The final paper

My grandfather just died, at the age of 87. It's relevant, I promise.

This past summer, when I started teaching "Human Growth and Development", I borrowed some ideas from a fellow professor's syllabus because I wasn't sure what to expect or what the best way to "bring home" the ideas was. One of the elements of this syllabus was two interviews. The first: To interview someone who was raising, or had recently raised, a teenager. The second: To interview someone in late adulthood (65+). This usually ends up being a grandparent of theirs.

At first I thought it was just a neat idea, so I adopted it for my courses. In reading these interviews, I have really been surprised by the multi-functional purposes that such a simple assignment can serve. First, the questions are student-generated, so they get to pick the topics they ask about. When you are speaking to someone who has lived so long, it helps the concepts, discussed in neat packages in our lifespan textbook, become more continuous and real. Second, it serves as a way to force students to have a conversation with someone they might not normally talk to. I noticed in the summary paragraphs, some of the students said that the interview was the longest conversation they had ever had with their grandparents. Third, it helps combat the feeling that sometimes the elderly may get when they may feel ignored or that "kids these days" don't interact with them in a meaningful way. Last, in opening the doors of conversation, it might give the students more ideas about other topics they may want to pursue in future conversations and may even be an "accidental" relationship builder.

Which brings me back to my grandfather. Last summer, before his health took a serious turn for the worse, I sat down with him (and my other grandmother) and asked about their families and what it was like when they were growing up. Since both of my still-living grandparents grew up in other countries, I have never met any of my great-grandparents, didn't know their names, their occupations, or what life was like for my grandparents as kids. To be honest, I was also asking so that I could develop a family tree and also to think of potential family names for my kids (I was pregnant at the time). I am so glad I had those conversations and took notes - my grandparents lived through some really interesting changes in history and it made me appreciate how much they had to experience in order for me to even exist.

I can see that some of my students are experiencing similar epiphanies in their interview projects. That makes me feel like this project was a worthwhile one, and I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone looking for a student project to assign.

One way to fight the midlife crisis...

"I'm 50! 50 years old. I can kick...stretch...and kick!"

Butterfly...

..or coronal slice of prefrontal cortex?
You be the judge.

 

Bregma +4.7, perhaps? Olfactory bulb before the white matter starts connecting the hemispheres...

 (Image borrowed from Masini CV et al (2010). Accessory and main olfactory systems influences on predator odor-induced behavioral and endocrine stress responses in rats. Behavioural Brain Research, 207, 70-77.

Puppy dog...

                                     

or caudal visual cortex and midbrain? Bregma -6.8, or perhaps -7.3...

(Image borrowed from Nitz DA & Mcnaughton BL. (1999). Hippocampal EEG and unit activity responses to modulation of serotonergic median raphe neurons in the freely behaving rat. Learning & Memory, 6, 153-67.)



Wishing the pictures of the Paxinos and Watson rat brain atlas were not copyright protected, but still wanting to get my point across. I see brain shapes everywhere!

End of semester is near...

With many papers to grade comes much caffeine consumption. I am caught up with grading now, and ready for the end-of-semester trifecta of Final Exam, Second Paper, and Course Evaluations.

Bring it!

Ever wanted to be a Psych professor in New Orleans?

Now's your chance. Tulane University, Loyola University, University of New Orleans, and Xavier University are all looking for Psych professors. I may be applying for one of these. Good luck!

Emerging Adulthood

My students are taking an exam *right now* over Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood. Which, even when I was in college, Emerging Adulthood didn't exist as its own life stage.

As the New York Times is so good at doing, here is a fantastic (but long!) article detailing the experiences of the Emerging Adulthood cohort: lots of education, little job prospects, maybe moving back in with mom and dad, or at least getting in on their healthcare insurance until they're 26.

What does that mean for this new stage in life? It's an interesting thought to project to the future and how Emerging Adults will be seen - just like how the "appearance" of Adolescence as a life stage brought about societal changes, Emerging Adults may have compulsory college attendance or something of the sort. Who knows? I'm interested to see how this plays out in society and psychology over the next few generations.

More TV to add to my queue

I came across a show which was discussing "The United States of Tara", which is a series on Showtime depicting a mother with Dissociative Identity Disorder (the artist formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). From what I understand, and this is all secondhand information, it seems to be a more reasonable depiction of a person with DID. And, just about to update my Netflix queue with some of that action.

For reference, the last TV series I watched which depicted someone with DID was Heroes - Ali Larter's character. It was kind of bizarre to combine the sci-fi powers with the multiple personalities, but those are two of my favorite things anyway (that is, sci-fi and psychology).

Reading list: Next up...

Waiting for me after a good night's sleep is my local library's copy of "The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager". Having just completed our unit on Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood (another *even newer* developmental stage!), I'm pretty excited to read about a historical perspective on teenagers and how generations and cohorts have experienced these years differently. Next semester I'll be teaching Adolescent Psychology online, so this should bump up my perspective.

In other news, one of these days I'm going to get myself a Kindle or some kind of eReader. For some reason that gives me the feeling that I'll be doing more book reading and less blog reading.

Until that time, here's a really cool picture from Pablo Garcia Lopez as shown on The Beautiful Brain:

 Psst. It's a wig!

SFN is coming!

Well, it's not coming *here*, but the Society for Neuroscience has their annual meeting next week in Washington DC!  The last SFN that I attended was in DC, but boy, that was before I got mired in dissertation work. I enjoyed the experience, but the ridiculous number of attendees (35000!) inspires a sense of agoraphobia for me.

I was so young!

This year, with work and everything, I'll stay home and give my Human Growth and Development students an exam. Woohoo!

And, thanks to the joy of bloggers, I can catch the major headlines from the SFN interactive crew. 

I'll be subscribing to a couple of these bloggers in my sidebar, and I say a couple because I was never really sure which division my research falls under. One one hand we have Homeostatic and Neuroendocrine Systems, blogged by Dormivigilia, and on another hand we have Cognition and Behavior, blogged by Future Dr. Science Lady. For good measure, we will include Scicurious (also found at Scientific American), which I like because of the name, blogging Disorders of the Nervous system.

I'm pretty excited to read some Neuroblogger posts and get some sense of what is happening at SFN this year!

Brains are everywhere

Brains are everywhere. And when you have spent the better part of a decade looking at brains, pictures of brains, brains under microscopes, and brains in a powerpoint presentation, you know one when you see one.

A while back, I was shopping at Central Market when I saw this enviro-friendly bag hanging in the checkout aisle and got a picture with my camera phone:

Those are supposed to be flowers. What's that you say? Looks like dendritic spines? You're probably right. Ramon y Cajal would have thought so. Here's proof:

Above: Drawings of dendritic spines, by Ramon y Cajal which I found on the IBRO website as part of the history of neuroscience.

If I had been in my right mind, I would have bought the bag and saved myself countless plastic grocery bags. Alas, I was too busy getting a picture with the camera on my phone, and now I wish I'd bought it at the time. Eventually, I will see one at Goodwill and snatch it up. Until then....

More job links

The lovely Jaimie clued me in last night to (yet another) place to look for faculty job postings: The Chronicle of Higher Education. Which, it seems, is separate from Higher Ed Jobs. There are positions here that I haven't seen advertised elsewhere, which is good, but there's no "subscription" option that I could see, so it's another place where you'll have to go and look periodically. (Edit: You have to create a free account in order to get job alerts.)

The good news? I found another job worth looking into, although I'm not *quite* qualified, it's worth thinking about. I've always wanted to teach Research Methods (and be good at it), but for some reason that hasn't come up in the lottery for where I work. Definitely, it is one of the skills that I have on my "to-do" list.

So! I will go back and add the Chronicle of Higher Ed to my long post which includes job-search links.

It should be really easy to get a job, right? I mean, there are so many postings out there ...

Movie Extra Credit

When most of my students begin the Introductory Psychology course, they have got some preconceived notions about psychology: therapists, lobotomies, Prozac. By the end of the course, they have had a lot of exposure to a lot of different ideas and topics. Some of the time, we can use examples from TV and movies to illustrate the disorders or conditions. Some of the time (and even better), the students themselves can remember how the disorders or conditions played out in something they watched on the big screen.

For instance: Memento or 50 First Dates (anterograde amnesia), Monk (obsessive-compulsive disorder), A Beautiful Mind (schizophrenia).

Toward the end of the semester, I like to offer as extra credit an assignment where the students can choose a movie from PsychMovies.com. This site is currently undergoing some renovation, but it does have a compiled list of movies and the psychological topics they cover. It also has a page for teaching resources, and lists the movies by topic (developmental, psychopathology, etc).

The assignment usually is required to be about 3 pages long and asks for a synopsis of the video, followed by an analysis of how the disorder or condition was portrayed and whether the portrayal was accurate based on our readings from the textbook. I also ask them to say what they would do differently if they were to have some input on the movie they watched. This is usually a popular assignment as extra credit -- students see it as a way to have fun *and* do homework at the same time.

The ones that are popularly reviewed include A Beautiful Mind, but last semester I got some old ones like All About Eve and Sybil, and then some crazy ones like Fight Club and What about Bob?.These are always fun to read and even sometimes clue me in to movies that I haven't watched that I can add to my Netflix queue.

Have you done any assignments like this with your classes? What kind of requirements did you include? What are your favorite psychological movies?

Where children sleep

If you are teaching psychology, we all come across the idea of "sociocultural" differences in how people live and what their values are. Sometimes it is easy to get stuck in a mindset that everyone has a middle-class standard of living worldwide. After all, it's what most of us experience, especially if we rarely leave our communities.

The photo essay "Where Children Sleep" by James Mollison is a collection of pictures, both of children's faces against a white background, and their living quarters. Sometimes this is their own well-furnished bedroom, sometimes it is a shack that they share with numerous other family members. I found this to be incredibly eye-opening and a great discussion piece for my Human Growth and Development class. You can also see some examples of what "Industry" (as in, "Industry vs. Inferiority") means in different cultures.

This slideshow at the New York Times gives a caption for each of the kids and their living environment.

 From Mollison's site: a bedroom in Kentucky. Nice use of camo, by the way!

You can also buy the book at Amazon for a whopping $239.

I encourage you to take a look at this photo series and even share it with your class!

Classroom demonstrations and activities

While interacting with the search chair for a position that I'm applying for, I came across her website called Full Cranium, in which she gives sample assignments (I really like this one: a scrapbook of Lifespan-related items) as well as links to her previous presentations regarding teaching and technology. I like what she said:

(there is a)..."lack of available social comparison in order to judge how well one is doing. In other words, lack of idea sharing for teaching techniques may not stem from selfish proprietary beliefs but rather from the inability to gauge one's own success. To protect egos, ideas are not shared for fear that others will consider them sub-par. We don't know how well we are doing ourselves. How do we know the quality of our own work if we cannot compare to the work of others?"

As someone who has been teaching at the adjunct level for a few years now, and sharing my office space with whoever happens to be there from many departments in the college, this is a huge thing that I happen to be dealing with regularly. I was really excited to see someone out there coming at this "problem" from a social psychology perspective -- I have a tendency to just assume that since I'm female, I like to talk, and talk to other people, about what I'm doing (biological psychologist, at your service...). Because of the nature of the adjunct, this opportunity is rare, beyond the monthly departmental meetings in which I get to *meet*, let alone interact with, my colleagues.

One website I have encountered as a result of being a member of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology  is their  wiki called ToPIX which is pretty comprehensive; they update it occasionally with links to demonstrations and a whole lot of links to media/Youtube clips divided up by topic, such as at Clips for Class.  They also have a separate page with teaching resources that can be helpful if you are looking for in-depth and specific ways to teach certain topics, including one about developing a neuroanatomy lab (Note to self...!).

I would love to see more of this around, and if my readers have links to other collections of psychology class activities, please share!

Oops!

 Gotta give credit where credit is due. This picture came up on the Failblog one day. I have to include it when I'm giving the S&P lectures. Ha!

And now for some actual content

So, I'm a person with a terminal degree in Psychology and Neuroscience, and I'm also a person trying to find a more permanent/stable job. What's a professor to do? One way to find openings could be to go to your desired institution, find their HR page, and see if perhaps they have available positions. This, my friends, can take a long time. The other key finding is that some employers post to several of these, and some post only to one or two, so if you don't look around, you could miss something!

Let me recommend a few websites that I have found helpful in the job search. In no particular order:

Higher Ed Jobs: Not just related to faculty jobs, but for staff and other administrative positions. I like this one a lot because you can create your job search and the website will automatically email you when a new job is posted that matches your criteria.

SFN's Neurojobs:  Here you will find more "neuroscience" and less "psychology" related listings. Also, lots of postings for postdoc positions.

Association for Psychological Science: These tend toward the tenure-track, "must have your own funding or be able to get your own funding" sorts of jobs. Also, a place where the big-name institutions are posting their job listings!

APA's PSYCcareers: These tend more toward clinical/counseling jobs, but not entirely.

COGDOP: I was getting a lot of forwarded emails from my old department chair that were labeled "COGDOP". When I looked it up, hey! More job listings! This is the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, by the way.

Academic Jobs Online: Another site not specific to psychology/neuroscience, but has listings you can sort according to institution, discipline, or location.

Chronicle of Higher Education: You can search by the field you want to go into, and also by state, and if you sign up for a free account, you can get email notifications when something new pops up in your desired area/location.

This collection is by no means complete, and I'm sure there are sites that I'm missing. If you know of another place to look, leave me a comment and let me know! Thanks!

It's a long story...

But as I was searching the Etsy website for brain-related items, I was alarmed to see that most of the brainy stuff out there had to do with zombies.

Fig 1. Zombie brain shoes? Isis the Scientist would be proud...except they are ugly.

Since Halloween is coming, I guess that's forgivable, but I really would like some "real" brain art and paraphernalia, not just zombie apocalypse costumes.

Fig. 2. A keychain seems like a safe place to start.

Until then, there are actually some lovely things about psychology and the brain all over the internet. I'll be posting my favorites on this blog.

If you're visiting, please leave a comment and let me know what you think!