Emotion and Self-Regulation

I regularly teach an Advanced Seminar course (note: a senior seminar for advanced undergraduates; this is one of the options for the “capstone” course in the Psychological Science major that includes the senior writing requirement) on emotion and self-regulation.  I’ve tweaked the class several times, and I’m sure I will continue to alter the structure of the course the next time I teach it, but I love the class overall.  We read articles related to self-regulation, emotion and emotion-regulation and discuss how these concepts apply to our lives.  Students regularly share links they have found online that relate to the course content.  Here’s a TED talk a student shared with me this spring, that she found really helpful to quell anxiety.

I’ve also found that several songs from the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend apply to concepts in this course; see my blog post about that here.

In the Fall of 2016, I will be teaching a graduate level seminar on Emotion in Psychotherapy; resources developed from this course will be posted here as we develop them.

Statistics

I have an absurd love of statistics, and of resources for teaching statistics.  Below are a selection of videos I sometimes use in my class:

• A class makes a great (and accurate) parody video teaching how to find the mean, median and mean
• A classic stats rap (more grad student level, but still awesome)

Someday, someday I will own one of these little normal distribution plushies. I do love them so!

Clinical Supervision

I teach the supervision and consultation “special topics” practicum for the graduate students in the program. This course covers models of supervision, what makes a “good” and “bad” supervisor according to the literature, and provides some skills practice in serving as a peer supervisor.

Personality Theory and Assessment

I also teach the personality theory and assessment course for graduate students.  First year students take this in their second semester of their first year, and it serves as the second assessment course (they take cognitive assessment in the Fall semester of their first year).  This course covers the major personality assessment instruments used in clinical practice (MMPI, PAI, MCMI) as well as some measures that are less-often used but important for assessment of personality disorder (e.g., SIDP-IV, PID-5).  We also discuss issues of personality theory: what is personality, how can we measure and conceptualize personality for all clients, not just those who might have a “disorder.”  Oh, and what is a personality disorder, anyway?  How can we best capture personality pathology according to the current research, even if that might not be reflected in our current diagnostic system?  Finally, we address social-cognitive perspectives on personality.  This article on personality change (which cites one of my personality psychologist heros, Dr. Walter Mischel) reflects some of the controversy in the field, which we address head-on in this course.