
For more about behavioral, cognitive, and cognitive-behavioral
views:
The Cognitive Therapy Center
of Brooklyn has a website geared toward people seeking therapy, with
very thorough and easy-to-read descriptions of cognitive-behavior therapy.
The San Francisco Bay Area Center for
Cognitive Therapy maintains a similar site. Both also include
lists of related websites and other providers. The
Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research website is also similar
to these, but especially notable because the Beck Institute was founded
by Dr. Aaron T. Beck, the man who developed cognitive therapy. There is
also the homepage for the Association for
Advancement of Behavior Therapy, which doesn't have as much general
information but does provide resources on this topic.
For more about humanistic views:
Here is the homepage for the Association for Humanistic Psychology; it includes basic information on theories of humanistic psychology as well as various resources related to this field.
For a quick personality test of your own:
Go to this online personality test, fill it out, score it, and get quickie results. Then refer to the end of your text chapter.
Chapter 16: Psychological Disorders
Chapter 17: Treatment and Therapy
Because these chapters are the entire content of my PSY250 (Abnormal Psychology) class, rather than pick a few highlights, just go to my PSY250 Page, which also has a set of links related to each chapter, so you can get much more specific information on abnormal psychology and various disorders and their treatments there.
Keep Watching This Space..... I'll keep adding related
links as I come across them and as I have time to make updates.
In the meantime, if you have any sites you think
should be added, or any questions or comments, please email: elizabeth.a.meadows@cmich.edu
This page was last updated on 09/12/06 .