Introduction: Undergraduate psychology programs offer opportunities for the development of knowledge and specialized skills in order to equip students to work with diverse populations. Statement of the Problem: It is crucial for psychology clinicians and other human service providers to understand and be responsive to the scope of cultural…

The interdisciplinary topic of creativity is both fascinating and controversial. In this review, we begin by highlighting the many ways that researchers conceptualize and define creativity, focusing in particular on the difference between everyday creativity and creativity associated with exceptional breakthroughs in thinking. In addition, we…

A highly relevant construct that may need more emphasis in our psychology courses is genetic attributions. Attributions are causal explanations people make for specific behaviors, characteristics, occurrences, or differences. Research has found that genetic attributions are related to numerous biopsychosocial phenomena (e.g., perceptions about…

All students, from college freshmen to advanced graduate students, have asked themselves, "Will this decision make me happy?" The vast majority of them have been wrong. Affective forecasting, the process of predicting future feelings, is a topic of great interest to students due to its applicable and highly relatable nature. This article…

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in college courses on leadership in a variety of academic disciplines. The study of leadership has a long history, much of it based on psychology. As a result, psychologists are well informed and quite capable of teaching leadership courses. In this article, I discuss core theories of leadership,…

Theories of learning styles suggest that individuals think and learn best in different ways. These are not differences of ability but rather preferences for processing certain types of information or for processing information in certain types of way. If accurate, learning styles theories could have important implications for instruction because…

It is important to understand the many controversies about cognitive sex differences because beliefs about these differences are often used to justify pubic policies and individual actions. As teachers of psychology, we need to provide a safe environment where students can think and argue about why, how, and how much females and males are similar…

The field of subjective well-being (SWB), or happiness, has become a thriving area of science, with over 10,000 publications per year on the topic in recent years. Discoveries about the causes and processes involved in SWB range widely, from culture to biology to circumstances, providing instructors an opportunity to draw broadly on concepts from…

In its recent report outlining principles for teaching undergraduate students in psychology, the American Psychological Association Board of Educational Affairs recommended including experiential learning in the curriculum and identified study abroad opportunities as being particularly valuable. Unfortunately, although American universities offer…

Today's college students are significantly different from previous generations. On average, they are overconfident, have high expectations, report higher narcissism, are lower in creativity, are less interested in civic issues, and are less inclined to read long passages of text. They are highly confident of their abilities and received…

We present an interactive demonstration of factors that mitigate gender differences. Male and female volunteers pass a grapefruit from one classmate to the next using only their chins. The speed of task completion depends on its framing; when the volunteers believe the task is an exercise, women tend to be faster than men, whereas the opposite…

The teaching of psychological science occurs face-to-face in classrooms and also through writing via op-ed essays, magazine articles, trade books, Web sites, and textbooks. I discuss the teaching of psychological science through such outlets, offer some practical suggestions for writing, and reflect on what I have found motivating, helpful, and…

We describe a model for new and senior faculty members, integrating a behavioral approach to enhancing teaching skills with research from the field of positive psychology on virtues and character strengths. The Teacher Behaviors Checklist (Keeley, Smith, & Buskist, 2006) identifies target behaviors amenable to modification, derived from…

To challenge students' stereotypes about gendered performance on motor skills tasks, we developed a classroom active learning demonstration. Four 3-person, same-gender teams received either a Barbie(r) doll or a Transformer(r), and team members dressed the Barbie or manipulated the Transformer from a tank to a robot as quickly as possible, with…

We designed a classroom activity to foster students' understanding of what schemas are and how they function. We used a video of the instructor as an infant to illustrate how schemas influence gender stereotyping. Before the video, we told students that the baby was either a boy or a girl. After the video, students rated whether the baby would…