Ep 195: How To Memorize Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

  • April 26, 2013
  • 18 Comments

Do you need to memorize Piaget’s stages for a test? You’ve found what you’re looking for. I’ll use some familiar mnemonics (“1 is a bun”, etc.) and some wacky images to get those stages – and what happens during them – into your mind. You’ll be able to remember when object permanence occurs, when children […]

Ep 173: An Interactive Neuron and Map Using ThingLink

  • April 10, 2012
  • 0 Comments

Every once in a while a really cool tool comes along and I like to show everyone the fun I had with it. In this video episode I show how I easily made an interactive image of a neuron and an interactive map containing videos and locations for some of the major studies in psychology. […]

Ep 168: Reliability – the Foundation of Any Good Test

  • January 19, 2012
  • 5 Comments

The Importance of Reliability in Personality Test In this episode, as human curiosity drives us to self-discovery, we delve into personality tests’ reliability. Our innate curiosity pushes us to understand the very essence of who we are. This profound journey to self-discovery has led to the rise of personality tests, tools that profess to shine a […]

Ep 165 (video): Psychological Research Under Fire: What Can We Do About It?

  • November 16, 2011
  • 7 Comments

What’s going on with Psychology? There have been a number of reports about poorly conducted or completely fraudulent research in the field such as this one that appeared in the New York Times. Well, there’s bad research in all fields, but psychology, which has through its history struggled for scientific credibility, is particularly sensitive to […]

Ep 160: How to Spend Your Money and Truly Make Yourself Happy

  • September 18, 2011
  • 2 Comments

Why aren’t rich people happier than those with less money? We think money will bring happiness, but research in the area of positive psychology has consistently found that having more money does NOT make us happier. Find out how to spend your money the right way so that it really can bring happiness into your […]

Ep 151: Popular Heuristics Explained

  We all take shortcuts when we are making decisions. And in those shortcuts often lie our mistakes. In this episode find out the difference between the availability and representativeness heuristics, as well as the “Take the Best“, Hindsight, and the Base Rate Neglect (Fallacy) heuristics. Lots of examples of these heuristics at work are […]

Video: Object Permanence – Does Your Dog Have It?

Piaget’s concept of object permanence is essential to understand. But how did they study this idea among 1 year olds? Obviously children can’t tell you that they believe that something no longer exists when they can’t see it, so how do we know what is going on inside a child’s mind? How about this challenge: do animals also understand object permanence? If you’ve ever seen your cat or dog look under or around objects for a lost toy then yes – you’ve seen that they do understand object permanence.

Episode 130 (video): Why Are We So Fascinated by Famous People?

  • August 22, 2010
  • 5 Comments

f you’ve ever met a famous person you know how exciting that feels. But why? What is it about fame that draws so many people to it? In this episode I examine fame from two very perspectives: the Basking in Reflected Glory theory and Terror Management Theory. Along the way we’ll see what this all has to do with the rock band Queen, baseball and Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.