Illustrating Concepts and Phenomena in Psychology: A Teacher-friendly Compendium of Examples

This compendium of examples of psychological concepts and phenomena is designed to make it easier for both novice and experienced teachers of psychology at all levels to bring new and/or particularly illuminating examples to their lectures and other presentations.

Psychology instructors know that vivid examples bring concepts to life for students, making psychology both more accessible and interesting. Having a good supply of such examples can be particularly important when, as often happens, students fail to immediately grasp particular points, especially those that are complex or difficult. Generating compelling examples can be challenging, particularly when teaching a course, such as Introductory Psychology, in which much of the material is outside one’s main area of expertise, when teaching a course for the first time, or when teaching a course that is entirely outside one’s main area of expertise.

This compendium will serve as a one-stop reference that presents a topic-organized body of compelling examples that instructors can explore as they prepare their teaching materials.  The examples they will find range from simple illustrations (e.g., muting an obnoxious commercial as an example of negative reinforcement), to videos (e.g., of a patient with prosopagnosia), to brief stories (e.g., about how confirmation bias led a man to dismantle a kitchen because he assumed that an electrical stove’s whining clock was a trapped kitten), to short summaries of research that illustrate a concept or phenomenon.

Beyond their value for enhancing the quality and interest level of classroom lectures, the examples in this book can help teachers find ideas for engaging multiple-choice exam and quiz items. They can also serve as stimuli for writing assignments and small group discussions in which students are asked to come up with additional examples of the concept or phenomenon, or link them to other concepts or phenomena.

E. Leslie Cameron is Professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College and Courtesy Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned a B.A. with distinction from McGill University in Montreal, Canada; an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester; and a Certificat Supérieur and Diplôme de Phonétique Appliquée à la Langue Française from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France. She was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research associate and adjunct professor at New York University and a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She was awarded a National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellowship and a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at NYU.

She teaches courses in cognitive and perceptual psychology and regularly involves undergraduate students in her research. She has embraced the Students as Partners model and recently co-authored two reflection articles with students and international colleagues on their partnership experiences. She was a Wagner Teaching Fellow from 2018 to 2020. In that position she collaborated with students and faculty colleagues to apply Decoding the Disciplines in conjunction with eye-movement recording to better understand what experts do when they read graphical data. The goal was to elucidate the process and teach it more effectively to students. Her current disciplinary research with students involves studying human olfaction, particularly the effect of Covid-19 on sense of smell, short-term and long-term memory for odors, and the effects of pregnancy on the sense of smell.

Doug Bernstein received his bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964 and his masters and Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Northwestern University in 1966 and 1968, respectively. From 1968 to 1998, he was on the psychology faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he taught graduate and undergraduate classes ranging from 15 to 750 students and served both as Associate Department Head and Director of Introductory Psychology. From 2006 to 2008 he was Visiting Professor of Psychology and Education Advisor to the School of Psychology at Southampton University, and in January 2009 was Visiting Professor and Education Consultant at l’Institut du Psychologie at the University of Paris. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Illinois and Courtesy Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida.

He founded the APS Preconference Institute on the Teaching of Psychology in 1994, as well as the APS Preconference Institute on the Teaching of Psychological Science at the biennial APS International Convention of Psychological Science. He was also the founding chairman of the Steering Committee for the APS Fund for the Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science. In 2013, he stepped down after 30 years as chairman of the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, and in 2018 founded the Biennial International Seminar on the Teaching of Psychological Science in Paris. He has written or co-authored chapters and books on the teaching of psychology, as well as textbooks on introductory, clinica, and abnormal psychology, and books on criminal behavior and progressive relaxation training. His teaching awards include the University of Illinois Psychology Graduate Student Association Teaching Award, the University of Illinois Psi Chi award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, the Illinois Psychology Department's Mabel Kirkpatrick Hohenboken Teaching Award, and the APA Distinguished Teaching in Psychology Award. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and he occasionally offers workshops on teaching techniques and on textbook-writing for prospective authors. As a hobby he collects student excuses.