Professor Wilcox-Herzog won prestigious award for teaching

Amanda Wilcox-Herzog, an associate professor of psychology at Cal State San Bernardino, has been selected as the winner of the 2011-2012 Golden Apple Award for excellence in teaching.

Wilcox-Herzog was surprised in her classroom by the friendly "ambush" when university President Albert Karnig burst into her class on Jan 19 to announce that she had won the university's prestigious award. He was joined by former recipients of the award, colleagues and administrators to honor her.

Karnig said that it’s valuable to announce the Golden Apple award winner during class so that students can participate in the recognition.

"Student evaluations were a key element in Dr. Wilcox-Herzog's selection, with comments that were effusive about her remarkable ability to explain complex issues, to skillfully ground theory in real-life situations, and the fact that she was simply 'a great teacher,'" Karnig said. "She not only explains things thoroughly, but patiently."

In reviewing her teaching records, the selection committee found her to be very passionate about teaching, wrote Tapie Rohm, chair of the selection committee. "Professor Wilcox-Herzog is the best of the best when it comes to teaching — a real teacher's teacher," said Rohm.

"Of all the things that I've done here at the university, this means the most to me, because it's the job I do in front of you," she told her students, Karnig and the others who were there.

She will be honored at the annual San Bernardino Mayor's Golden Apple Awards dinner on March 29, at CSUSB's Obershaw Dining Room, along with three other employees from CSUSB, four from San Bernardino Valley College and four from the San Bernardino City School District.

Psychologists - Sexual addiction among women real and growing

The women spend hours online looking at pornography or looking for sex.

Some fantasize about being sexual in public. Others cruise bars looking for anonymous encounters with strangers. Tolerance builds and things get boring, so the women have to engage in ever-riskier or more frequent behaviour to get the same "hit," or even just to feel normal.

Little is known about the prevalence of sexual addiction in women, but psychologists say the phenomenon is real and only now getting the attention given men.

"We're seeing women getting into pornography in a way we've never seen before," says psychologist and sex-addiction research pioneer Dr. Patrick Carnes, executive director of the Gentle Path program at Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi - the clinic where Tiger Woods reportedly sought treatment.

"Women are engaging in affairs, they're engaging in sado-masochistic behaviour," Carnes said. "This thing is just morphing right in front of us.

According to Carnes, sexual addiction is estimated to afflict as much as three to six per cent of the population and is defined as intense, sexually arousing fantasies, urges and behaviours that the person cannot control or stop, regardless of the consequences.

As a result, "women aren't inclined to come forward and say, 'I need help," ' says Lawson, creator of Canada's first residential treatment program for sexual addiction at Bellwood Health Services in Toronto.