Sixteen years ago, daughter Karen and I embarked on a weight loss journey, courtesy of Jenny Craig. Karen had just finished her stellar career as an internationally ranked shot putter, and she needed to relearn how to eat like a non-shot putter. She and my husband Roger conspired to convince me to join her in solidarity. I needed to do something. Like many people, I had gained a lot of weight during the 1990s, reaching an appalling 210 on my 5’9″ frame. I told the Jenny Craig consultants that I wanted to weigh 135, and they asked me politely if that was realistic. I said, yes, I’d done it seve ..read more

This week, our Biopsych class covered sensation and perception. On Tuesday, the students worked overtime to wrestle with the ever-popular topic of visual receptive fields. Receptive fields are one of the more difficult things to cover in S&P, and I’m still working out how to do this most effectively. With great relief, then, we moved today to the “non-visual” senses, including the chemical senses. I’m still disappointed to learn that supertasters are no longer believed to have extra papillae. Painting our tongues blue with food coloring and counting our papillae was always one of my favori ..read more

My friends in the Facebook group “Teaching Resources for Biological Psychology and Neuroscience” have shared so many exciting resources, but my favorite was the Play-Doh neuron project. Because I’ve been teaching remotely for three (!!!) years now, I never had a chance to do this. Yes, I could have asked the students to do this at home and upload their photos, but that just didn’t seem to be the same. This quarter, I have my first in-person biopsych course since Spring 2020. Because I have all of my recorded lectures for the online, asynchronous classes I’ve been teaching, I thought I might as ..read more

When Karla was little, I found that I had to educate my pediatricians about autism. They said they’d read about it in medical school, but it was so rare that they never expected to see a case. Services in the public school were non-existent, and given my responsibilities with a full-time job and two older daughters, I opted to homeschool instead of fighting a school system that harbored extreme negativity toward our daughter and toward us. Karla contributed many images to my most recent edition of my behavioral neuroscience text. She made this self-portrait to go in the front matter. Over the ..read more

My younger self was known to consume rather alarming amounts of diet soda. A busy schedule of family and work was easier to manage if my caffeine intake was high. I would drink quite a bit of coffee in the morning, then switch to diet soda later in the day. A turning point occurred when a colleague from Chemistry advised me that I shouldn’t consume so much aspartame. She had noticed during committee meetings that my eyes looked red and tired (they did) and that I should try backing off the diet soda to fix this problem. Intrigued, I did a bit of digging and found that U.S. researchers proclai ..read more

I never get tired of the thrill of opening up a box from a publisher with my complimentary copies of a new book. Somehow, holding the book in your hands makes it real! So I’m happy to report that my copies of An Introduction to Applied Behavioral Neuroscience: Biological Psychology in Everyday Life made it to my doorstep. As I am currently recovering from Covid (ugh), this was a most welcome highlight! My husband is dutifully reading through his new copy, as he always does with my books, and he says that it is especially easy to read compared to my other work. I think that’s probably a good th ..read more

I’m happy to report that my newest book, An Introduction to Applied Behavioral Neuroscience, will be available in print on May 12 from Taylor & Francis. This was such a fun book to write. A highlight for me was collaborating with my daughter, Karla, who provided many of the illustrations like the one below ..read more

I’ve been having a lot of fun writing for the Counseling Schools website this year. This latest article is about Having Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the Age of Covid. https://www.counselingschools.com/blog/covid-and-ocd ..read more

Mark Twain famously popularized the saying “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Statistics can be very persuasive, for good or evil purposes, but graphs representing statistics can be even more so. I’m not implying that people deliberately produce terrible graphs, although some do seem to be pushing an agenda or two. In many cases, people just don’t know any better. Our technology doesn’t always help. The other day, I was attempting to graph some data in Excel, and the resulting automatically generated graph committed one of our major no-no’s: It did not begin the y-axis at zero. I had to clic ..read more

Styling my mask during some recent travel I’m not a fan of masks–they’re uncomfortable, dirty, a hassle, and I’m not at all convinced that they do what they’re supposed to do, COVID-wise. That being said, if we have to do this, we might as well make a psychology lesson out of it. One of the interesting challenges of mask-wearing is the effect of covering half your face on the ability of others to read your facial expressions. David Matsumoto, who studies facial expression and emotional recognition in depth, tells us there is no need to abandon the idea that we can still perceive emotion, and e ..read more