On The Colbert Report, (March 13, 2008), Sudhir Venkatesh was interviewed. Please answer the following questions:
a. What type of scientist is Venkatesh?
b. How did he gather his data?
c. Who did he study?
d. Where did the study take place?
e. What did he discover about the population that he was studying?
f. According to Venkatesh, what is the role of a leader?
g. What role did the police play in this subculture?
h. Where was Venkatesh raised? Were you surprised?
Highlight for answers:
a. Rogue sociologist
b. 1-5 multiple choice at first, immerse himself, participant observation
c. Poor people, less than $10,000, Black Kings
d. Robert Taylor Projects in Chicago
e. Modeled themselves around a corporation, head of directors, they work for minimum wage
f. Enforce the “rules” of the gang, delegate fighting
g. Avoided the situation, too dangerous
h. Irvine, California; Yes, I thought he was from India
Japanese Baseball
1. Define ethnocentrism.
2. Define cultural relativism.
3. What are the major ways in which baseball in Japan differs from baseball in the United States?
4. How is this related to differences in culture?
5. What is the difference between a concept of fairness based on “fair play” versus a concept of fairness based on “fair shares”?
6. What does this comparison of baseball in these two countries tell us about the dangers of ethnocentrism?
Highlight for answers:
1. Judging another’s culture from your culture. Comparing another culture with yours. subjective
2. Being able to analyze another culture from their context and history. Objective
3. Strikezone wider, balls lighting, infield smaller, team oriented success, cuisine, hair short, shaven, managers disciplined, conformity, organized cheering factions, time limits
4. Team-oriented culture that focuses more on the group than the individual in Japan. In the United States, the individual is valued more so home runs are emphasized. There is a more competitive culture where there must be a winner and a loser.
5. Fairplay, if rules are fair then outcome is fair. Fair share, did everyone contribute equally?
6. It is dangerous to enthocentrize because you will only be disappointed and confusing in a culture that appears to everyday citizens to be normal. You will appear selfish and shallow minded to the citizens of that culture. It can also lead to conflict.
Impact of the Media: Socialization
1. What are the images of men in the media?
2. What are the messages of these images to males?
3. What are some of the consequences of these messages?
4. What are the images of women in the media?
5. What are the messages of these images to females?
6. What are some of the consequences of these messages?
Highlight for answers:
1. Superheroes are commanding figures (the Incredibles). Dominant partners in relationships. Climatic scenes in movies are between two men, often over women
2. Men should see women as objects of pleasure or service. Men should take a more active role than women. If you’re not like these men, you are weak.
3. Steroid use, feelings of inadequacy
4. Cooks, objects of pleasure, sex symbols, homemakers, sexuality, beauty, objects of desire, breasts/butts
5. They should be inferior to men and seek them for their appearance and power. Must spend time and money to look perfect, thin and white are best
6. Inferiority in women, insecurity in looks, 1 in 5 women have eating disorder, must be painful to be attractive, high rates of teen pregnancy, hypersexualized, batter/rape/assault
Race: Reel Bad Arabs
1. What are the images of Arabs in Hollywood films?
2. If you were a citizen of an Arab nation, how would you feel after watching these movies?
3. How do you think these films might shape perceptions of the United States in the Arab world, especially among young people?
Highlight for answers:
1. Subhuman, terrorists, villains, dangerous, women as belly dancers, buffoons, too rich and stupid to know the value of money, obsessed with American women, incompetent
2. I would feel villafied and would see these as untrue. I would petition and protest these films. I would say that these represent stereotypes that are often untrue.
3. Young people may think that the United States is using these films as propaganda to villafy the Arab world. The young people may think that the United States is racist towards them. They may become motivated to attack the United States.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
My Personal Psychology Perspective
I am not a psychologist but this is what I believe.
Although much has changed over the seven thousand years on Earth, one thing has re-mained constant: the fundamental characteristics of human beings. Surviving and reproducing have always been the two mantras but what drives those? The answer is the human brain. Throughout the course of humanity, our body and brain have evolved to provide the best chances for us to survive and reproduce. Working on this, numerous parts of other perspectives, such as the socio-cultural, behavior genetics, neuroscience, and behavioral views, are used to explain elements of the evolutionary perspective that are too complex to explain simplify by that pers-pective.
From the first creation of life to the day we die, we are influenced by outside forces. How so? From the first cell, our ancestors have always been alive before we were actually “alive,” regardless whether our ancestors reproduced through replication, egg, or live birth. Because of this, our DNA has been, and if we have children will continue to be, our link to life. As for conception (the most influential part of our life before we are born), as soon as the egg and sperm combine in the traditional way, we are subjected to our mother’s womb. In addition, we also experience her teratogens and can be born affected by life without having firsthand experienced it.
In addition to being controlled by outside forces, we are also controlled by another force: our brain chemicals. Various hormones regulate how our body works on a macro scale while neurotransmitters and action potentials affect our body on a micro scale, our neurons. These chemicals were all formed as a result of evolution and are thus a byproduct of it. In addition, drugs can mimic these chemicals and thus change our body chemistry. As for the brain itself, we have evolved our brains to be the most complex of any species. To do this, the brain had to be-come quite large and incorporate large amounts of information. More important brain functions were located deeper in the brain for more protection. Lateralization was evolved to prevent us from being completely incapacitated from an attack.
After we are born, we experience our second real stage of our life. We have several ref-lexes that undoubtedly exist as precursors to an earlier kind of life where these reflexes were highly valued. For instance, the stepping reflex shows how we are meant to be bipedal, the grasping reflex allows us to quickly hold on to something such as our mother’s hair if we were to have fallen from her grasp, and the rooting reflex enables us to find our mother’s breast for much needed breast milk. Our dependency on our family for physical support is reciprocated by our parents to us because we are continuing their DNA. Thus, attachment occurs, causing the family to become the closest social group to us. Over the years, the baby grows up physically and men-tally, allowing for us to gradually become more acquainted with our surroundings. The various stages we go through, as described by Piaget, can be attributed by evolutionary factors. For in-stance, the sensorimotor stage most likely comes first because it is we must first learn what ob-jects hurt us or help us. Perhaps purposefully, we experience the formal operations stage around the same time we start puberty, suggesting that now that we are to reproduce, we must make more rational decisions.
Our sense of perception can also be explained through the evolutionary perspective. Our ability to understand five senses has allowed us to decipher the main characteristics of our sur-roundings. The crossing over of optic nerves serves to protect us from losing half of our visual understanding if there is an accident. Generally, food that is important to our survival tastes and smells good, causing us to develop a liking for those kinds of food. Also, we are attracted to more beautiful people because they have the characteristics of a healthy mate or person. Our ability to understand perceptual constancies can be attributed by our need to simplify processes so as not to overload the brain. Schemas and concepts are also designed to overload the mind.
Our consciousness has also evolved to fit our surroundings. Our 24.2-hour circadian rhythm almost matches with the 24-hour day. Yawning may have evolved as a result of others communicating it is a time to rest. Sleep has also evolved. Sleep mostly came about as a way to pass the time when we could not see anything. During sleep, we have also evolved to think about the day’s problems. In addition, it is also utilized to restore and rejuvenate our bodies. Dreams have also evolved into ways that we can benefit; we often are able to remember better.
Our learning through behavior is another, albeit skewed, example of how the evolutionary perspective is valid. Naturally, our brain wants to maximize our rewards and minimize our punishments. Thus, the behaviorists’ creed, whether classical or operant conditioning, can be stated to have evolved from humans’ desire to have better chances at survival (i.e. the howl of wolves to signal wolves or picking numerous berries to survive). Observational learning also demonstrates this fact; if we see someone rewarded or punished, we try to repeat his or her ac-tions or avoid them, respectively.
Other mental processes have clear ties to other evolution. Memory developed as a way to remember if certain actions were beneficial or hurt us. Similarly, intelligence was evolved so we could figure out situations that we had not experienced before. Flashbulb memories are more im-portant to us because they represent poignant emotional visions, which are for the most part more important than other memories. Forgetting pushes out unnecessary memories and allows us to receive other memories. Heuristics were evolved to allow us to make sense out of unfamiliar ob-jects. Motivations often manifest themselves in a way that contributes to our survival and repro-duction, even sometimes promoting too much.
Lastly, our social environment, the factor that causes evolution, plays an immense role in our lives. We are motivated to conform to other people via social proof, which can be explained by our need to be accepted by other people as a way of survival and reproduction. The role of reciprocation can be explained as the reasoning behind altruism, that if we help others in whatev-er they will return the favor. Prejudice is just another form of group favoring. Just as humans support our own species more than any other species due to a share gene pool so do people of a certain race advocate their own ethnicity. Obedience allows us to relax and use a more powerful person’s orders that are more likely to be successful and take the blame if necessary.
Although the evolutionary perspective may be viewed as too broad to dictate the majority of human behaviors and mental processes, it can be viable if you relate it to other perspectives. Because of this, the evolutionary perspective can be expanded to cover almost all of human be-havior.
Although much has changed over the seven thousand years on Earth, one thing has re-mained constant: the fundamental characteristics of human beings. Surviving and reproducing have always been the two mantras but what drives those? The answer is the human brain. Throughout the course of humanity, our body and brain have evolved to provide the best chances for us to survive and reproduce. Working on this, numerous parts of other perspectives, such as the socio-cultural, behavior genetics, neuroscience, and behavioral views, are used to explain elements of the evolutionary perspective that are too complex to explain simplify by that pers-pective.
From the first creation of life to the day we die, we are influenced by outside forces. How so? From the first cell, our ancestors have always been alive before we were actually “alive,” regardless whether our ancestors reproduced through replication, egg, or live birth. Because of this, our DNA has been, and if we have children will continue to be, our link to life. As for conception (the most influential part of our life before we are born), as soon as the egg and sperm combine in the traditional way, we are subjected to our mother’s womb. In addition, we also experience her teratogens and can be born affected by life without having firsthand experienced it.
In addition to being controlled by outside forces, we are also controlled by another force: our brain chemicals. Various hormones regulate how our body works on a macro scale while neurotransmitters and action potentials affect our body on a micro scale, our neurons. These chemicals were all formed as a result of evolution and are thus a byproduct of it. In addition, drugs can mimic these chemicals and thus change our body chemistry. As for the brain itself, we have evolved our brains to be the most complex of any species. To do this, the brain had to be-come quite large and incorporate large amounts of information. More important brain functions were located deeper in the brain for more protection. Lateralization was evolved to prevent us from being completely incapacitated from an attack.
After we are born, we experience our second real stage of our life. We have several ref-lexes that undoubtedly exist as precursors to an earlier kind of life where these reflexes were highly valued. For instance, the stepping reflex shows how we are meant to be bipedal, the grasping reflex allows us to quickly hold on to something such as our mother’s hair if we were to have fallen from her grasp, and the rooting reflex enables us to find our mother’s breast for much needed breast milk. Our dependency on our family for physical support is reciprocated by our parents to us because we are continuing their DNA. Thus, attachment occurs, causing the family to become the closest social group to us. Over the years, the baby grows up physically and men-tally, allowing for us to gradually become more acquainted with our surroundings. The various stages we go through, as described by Piaget, can be attributed by evolutionary factors. For in-stance, the sensorimotor stage most likely comes first because it is we must first learn what ob-jects hurt us or help us. Perhaps purposefully, we experience the formal operations stage around the same time we start puberty, suggesting that now that we are to reproduce, we must make more rational decisions.
Our sense of perception can also be explained through the evolutionary perspective. Our ability to understand five senses has allowed us to decipher the main characteristics of our sur-roundings. The crossing over of optic nerves serves to protect us from losing half of our visual understanding if there is an accident. Generally, food that is important to our survival tastes and smells good, causing us to develop a liking for those kinds of food. Also, we are attracted to more beautiful people because they have the characteristics of a healthy mate or person. Our ability to understand perceptual constancies can be attributed by our need to simplify processes so as not to overload the brain. Schemas and concepts are also designed to overload the mind.
Our consciousness has also evolved to fit our surroundings. Our 24.2-hour circadian rhythm almost matches with the 24-hour day. Yawning may have evolved as a result of others communicating it is a time to rest. Sleep has also evolved. Sleep mostly came about as a way to pass the time when we could not see anything. During sleep, we have also evolved to think about the day’s problems. In addition, it is also utilized to restore and rejuvenate our bodies. Dreams have also evolved into ways that we can benefit; we often are able to remember better.
Our learning through behavior is another, albeit skewed, example of how the evolutionary perspective is valid. Naturally, our brain wants to maximize our rewards and minimize our punishments. Thus, the behaviorists’ creed, whether classical or operant conditioning, can be stated to have evolved from humans’ desire to have better chances at survival (i.e. the howl of wolves to signal wolves or picking numerous berries to survive). Observational learning also demonstrates this fact; if we see someone rewarded or punished, we try to repeat his or her ac-tions or avoid them, respectively.
Other mental processes have clear ties to other evolution. Memory developed as a way to remember if certain actions were beneficial or hurt us. Similarly, intelligence was evolved so we could figure out situations that we had not experienced before. Flashbulb memories are more im-portant to us because they represent poignant emotional visions, which are for the most part more important than other memories. Forgetting pushes out unnecessary memories and allows us to receive other memories. Heuristics were evolved to allow us to make sense out of unfamiliar ob-jects. Motivations often manifest themselves in a way that contributes to our survival and repro-duction, even sometimes promoting too much.
Lastly, our social environment, the factor that causes evolution, plays an immense role in our lives. We are motivated to conform to other people via social proof, which can be explained by our need to be accepted by other people as a way of survival and reproduction. The role of reciprocation can be explained as the reasoning behind altruism, that if we help others in whatev-er they will return the favor. Prejudice is just another form of group favoring. Just as humans support our own species more than any other species due to a share gene pool so do people of a certain race advocate their own ethnicity. Obedience allows us to relax and use a more powerful person’s orders that are more likely to be successful and take the blame if necessary.
Although the evolutionary perspective may be viewed as too broad to dictate the majority of human behaviors and mental processes, it can be viable if you relate it to other perspectives. Because of this, the evolutionary perspective can be expanded to cover almost all of human be-havior.
An Analysis of the REM Sleep-Memory Consolidation Hypothesis
An Analysis of the REM Sleep-Memory Consolidation Hypothesis
Have you found that you remember something more strongly if you get more sleep? If so, then you may have confirmed the REM Sleep-Memory Consolidation Hypothesis. What this hy-pothesis states is that the more REM sleep you get, the more you are to remember, whether in the form of an increase in memory because of more of it or a decrease in memory because of a de-privation. Research by several scientists states that this phenomenon can come about due to “the replay of neuronal activity seen during prior learning episodes” (Siegel). Others believe that this replay may be a result of genetically programmed neuronal development that may be a factor in the “extinction of memory traces” or have no function in neuronal plasticity.Numerous experiments have been devoted to wondering if there is a positive correlation between REM sleep and memory. In 2000, Dave and Margoliash studied the motor cortex of ze-bra finches and found that their “neural activity patterns in sleep” were similar to their singing when they were awake, suggesting that sleep plays a role in the consolidation of procedural memory. This hypothesis is also supported by the fact that infants and babies sleep for a consi-derably long time. Other findings have focused more on the macro-level interaction by saying the hippocampus plays a role in memory consolidation during REM sleep. Work on the hippocampus has shown that memories are recorded better when impulses arrive at the high points of the theta rhythm while those that arrive at the low points of the rhythm “can undo the facilitation” of a memory. In 2000, Stickgold and his colleagues studied dreams and found that 10% of dreams were those of a task just learned. Other dreamers reported that their dreams were those of a learned task that occurred after that task was consolidated. Many of the dreams were also linked to the place where the learning had occurred or were matched with the emotions of the learning experience.
Other findings have considered whether the deprivation of REM sleep can prevent mem-ory. A 1962 finding by Jouvet stated that with REM sleep deprivation, the animal subject had a total loss of muscle tone, suggesting that REM sleep is necessary for proper memory functioning of muscles. The study has been extended by Vimont-Vicary and colleagues in 1966 to show that if animals, specifically rats, are restricted to a small area surrounded by water, they will fall into the water if “they assume the maximally relaxed recumbent posture required for REM sleep.” In addition, Quervain in 1998 showed that without REM sleep, the animal experiences more stress which can combine with loss of REM sleep to produce a synergistic effect of memory consolida-tion impediment.
Despite these claims that there is a positive correlation between REM sleep and memory, numerous findings seem to disprove this belief. Louie and Wilson in 2001 found that the replay of events occurred in the latter REM stages rather than the first ones after the process, suggesting that there are more factors in memory consolidation than just REM sleep. In addition, a majority of dreams do not have any particular relationships to events we have just learned. In Jouvet’s same study, the findings reported that “some non-REM sleep can occur without complete relaxa-tion” of the muscles, which were previously viewed as a reason for the necessity of REM sleep. As for the surrounded by water test, several studies reported no difference in memory consolida-tion while some stated that there was an increase in it. In 1982, van Hulzen devised an experi-ment where the rat was rocked gently back in forth so that there would be less stress on the ani-mal. The findings showed that there was no learning deficit, suggesting that stress caused the memory loss. Numerous drugs such as monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors are able to suppress REM sleep without any learning deficit.
Regardless of the actual verdict on the positive correlation between REM sleep and memory correlation, it can be said that any experiments that improve the conditions of human beings are beneficially. Even if the hypotheses are wrong, they do bring in new data that can possibly be attributed to other hypotheses. With the help of advanced scientific tools like MRI machines, we can delve deeper into the human mind. Continued research is needed to determine if we ourselves should sleep longer or whether our children should do so also. Further studies should control for unwanted variables such as stress and that the sample sets are large enough and varied enough to draw a valid conclusion from.
Works Cited
Siegel, Jerome M. "The REM Sleep-Memory Consolidation Hypothesis. " Science 294.5544 (2001): 1058-1063. Research Library Core, ProQuest. Web. 6 Aug. 2009.
75 Events in the Course of Psychology
# Start Date Person Action
1 1596 René Descartes Born and would later propose the doctrine of interactive dualism—the idea that mind and body are separate entities that interact to produce sensations, emotions, and other conscious experiences.
2 1795 Ernst Weber Born and would later propose Weber's law-for each sense, the size of a just noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the size of the initial stimulus
3 1821 Hermann von Helmhotz Born and would later propose the trichromatic theory
4 September 13, 1848 Phineas Gage Had a pole impaled through his frontal lobe
5 1859 Charles Darwin Added to Herbert Spencer's belief of gradual evolutionary change by publishing On the Origin of Species
6 1861 Phineas Gage Died 13 years after being impaled
7 1861 Paul Broca Discovered Broca's area
8 1867 Edward B. Titchener Born and would later propose structuralism—the belief that even our most complex conscious experiences could be broken down into elemental structures of sensations and feelings.
9 1874 Wilhelm Wundt Published Principles of Physiological Psychology, outlining the connections between physiology and psychology
10 1874 Karl Wernicke Discovered Wernicke's area
11 1878 G. Stanley Hall Received the first Ph.D. in psychology in the United States
12 1879 Wilhelm Wundt Opened the first psychology research laboratory at the University of Leipzig
13 1880 Max Wertheimer Born and would late establish Gestalt psychology
14 1883 G. Stanley Hall Founded the first psychology research laboratory in the United States at Johns Hopkins University
15 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus Published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology and his ideas on the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
16 1890 William James Published Principles of Psychology, which would later lead to his idea of functionalism—the importance of how behavior functions to allow people and animals to adapt to their environments
17 1890 Mary Whiton Calkins Assigned the task of teaching experimental psychology at a new women's college-Wellesley College
18 1891 Mary Whiton Calkins Established a psychological laboratory at Wellesley College
19 1892 Edward B. Titchener Became a psychology professor at Cornell University
20 1892 G. Stanley Hall Founded the American Psychological Association and elected first president
21 1892 William James Described consciousness as a "stream" or "river"
22 1898 Edward Lee Thorndike Did his "puzzle boxes"
23 1900 Sigmund Freud Published The Interpretation of Dreams
24 1902 Carl Rogers Born and would later develop the actualizing tendency-the innate drive to maintain and enhance the human organism
25 1904 Sigmund Freud Published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and proposed the concept of "Freudian slips"
26 1904 Sigmund Freud Believed that dreams had a manifest content and latent content
27 1904 Ivan Pavlov Did his classical conditioning tests on dogs
28 1904 Charles Spearman Believed that a factor called general intelligence, or the g factor, was responsible for people's overall performance on tests of mental ability
29 1905 Mary Whiton Calkins Elected first female president to APA
30 1905 Sigmund Freud Proposed the five psychosexual stages of development
31 1908 Margaret Floy Washburn Published the influential text The Animal Mind, summarizing research on sensation, perception, learning, and other "inner experiences" of different animal species
32 1909 Sigmund Freud Delivered five lectured on psychoanalysis at Clark University's 20th anniversary celebration in Worcester, Massachusetts
33 1913 John B. Watson Published "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," starting behaviorialism
34 1913 Roger Sperry Born and would later do experiments to split-brain patients
35 1916 Lewis Terman Published the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, which became the standard for intelligence tests in the United States
36 1919 John B. Watson Identified fear, rage, and love as the three instinctual emotions
37 1920 Francis C. Sumner Became first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, awarded by Clark University
38 1920 John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner Performed the Little Albert tests
39 1921 Margaret Floy Washburn Elected second female president to APA
40 1921 Hermann Rorschach Developed his famous Rorschach Inkblot Test
41 1933 Alfred Adler Proposed superiority and inferiority complexes
42 1935 Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray Developed a test to measure human motives called the Thematic Apperception Test
43 1936 Carl Jung Proposed the concept of the collective unconscious, which contains archetypes
44 1945 Karen Horney Stressed the importance of cultural and social factors in personality development
45 1948 Edward C. Tolman Stated his idea of a cognitive map, the layout of a familiar environment
46 1953 B. F. Skinner Coined the term operant to describe "any behavior that operates upon the environment to generate consequences"
47 1953 Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman Discovered REM sleep
48 1953 B. F. Skinner Identified positive and negative punishment
49 1953 H.M. His doctors located the brain area where the seizures seemed to occur, but removed portions of his hippocampus, causing memory loss
50 1955 David Wechsler Designed the intelligence test Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
51 1955 Solomon Asch Performed his experiment on conformity
52 1956 Benjamin Whorf Developed the linguistic relativity hypothesis that contended we see things through language
53 1961 M. C. Escher Created Waterfall, a visual illusion similar in absurdity to his other drawings
54 1962 Eugene Galanter Provided absolute thresholds for each sense
55 1964 George Wald Confirmed the trichromatic theory by showing rods are color-specific
56 1966 John Garcia and his colleagues Discovered taste aversion
57 1967 Steven F. Maier and Martin Seligman Discovered learned helplessness
58 1968 Robert A. Rescorla Discovered the reliability part of classical conditioning
59 1968 Erik Erikson Formulated his idea of psychosocial development
60 1970 Kenneth Bancroft Clark Elected first African American president to APA
61 1970 Abraham Maslow Finished his hierarchy of needs model
62 1972 Amos Tversky Proposed the decision-making model called the elimination by aspects model
63 1972 Jean Piaget Finished his theory of cognitive development
64 1973 Candace Pert and Solomon Snyder At John Hopkins University, discovered receptor sites for opiates
65 1974 Albert Bandura Did his famous Bobo Doll experiment
66 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John C. Palmer Performed their classic automobile accident explaining how memories can be altered
67 1977 J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley Proposed the activation-synthesis model of dreaming, stating that dreaming is our subjective awareness of brain's internally generated signals during sleep
68 1981 Roger Sperry Won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
69 1986 Ernest R. Hilgard Stated his neodissociation theory of hypnosis, that a hypnotized person consciously experiences one stream of mental activity that is responding to the hypnotist's suggestion while the other is unconscious
70 1993 Thomas Bouchard and Matt McGue Collected data on more than 100,000 pairs of relatives to see the importance of nature and nurture
71 1995 Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell Performed their famous lost-in-the-mall study
72 1997 Robert Sternberg Proposed the conception of intelligence as successful intelligence that contains analytic, creative, and practical intelligence
73 1997 Claude Steele Documented the effect known as stereotype threat
74 1998 Elizabeth Gould and her colleagues Showed that neurons were continuously generated in the hippocampus due to neurogenesis
75 2000 Eric Kandel Won the Nobel Prize for his discoveries on the neural basis of memory
1 1596 René Descartes Born and would later propose the doctrine of interactive dualism—the idea that mind and body are separate entities that interact to produce sensations, emotions, and other conscious experiences.
2 1795 Ernst Weber Born and would later propose Weber's law-for each sense, the size of a just noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the size of the initial stimulus
3 1821 Hermann von Helmhotz Born and would later propose the trichromatic theory
4 September 13, 1848 Phineas Gage Had a pole impaled through his frontal lobe
5 1859 Charles Darwin Added to Herbert Spencer's belief of gradual evolutionary change by publishing On the Origin of Species
6 1861 Phineas Gage Died 13 years after being impaled
7 1861 Paul Broca Discovered Broca's area
8 1867 Edward B. Titchener Born and would later propose structuralism—the belief that even our most complex conscious experiences could be broken down into elemental structures of sensations and feelings.
9 1874 Wilhelm Wundt Published Principles of Physiological Psychology, outlining the connections between physiology and psychology
10 1874 Karl Wernicke Discovered Wernicke's area
11 1878 G. Stanley Hall Received the first Ph.D. in psychology in the United States
12 1879 Wilhelm Wundt Opened the first psychology research laboratory at the University of Leipzig
13 1880 Max Wertheimer Born and would late establish Gestalt psychology
14 1883 G. Stanley Hall Founded the first psychology research laboratory in the United States at Johns Hopkins University
15 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus Published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology and his ideas on the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
16 1890 William James Published Principles of Psychology, which would later lead to his idea of functionalism—the importance of how behavior functions to allow people and animals to adapt to their environments
17 1890 Mary Whiton Calkins Assigned the task of teaching experimental psychology at a new women's college-Wellesley College
18 1891 Mary Whiton Calkins Established a psychological laboratory at Wellesley College
19 1892 Edward B. Titchener Became a psychology professor at Cornell University
20 1892 G. Stanley Hall Founded the American Psychological Association and elected first president
21 1892 William James Described consciousness as a "stream" or "river"
22 1898 Edward Lee Thorndike Did his "puzzle boxes"
23 1900 Sigmund Freud Published The Interpretation of Dreams
24 1902 Carl Rogers Born and would later develop the actualizing tendency-the innate drive to maintain and enhance the human organism
25 1904 Sigmund Freud Published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and proposed the concept of "Freudian slips"
26 1904 Sigmund Freud Believed that dreams had a manifest content and latent content
27 1904 Ivan Pavlov Did his classical conditioning tests on dogs
28 1904 Charles Spearman Believed that a factor called general intelligence, or the g factor, was responsible for people's overall performance on tests of mental ability
29 1905 Mary Whiton Calkins Elected first female president to APA
30 1905 Sigmund Freud Proposed the five psychosexual stages of development
31 1908 Margaret Floy Washburn Published the influential text The Animal Mind, summarizing research on sensation, perception, learning, and other "inner experiences" of different animal species
32 1909 Sigmund Freud Delivered five lectured on psychoanalysis at Clark University's 20th anniversary celebration in Worcester, Massachusetts
33 1913 John B. Watson Published "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," starting behaviorialism
34 1913 Roger Sperry Born and would later do experiments to split-brain patients
35 1916 Lewis Terman Published the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, which became the standard for intelligence tests in the United States
36 1919 John B. Watson Identified fear, rage, and love as the three instinctual emotions
37 1920 Francis C. Sumner Became first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, awarded by Clark University
38 1920 John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner Performed the Little Albert tests
39 1921 Margaret Floy Washburn Elected second female president to APA
40 1921 Hermann Rorschach Developed his famous Rorschach Inkblot Test
41 1933 Alfred Adler Proposed superiority and inferiority complexes
42 1935 Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray Developed a test to measure human motives called the Thematic Apperception Test
43 1936 Carl Jung Proposed the concept of the collective unconscious, which contains archetypes
44 1945 Karen Horney Stressed the importance of cultural and social factors in personality development
45 1948 Edward C. Tolman Stated his idea of a cognitive map, the layout of a familiar environment
46 1953 B. F. Skinner Coined the term operant to describe "any behavior that operates upon the environment to generate consequences"
47 1953 Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman Discovered REM sleep
48 1953 B. F. Skinner Identified positive and negative punishment
49 1953 H.M. His doctors located the brain area where the seizures seemed to occur, but removed portions of his hippocampus, causing memory loss
50 1955 David Wechsler Designed the intelligence test Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
51 1955 Solomon Asch Performed his experiment on conformity
52 1956 Benjamin Whorf Developed the linguistic relativity hypothesis that contended we see things through language
53 1961 M. C. Escher Created Waterfall, a visual illusion similar in absurdity to his other drawings
54 1962 Eugene Galanter Provided absolute thresholds for each sense
55 1964 George Wald Confirmed the trichromatic theory by showing rods are color-specific
56 1966 John Garcia and his colleagues Discovered taste aversion
57 1967 Steven F. Maier and Martin Seligman Discovered learned helplessness
58 1968 Robert A. Rescorla Discovered the reliability part of classical conditioning
59 1968 Erik Erikson Formulated his idea of psychosocial development
60 1970 Kenneth Bancroft Clark Elected first African American president to APA
61 1970 Abraham Maslow Finished his hierarchy of needs model
62 1972 Amos Tversky Proposed the decision-making model called the elimination by aspects model
63 1972 Jean Piaget Finished his theory of cognitive development
64 1973 Candace Pert and Solomon Snyder At John Hopkins University, discovered receptor sites for opiates
65 1974 Albert Bandura Did his famous Bobo Doll experiment
66 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John C. Palmer Performed their classic automobile accident explaining how memories can be altered
67 1977 J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley Proposed the activation-synthesis model of dreaming, stating that dreaming is our subjective awareness of brain's internally generated signals during sleep
68 1981 Roger Sperry Won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
69 1986 Ernest R. Hilgard Stated his neodissociation theory of hypnosis, that a hypnotized person consciously experiences one stream of mental activity that is responding to the hypnotist's suggestion while the other is unconscious
70 1993 Thomas Bouchard and Matt McGue Collected data on more than 100,000 pairs of relatives to see the importance of nature and nurture
71 1995 Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell Performed their famous lost-in-the-mall study
72 1997 Robert Sternberg Proposed the conception of intelligence as successful intelligence that contains analytic, creative, and practical intelligence
73 1997 Claude Steele Documented the effect known as stereotype threat
74 1998 Elizabeth Gould and her colleagues Showed that neurons were continuously generated in the hippocampus due to neurogenesis
75 2000 Eric Kandel Won the Nobel Prize for his discoveries on the neural basis of memory
Fight Club Psychoanalytic Notes
Narrator
• No name – universal
• Intellectualization is widespread, apathetic about boring life (when his apartment ex-plodes)
• is anal-retentive on interior decorating, perhaps from a fixating on going to the bath-room too much
• used to read pornography but now reads the Horchow collection, a magazine about in-terior decorating. Example of displacement and sublimation
• when he obviously puts a fake name sign of anal-retentive
• is in denial about his own dependency
• after the meeting, he realizes a sense of dependency from oral fixation
• reaction formation when he sees Marla. States that she doesn’t have testicular cancer (obviously – girl) while he doesn’t either
• after being punched by Tyler, his death drive is unleashed and his instinctual id over-powers the ego, causing him to act impulsively and fight back
• dad left when he was six years old – childhood issues
• sometimes Tyler speaks through him – id to ego
• when he hears Marla and Tyler having sex, displaces and sublimates sexual energy into reading, brushing teeth, washing clothes
• has come to smoke and have blood on clothes
• becomes brainwashed by Tyler (id)
• beats himself up when his boss doesn’t
• tricks his boss to give him what he wants
• has a weakened superego
• when he talks to Marla in the kitchen, he’s the only one who can hear Tyler’s sawing and him speaking. Tyler tells him what to say. Marla acts as a superego by asking him how he got a scar
• begins to reform his superego after Project Mayhem’s increased vandalism
• his mind is in conflict between his and Tyler’s
Tyler Durden
• smokes – oral fixation?
• Uncontrollable id – steals cars, gets pleasure from being hit, drinks, smokes, inserts por-nography clips into family films, pees into soup, rides bicycle in house, has sex with ran-dom women, chemically burns the narrator
• Thanatos – uncontrolled aggression
• No control – anal stage
• Symbolizes the narrator’s and everyone else’s id. Strengthened by the narrator’s reading of stories about people personifying themselves as people’s organs
• Cold father
• Libido – has sex with low standard women
• Convinces the narrator to steal fat from the liposuction
• Tricks the hotel he works at into a lawsuit
• Perverted sense of right – holds a man (Raymond) up at gunpoint so he can further pur-sue the career he wants (veterinarian) , blows up the narrator’s condo to make his life interesting
Marla Singer
• smokes – oral fixation?
• Denies that her zanax overdose is bad
• Promiscuous – low phallic stage
• Claims the narrator is a nutcase – reaction formation
Fight Club
• movie is a representation as a whole of Thanatos through Tyler’s anti-franchise rampage
• becomes a cult with organized labor and mindless following to create explosives
Other
• demolition is on the basement
• after testicular cancer, bob regresses into his phallic stage
• in the men’s discussion, Thomas says he’s glad for his ex-wife for having a baby with her new husband, an example of rationalization
• the moral support groups the narrator goes to are elevated, sometimes on the second floor: Freudian house analogy
• after fighting, Tyler walks on the street while the narrator walks on the sidewalk, show-ing the Freudian house analogy
• the official fighting occurs in the basement of the tavern: Freudian house analogy
• in the basement of the house are nitroglycerines
• No name – universal
• Intellectualization is widespread, apathetic about boring life (when his apartment ex-plodes)
• is anal-retentive on interior decorating, perhaps from a fixating on going to the bath-room too much
• used to read pornography but now reads the Horchow collection, a magazine about in-terior decorating. Example of displacement and sublimation
• when he obviously puts a fake name sign of anal-retentive
• is in denial about his own dependency
• after the meeting, he realizes a sense of dependency from oral fixation
• reaction formation when he sees Marla. States that she doesn’t have testicular cancer (obviously – girl) while he doesn’t either
• after being punched by Tyler, his death drive is unleashed and his instinctual id over-powers the ego, causing him to act impulsively and fight back
• dad left when he was six years old – childhood issues
• sometimes Tyler speaks through him – id to ego
• when he hears Marla and Tyler having sex, displaces and sublimates sexual energy into reading, brushing teeth, washing clothes
• has come to smoke and have blood on clothes
• becomes brainwashed by Tyler (id)
• beats himself up when his boss doesn’t
• tricks his boss to give him what he wants
• has a weakened superego
• when he talks to Marla in the kitchen, he’s the only one who can hear Tyler’s sawing and him speaking. Tyler tells him what to say. Marla acts as a superego by asking him how he got a scar
• begins to reform his superego after Project Mayhem’s increased vandalism
• his mind is in conflict between his and Tyler’s
Tyler Durden
• smokes – oral fixation?
• Uncontrollable id – steals cars, gets pleasure from being hit, drinks, smokes, inserts por-nography clips into family films, pees into soup, rides bicycle in house, has sex with ran-dom women, chemically burns the narrator
• Thanatos – uncontrolled aggression
• No control – anal stage
• Symbolizes the narrator’s and everyone else’s id. Strengthened by the narrator’s reading of stories about people personifying themselves as people’s organs
• Cold father
• Libido – has sex with low standard women
• Convinces the narrator to steal fat from the liposuction
• Tricks the hotel he works at into a lawsuit
• Perverted sense of right – holds a man (Raymond) up at gunpoint so he can further pur-sue the career he wants (veterinarian) , blows up the narrator’s condo to make his life interesting
Marla Singer
• smokes – oral fixation?
• Denies that her zanax overdose is bad
• Promiscuous – low phallic stage
• Claims the narrator is a nutcase – reaction formation
Fight Club
• movie is a representation as a whole of Thanatos through Tyler’s anti-franchise rampage
• becomes a cult with organized labor and mindless following to create explosives
Other
• demolition is on the basement
• after testicular cancer, bob regresses into his phallic stage
• in the men’s discussion, Thomas says he’s glad for his ex-wife for having a baby with her new husband, an example of rationalization
• the moral support groups the narrator goes to are elevated, sometimes on the second floor: Freudian house analogy
• after fighting, Tyler walks on the street while the narrator walks on the sidewalk, show-ing the Freudian house analogy
• the official fighting occurs in the basement of the tavern: Freudian house analogy
• in the basement of the house are nitroglycerines
A Freudian Analysis of Fight Club
A Freudian Analysis of Fight Club
Although the movie Fight Club is usually thought of simply to be a group of men fight-ing, it has a much darker and insightful meaning. With the narrator anonymous throughout the film, his struggles come to symbolize the everyman’s problems with himself and society. The fight club that spontaneously starts up symbolizes the death drive (Thanatos) of Sigmund Freud’s dynamic theory of personality and how humans are constantly in a state of aggression in order to survive. Through Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective, the film depicts the internal “fights” be-tween the narrator and the other characters as battles over conformity in corporate America.In the beginning of the film, the narrator is apathetic towards his life and largely compla-cent about his place in it. He is also anal-retentive about the interior decoration in his condomi-nium, of which he may have developed from a fixation of the anal psychosexual stage. This is enforced when he mentions that he used to read pornography but now reads the Horchow Collection, a magazine about interior decorating. In this situation, he employs the ego defense mechanism of sublimation through displacement, rechanneling his sexual energy into his compulsive nature. Although he hates his job, the narrator employs the ego defense mechanism of intellectualization to provide him solace. Because his job takes him to numerous locations, he experiences perpetual jet lag that manifests itself into insomnia, causing the narrator to become out of touch with his life instinct of sleep. After he is recommended by his doctor to visit support groups to find out what real suffering is, he calls himself by many different names, foreshadow-ing Tyler’s eventual introduction. By disguising himself, he regresses to the phallic psychosexual stage because he fails to identify with himself, of which is probably influenced by a lack of a fa-ther figure in his childhood. In a quasi-form of projection, the narrator vicariously mourns with the other members of the support groups until he discovers another imposter, Marla. Initially, he ironically condemns her through the reaction formation, but comes to accept her due to their sim-ilar ties to the groups. The narrator’s life has become darker but will only continue to do so.
A while after the support groups, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, a man that the narrator comes to envy because of his interestingness. Tyler comes to symbolize an uncontrollable id by stealing cars, drinking, smoking, urinating into soups, and riding a bicycle in the house in which he lacks control, perhaps because of an underdeveloped anal stage. His constantly hungry Thana-tos and fashionable wardrobe provides his pleasure principle with more than enough satisfaction, so much that it interests the narrator. He is also masochistic, enticing the narrator to punch him. After he punches the narrator back, the narrator’s powerful superego begins to diminish in im-portance and his id comes to control his life. Thus, Tyler can be seen as the narrator’s id, while society’s norms symbolize the narrator’s superego. This realization is enforced by the narrator reading stories about how the author personified himself or herself as an organ in the body of another person. Also, this is evident when Tyler begins to tell what the narrator should say and, sometimes, when he actually speaks for the narrator. When the narrator overhears Marla and Ty-ler having sex, he sublimates his sexual energy into productive activities such as reading, brushing his teeth, and washing clothes. After a while, the narrator adopts several of Tyler’s pleasure activities such as drinking, smoking, and swindling corporations.
Due to the fight club’s popularity, Tyler turns it into a cult, causing the narrator to ques-tion the club’s overall purpose. When Tyler issues a vandalizing spree known as Project Mayhem, the narrator does not feel much remorse due to his weakened superego. However, after he sees Tyler hold up a random man at gunpoint so he can further pursue the career he wants, the narrator begins to see Tyler’s perverted sense of right and rebuild his superego. His superego is further strengthened when he hears that his close friend, Bob, has been shot because of Tyler’s orders. The narrator’s journey to find the know hiding Tyler is symbolic of the ego trying to reason with the id. Eventually, the narrator realizes that he is Tyler and that he is the architect of Project Mayhem. His realization that he is in conflict with himself and Tyler is representative of the battles that occur within the mind, particularly between the id and the ego.
Although the narrator is severely wounded and has blown up several buildings, he has technically won by defeating Tyler, his symbolic id. The narrator has come to symbolize the struggles that everyone must go through daily, from pursuing our pleasure to conforming to so-ciety. The director himself does this by splicing random stills throughout the movie, with the last one being a penis, which was one of the jobs Tyler did. Thus, his actions show the universal competition between the id and the ego. His actions are a reminder that although following our human instincts in this movie resulted in widespread destruction, they are the principles that al-low us to survive and live.
Random Stories about Life
Although the phenomenon known as social loafing is a well-established psychological finding, I too, like the counter example given in the book, can argue against its proposed ubiqui-ty due to my own experiences and also advocate social striving in certain situations. Being at a high school with about half Asian Americans and half Caucasians, I have had my fair share of group projects in which I work with Caucasians and Asian Americans. Although most of my friends are Caucasian, I sometimes choose to work with other Asian Americans that I am not as familiar with. Why, you might ask? Because they work harder. Caucasians feel that since there are more people in a group, the work is split between the group members. While this may be true, Asian Americans do not share this mentality and instead work harder than in a group due to a culture full of competition. In my own life, when I worked on a project that involved plan-ning a city, the other Caucasians in my group slacked off and took a less active role in the group that me or the Asian Americans in the group, who elevated themselves about their normal lev-el. As for all Caucasian groups I have been in, the standard procedure is to meet at my house, provide an hour or two of work that usually centers on me, and then have me finish the work. On the other hand, when I’m working in an all Asian American group, the work is evenly dis-persed throughout the group with the Asian Americans often times eagerly accepting more of the work share. Accordingly to all these examples, the best grades I receive correlate to the number of Asian Americans I have in my group and have a negative correlation with the num-ber of Caucasians I have in my group. However, I have a very high work ethic myself and I therefore may be biased towards criticizing Caucasians and siding with Asian Americans.
I can relate to Sigmund Freud’s ego defense mechanism of sublimation in the category of displacement. On one of my favorite television shows, Malcolm in the Middle, the two par-ents are believed to have sex every night. This strong sexual interaction, however, leads to the deteriorating household and working conditions. When the mother of the family, Lois, says that she and her husband, Hal, cannot have sex due to an infection until all the pills run out (which would be a week), he initially panics but then resolves to mow the lawn. While sex can be seen as a deterrent to work, it is a part of human nature and therefore cannot be prevented but ra-ther restrained. Instead, Hal uses that sexual energy that he has been accustomed to for every night to channel it into productive, nonsexual activities such as painting the kitchen cabinets and making a lavish breakfast. Lois also rechannels her sexual energy into productive, nonsex-ual activities such as removing the grout from showers and picking up fresh flowers. The absti-nence from sex also allows Hal to do better at his job and receive a raise, while Lois now has the time and focus to go over IRS tax returns and find $800 in overpaid fees. However, just as their lives are starting to improve, the last pill is eaten and Lois is cured. Initially, they both continue working hard and improving their lives. They try to avoid their temptations, but Lois succumbs and Hal eventually follows also. Eventually, the house returns to its old, decrepit state. As evident by Lois’s compulsive behavior to spill her drink so she could wipe it up, sublimation, as well as any other ego defense mechanism, requires psychological energy that drains mental stability out of daily life activities and produces a sort of neurotic behavior.
I have a personal response to the myelin sheath that covers the axon. We had to do a re-port on some health disorder. My partner and I chose the longest name on the list, adrenoleu-kodystrophy, or ALD for short. After some research, we learned that it is a degenerate disease that comes from the gradual loss of the myelin sheath. Although the myelin sheath is not com-pletely responsible for communication between the neurons, it can greatly decrease the time of messages between neurons. We also discovered that Lorenzo Odone was a famous victim of the disease. In addition to our project on ALD, our teacher showed us a movie about Lorenzo called Lorenzo’s Oil. It described Lorenzo’s terrible journey from a playful kid to a near vegetable. First, Lorenzo developed a kind of hyperactivity that brought about his school’s attention. He was then tested by various doctors and told that he only a year or two to live. Horrified, his parents sought out to find a cure. They contacted various doctors and support groups to help their cause, even researching themselves. The many dead ends and their son’s degeneration weighed heavily on the family, but they did not give up. Eventually, Mr. Odone experimented and found that a certain type of olive oil was able to stop the degeneration but not help to heal their son back to a fully functioning human. Lorenzo was able to communicate by blinking and swallow on his own. Although the invention of Lorenzo’s Oil can stop the degeneration of ALD, there is no way to recover the myelin sheath, indicating that further research is needed. In ad-dition to ALD, there are other diseases that cause the gradual decline of the myelin sheath such as multiple sclerosis and Alexander’s disease.
I have a personal response to the concept of subliminal messages. Because of your extra credit assignment, I watched Fight Club yesterday. However, I was perplexed at what I saw sub-liminal messages inside the film, random stills placed in seemingly random places. These observations were reaffirmed by Tyler Durden’s job as a film loader in a movie theater where he inserted pornographic stills into family films. I only noticed this at three times but further research says he appears subliminally in four and randomly in another two. The first time it occurs is when the narrator is in his office and he says his job is like a copy of a copy a copy because of his insomnia. Tyler then appears behind the doctor who tells the narrator to go to support groups to see real pain. Thirdly, Tyler appears at the support group hugging Thomas, the man who talks about his ex-wife. Fourthly, Tyler appears when Marla is walking away from the support group. The times when he occurs are all related to each based on the narrator’s initial problems with insomnia. Thus, it can be said that Tyler only appears because of the narrator’s insomnia, which is later confirmed. Next, Tyler appears not as subliminally but still moderately subtly when he is seen going to the opposite way of the narrator on the movie carpet (symbolizing the differing attitudes of the two) and in the hotel welcoming video (characterizing himself as a welcome addition to the narrator’s life). In the end, in an homage to Tyler’s job at the movie theater and as a way to wake the viewer up to the subliminal and hidden messages, the director of the film inserts a clip of a penis. Thus, he symbolizes how Tyler’s reckless behavior, characteristic of the id, are in everyone and thus the problems that occur within everyone’s minds, such as the narrator’s insomnia, affect us all.
In response to lucid dreams, I have often have these. They vary between dreams that I am able to realize are not possible to dreams where I can force myself to wake up because I don’t like they way they are developing to completely changing them for the better. For example, one time I was dreaming that I was a wizard like Harry Potter and I was casting magic. However, right when the big battle was to occur, as what always happen in one of the books, I realized that I was dreaming and that this dream was unrealistic. Another example is when I dreamed that I had snuck out of the house to go to a party of some social gathering. However, when I came home, the light was on in my room and I reasoned that my parents knew that I had snuck out. At that moment, my conscious realized that I was in trouble and woke me up to get out of my bad situation. When I went back to sleep, I dreamed of several different scenarios that did not make much sense but did not get me in trouble. A third example is when I dreamed about schoolwork and how I was going to plan out my day. I debated between various scenarios and went back and forth until I finally chose one that was the best. All of these lucid dreams indicate a strong conscious that is able to overcome most challenges, including ones that are not readily conscious and are hard to delve into. The fact that I am able to change some of my dreams shows that some of my dreams take place in my reasoning center of my right brain. In addition, it can indicate that the reasoning portions of my brain are always in work and that nothing illogical can pass by me 100% of the time.
In response to operant conditioning, I have personally seen its effects on my dog. When my family first got her, she was a fairly untamed dog, having been rescued from the wild. However, today she is strictly domesticated. To do this, we followed operant conditioning and specifically B.F. Skinner’s ideas. To potty train her, we first designated an area where she could go to the bathroom, a piece of liquid-holding paper. This was done so that we could control her excretory system, something that my parents have done to me during the anal psychosexual stage. We used positive reinforcement by giving her verbal praise then petting her then giving her treats in diminishing fashion so that she would still pee but not become dependent on our reinforcements. After she had mastered the first part, we then directed her to the ideal place to do her business, the back lawn. Again, we used positive reinforcement to get her through the doggie door and excrete or urinate on the grass. In addition to positive reinforcement, she also adhered to another one of Skinner’s observations, partial reinforcement effect. Whenever my family and I ate at our dinner table, she would sit patiently besides us and occasionally bark at us when we ignored her. She would do this many times, often with a less than 10% chance of receiving food. After a few years had passed, I decided to see if I could teach her to shake her whole body. If she did it correctly, I would let her out on our balcony; if not, I would wait a few minutes then give up. First, she needed to know what “shake” meant. I would rub her hair back and forth and do it myself while verbally saying it. Sometimes it took a long time but she eventually did it and caught on. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks if there’s a positive reward in it.
In response to memory consolidation, I have personally had it disrupted. During a lacrosse game, I was going after a ground ball. I was considerably tired from all the running and the heat, so I forgot to keep my head up and watch my surroundings. Just when I was going to pick the ball up, a person on the other team ran into my head and knocked me down. I had no knowledge of trying to pick the ball up then, maybe because I closed my eyes after being hit. After my eyes went black for a second, I got up and walked over to the sideline. Besides feeling angry, I was also incredibly nauseous and disorientated. Taking off my helmet, I was struggling to stand up. Many thoughts went through my head, with the sounds of the game being washed out. After a while, I asked what the score what. To my surprise, we were actually winning even though we were down by two when I left. Apparently, because of my head injury, my brain was unable to consolidate the memories of my team scoring. Eventually, my team, Northwood, won that game but I was still drawing a blank on how we scored the last few goals. Asking several of my teammates received sincere replies that I had a concussion and I needed to go to the hospital, but I was fine. In the end, I went over to the scorebook to see that several of my players had indeed scored those final two goals. Perhaps my disruption of memory consolidation was more a result of me focusing more on my headache than on the game. Although it was a considerably hard blow, I did not officially black out nor did I forget any long-term memories.
In response to measuring intelligence quotients (IQ) by IQ tests, I believe that they do not do a very good job at measuring through intelligence. Often times the questions are bizarre and very unorthodox, and thus are hard to answer. They often involve complex numbers or strange wordplay and are hard to answer. At the end of the test, some bizarre multiplication and other math is used to find your IQ. However, I find this inadequate. I do not believe knowing unorthodox puzzles is representative of your knowledge, as they are most likely not important to everyday life and are thus not practiced frequently. In addition to these magic IQ tests, school tests are not much more representative of your true knowledge. Knowing how your teacher writes tests is a way to increase your knowledge by seeing whether the answers are clustered together or spread out, how teachers use the “all of the above” or “none of the above,” the level of deception in wording à la attractive distracters or blindly choosing the first answer, whether or not spelling or grammar errors gives away wrong answers, and the use of the magic letter “c.” For the letter “c,” it has been said that it is the most often answer, but you should not automatically choose it but rather see in the instructor uses that knowledge to trick you. In addition to these teacher specific “hints,” other general patterns can give away the answer. For instance, the more common elements to an answer there are, the more likely it is. Although repeating the same letter can occur, the change that it occurs right after another decreases greatly each time it is used. Also, hardly ever are there “none of the above answers,” since the instructor is trying to see if you know something and would then not pull out of the question. Sometimes the answers to questions can be indirectly stated in other questions or directions. Thus, any test to try to 100% test IQ is bound to fail. To resolve this, I believe they should be discarded and more thorough ways of judging intelligence be implemented.
In response to detecting lies, I have found that methods from polygraphs to visually detecting lies are usually invalid and can be made to depict an opposite emotion. As your polygraph lecture earlier in the class year confirmed, polygraphs simply detect the characteristics of lies such as sweating and high blood pressure. On Penn and Teller’s show BS, an episode occurred on July 23 that stated how these machines could be fooled by tensing up at non-tense times by flexing the sphincter muscle or by controlling stressful elements such as breathing. In addition to polygraph tests, faking body language can be used to tell lies. I often do this to evade bad situations. Sometimes I will purposefully lie to little white lies so that I can train myself for when I have to say bigger lies. To do this, it is important to be all the way committed to the life and not change your mind unless it becomes apparent that the lie is not working or too much work has gone into the white lie. On smaller scales, it is important not to allow your voice to shake, as that is an instant sign of lying, and not to have your eyes water up. In addition, breathing through your nose not only gives cleaner air to the brain that is needed for the lie but also prevents you from choking for air that occurs if you were to breathe through your mouth, as any difficulties that occur in the nose can be passed by as a sniffle. Also, do not back down to the person you are lying to and try to intimidate them by inching closer to him or her. Probably the most important thing to do is to wait a while before talking, even when not lying, so you have that time to think about what to say. Of course, honesty also pays off greatly in the long run also.
In response to the social development of adolescents, I have not fallen into the book’s descrip-tion of likely friends. While most of my friends tend to be of the same gender, age, social class, and race, some of the descriptions do not hold through all the way. Though most of my friends are white, some are African American while others are Asian American and Mexican American. In addition, I have friends of different ages (usually within a year or two) and some friends that are girls. However, the main difference between my experiences are that my friends are I do not just have different believes, we often have opposite beliefs. A large amount of my friends view drinking as the highest way to have fun and a necessary way to start that fun. I however see it as a digression to having to alter your consciousness to have fun and distort your percep-tion of what is really going on. When it comes to church attendance, I just about always differ. Being an atheist, anyone who is religious is different from me, regardless if they go to church. Even with my Christian roots, I do not have friends strictly that are Christians, as a large portion of my friends are Jewish. In addition, I do not have many atheist friends, mostly because there are not that many out there. Lastly, my friends and I have very different education goals. With my high intelligence, I plan to attend a prestigious California four-year university while many of my friends want to go to community colleges where they can live away from home and party. Similarly, they do not care much about their grades in high school. In regards to what factors can group friends, I would say that all of them are correct except for what beliefs you have. In-stead, friends can come from necessity, where there are no other people to interact with and thus you are limited to just them.
Is human nature naturally evil or not? Sigmund Freud believed that it was, but Carl Rogers countered that and said humans are basically good. However, I do not thing such a complex issue as good and evil can be described with simply a blanket statement, and I do not think something as advanced and complex as the human brain could be described in a single sentence. Instead, I view human nature as changing to fit its needs. Using the influences of evolutionary psychologists, I believe that human beings are just like any other creature because they are all living and thus adhere to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This theory states that those individuals who are best able to survive and reproduce will do so and continuously improve the condition of that species. Not surprisingly, humans will follow this same process because they are just like any other species, albeit more advanced and much more complex. How humans are able to survive and reproduce often results in conflict. For instance, when there is a scarce resource such as food, water, space, and mates, individuals will often compete over that and will try to secure more of that thing as a reserve. Those who are able to survive longer, because of their “greediness,” will be more likely to pass on their genes in what Charles Darwin called natural selection. Thus, a middle ground is found between Sigmund Freud’s theory of aggressive and destructive humans and Carl Roger’s optimistic view of humans as peaceful and humanistic. When it comes to people doing good out of spontaneity, people are biologically motivated to help others of the same race (after their own needs are fulfilled) as that helps the human race expand. In a sense, life is paradoxical in that it naturally wants only the best individuals to continue but also wants the species to flourish.
In response to the Robbers Cave Experiment, I have experienced a similar situation. Last year, my team and I were practicing lacrosse. We were having a fun time together, with everyone being respectful to one another. At the end of the practice, my coach told us that we were going to split up into two teams and race against each other. The race was designed so that we crossed over two times. The members of the losing team were told that they would have to run an extra time. My coach left before the race, putting our assistant coach in charge. In the beginning of the race, everyone was competing admirably against one another, but after the first few guys (and when the race was beginning to end), the tension started to heat up. Some of the guys would give the other person the impression they were going to hit them when they crossed over in an attempt to slow them down. Often, this resulted in shoulders brushing against each other but some of the time people actually hit each other. Because we carry sticks in lacrosse, some of the people would hold them at the other person, trying to give the impression that they were going to impale them. Instead of trying to run fast, we focused on making the other team lose, so some people even intentionally hit the other person when the two lines crossed over. Eventually, all my teammates agreed that we should not hit each other. However, I was the last one in the race and I saw that we were losing and that I would be somewhat blamed for losing the race. So, I intentionally ran into another player of the other team but acted like it was his fault. When my opposing player and I got back (he had won clearly), everyone was yelling at each other and almost physically fighting. Our coach came back and saw what was happening and made us run several laps. Throughout those laps, we channeled our energy at one another to our coach, and we acted friendly towards one another.
My family, from my knowledge, has had two people with psychological disorders. When I asked my mom today if anyone in our family had a mental disorder, my mom surprisingly said yes and that my aunt had bipolar disorder. Although this was the first time I knew of this, I could see how she came to have this distinction, even with taking medication to limit it. Often she would become angry and not soon after would become jovial and want a hug (a manic episode). As the person states, she also had “boundless energy.” However, due to her medications, her disorder is greatly lessened so that she has characteristics of a cyclothymic disorder. Although I do not know when they developed this disorder, she was also known back in the day to “commit illegal acts,” as the book cites as characteristic of them. As well as my aunt, my female cousin appears to have anorexia nervosa although she has never been diagnosed with it. She displays several symptoms of it, ranging from being obsessed with body mass index (which she coincidentally calculated today when I was eating lunch with her) to being afraid of being considered fat. In addition, she does not have the highest self-esteem. Whether she has developed these behaviors because of the mass media’s focus of promoting thinness dangerously or because of track is unclear. Whenever she eats (as in today), she often orders low carbohydrate meals such as salads and even when she does so, she only eats a little bit of it and then takes it home. She also takes energy bars and Ensure. Lastly, she also runs a lot and exercises frequently. Although her conditions could be signs of anorexia nervosa, I do not believe that she has because she seems to be in control.
Through counterconditioning via systematic desensitization, I have learned to control my anxie-ty during strenuous and nerve-racking tests such as the Standardized Academic Testing (the SAT). The media, mostly movies and television shows, perpetuate the idea that the SAT is very important to getting into college and future success. Because of this, I was considerably nervous about taking the SAT. To overcome this, I did a couple of steps. First, I took the PSAT in my sophomore year. While this told me that I had a relatively good chance to get a high score on the real thing, I was not satisfied because it was above 200 and was not like the real test, which was longer and had an essay. The next year in March, I again took the PSAT with similar results. Feeling fairly confident, I took the SAT in the fall. I was still quite anxious, especially after the essay since I am not the best essay writer. However, as the PSAT had predicted, I got around 2000. Although this is good for many people, it was not for me. My family and I committed to taking the SAT again the next spring. To do better, I signed up for SAT review courses, but those were cancelled. For Christmas, my parents got me a huge 800-page SAT re-view book that I initially put aside but about a month before actually started to do. In addition, I started to go onto the College Board website and complete the questions of the day. When it was time for the big day, I was academically and emotionally set to succeed. Overall, I did very well. A few months after the test I received the news that I got a higher score. I had learned to settle my anxiety over the SAT in baby steps, something that can be hard for many people.
I can relate to Sigmund Freud’s ego defense mechanism of sublimation in the category of displacement. On one of my favorite television shows, Malcolm in the Middle, the two par-ents are believed to have sex every night. This strong sexual interaction, however, leads to the deteriorating household and working conditions. When the mother of the family, Lois, says that she and her husband, Hal, cannot have sex due to an infection until all the pills run out (which would be a week), he initially panics but then resolves to mow the lawn. While sex can be seen as a deterrent to work, it is a part of human nature and therefore cannot be prevented but ra-ther restrained. Instead, Hal uses that sexual energy that he has been accustomed to for every night to channel it into productive, nonsexual activities such as painting the kitchen cabinets and making a lavish breakfast. Lois also rechannels her sexual energy into productive, nonsex-ual activities such as removing the grout from showers and picking up fresh flowers. The absti-nence from sex also allows Hal to do better at his job and receive a raise, while Lois now has the time and focus to go over IRS tax returns and find $800 in overpaid fees. However, just as their lives are starting to improve, the last pill is eaten and Lois is cured. Initially, they both continue working hard and improving their lives. They try to avoid their temptations, but Lois succumbs and Hal eventually follows also. Eventually, the house returns to its old, decrepit state. As evident by Lois’s compulsive behavior to spill her drink so she could wipe it up, sublimation, as well as any other ego defense mechanism, requires psychological energy that drains mental stability out of daily life activities and produces a sort of neurotic behavior.
I have a personal response to the myelin sheath that covers the axon. We had to do a re-port on some health disorder. My partner and I chose the longest name on the list, adrenoleu-kodystrophy, or ALD for short. After some research, we learned that it is a degenerate disease that comes from the gradual loss of the myelin sheath. Although the myelin sheath is not com-pletely responsible for communication between the neurons, it can greatly decrease the time of messages between neurons. We also discovered that Lorenzo Odone was a famous victim of the disease. In addition to our project on ALD, our teacher showed us a movie about Lorenzo called Lorenzo’s Oil. It described Lorenzo’s terrible journey from a playful kid to a near vegetable. First, Lorenzo developed a kind of hyperactivity that brought about his school’s attention. He was then tested by various doctors and told that he only a year or two to live. Horrified, his parents sought out to find a cure. They contacted various doctors and support groups to help their cause, even researching themselves. The many dead ends and their son’s degeneration weighed heavily on the family, but they did not give up. Eventually, Mr. Odone experimented and found that a certain type of olive oil was able to stop the degeneration but not help to heal their son back to a fully functioning human. Lorenzo was able to communicate by blinking and swallow on his own. Although the invention of Lorenzo’s Oil can stop the degeneration of ALD, there is no way to recover the myelin sheath, indicating that further research is needed. In ad-dition to ALD, there are other diseases that cause the gradual decline of the myelin sheath such as multiple sclerosis and Alexander’s disease.
I have a personal response to the concept of subliminal messages. Because of your extra credit assignment, I watched Fight Club yesterday. However, I was perplexed at what I saw sub-liminal messages inside the film, random stills placed in seemingly random places. These observations were reaffirmed by Tyler Durden’s job as a film loader in a movie theater where he inserted pornographic stills into family films. I only noticed this at three times but further research says he appears subliminally in four and randomly in another two. The first time it occurs is when the narrator is in his office and he says his job is like a copy of a copy a copy because of his insomnia. Tyler then appears behind the doctor who tells the narrator to go to support groups to see real pain. Thirdly, Tyler appears at the support group hugging Thomas, the man who talks about his ex-wife. Fourthly, Tyler appears when Marla is walking away from the support group. The times when he occurs are all related to each based on the narrator’s initial problems with insomnia. Thus, it can be said that Tyler only appears because of the narrator’s insomnia, which is later confirmed. Next, Tyler appears not as subliminally but still moderately subtly when he is seen going to the opposite way of the narrator on the movie carpet (symbolizing the differing attitudes of the two) and in the hotel welcoming video (characterizing himself as a welcome addition to the narrator’s life). In the end, in an homage to Tyler’s job at the movie theater and as a way to wake the viewer up to the subliminal and hidden messages, the director of the film inserts a clip of a penis. Thus, he symbolizes how Tyler’s reckless behavior, characteristic of the id, are in everyone and thus the problems that occur within everyone’s minds, such as the narrator’s insomnia, affect us all.
In response to lucid dreams, I have often have these. They vary between dreams that I am able to realize are not possible to dreams where I can force myself to wake up because I don’t like they way they are developing to completely changing them for the better. For example, one time I was dreaming that I was a wizard like Harry Potter and I was casting magic. However, right when the big battle was to occur, as what always happen in one of the books, I realized that I was dreaming and that this dream was unrealistic. Another example is when I dreamed that I had snuck out of the house to go to a party of some social gathering. However, when I came home, the light was on in my room and I reasoned that my parents knew that I had snuck out. At that moment, my conscious realized that I was in trouble and woke me up to get out of my bad situation. When I went back to sleep, I dreamed of several different scenarios that did not make much sense but did not get me in trouble. A third example is when I dreamed about schoolwork and how I was going to plan out my day. I debated between various scenarios and went back and forth until I finally chose one that was the best. All of these lucid dreams indicate a strong conscious that is able to overcome most challenges, including ones that are not readily conscious and are hard to delve into. The fact that I am able to change some of my dreams shows that some of my dreams take place in my reasoning center of my right brain. In addition, it can indicate that the reasoning portions of my brain are always in work and that nothing illogical can pass by me 100% of the time.
In response to operant conditioning, I have personally seen its effects on my dog. When my family first got her, she was a fairly untamed dog, having been rescued from the wild. However, today she is strictly domesticated. To do this, we followed operant conditioning and specifically B.F. Skinner’s ideas. To potty train her, we first designated an area where she could go to the bathroom, a piece of liquid-holding paper. This was done so that we could control her excretory system, something that my parents have done to me during the anal psychosexual stage. We used positive reinforcement by giving her verbal praise then petting her then giving her treats in diminishing fashion so that she would still pee but not become dependent on our reinforcements. After she had mastered the first part, we then directed her to the ideal place to do her business, the back lawn. Again, we used positive reinforcement to get her through the doggie door and excrete or urinate on the grass. In addition to positive reinforcement, she also adhered to another one of Skinner’s observations, partial reinforcement effect. Whenever my family and I ate at our dinner table, she would sit patiently besides us and occasionally bark at us when we ignored her. She would do this many times, often with a less than 10% chance of receiving food. After a few years had passed, I decided to see if I could teach her to shake her whole body. If she did it correctly, I would let her out on our balcony; if not, I would wait a few minutes then give up. First, she needed to know what “shake” meant. I would rub her hair back and forth and do it myself while verbally saying it. Sometimes it took a long time but she eventually did it and caught on. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks if there’s a positive reward in it.
In response to memory consolidation, I have personally had it disrupted. During a lacrosse game, I was going after a ground ball. I was considerably tired from all the running and the heat, so I forgot to keep my head up and watch my surroundings. Just when I was going to pick the ball up, a person on the other team ran into my head and knocked me down. I had no knowledge of trying to pick the ball up then, maybe because I closed my eyes after being hit. After my eyes went black for a second, I got up and walked over to the sideline. Besides feeling angry, I was also incredibly nauseous and disorientated. Taking off my helmet, I was struggling to stand up. Many thoughts went through my head, with the sounds of the game being washed out. After a while, I asked what the score what. To my surprise, we were actually winning even though we were down by two when I left. Apparently, because of my head injury, my brain was unable to consolidate the memories of my team scoring. Eventually, my team, Northwood, won that game but I was still drawing a blank on how we scored the last few goals. Asking several of my teammates received sincere replies that I had a concussion and I needed to go to the hospital, but I was fine. In the end, I went over to the scorebook to see that several of my players had indeed scored those final two goals. Perhaps my disruption of memory consolidation was more a result of me focusing more on my headache than on the game. Although it was a considerably hard blow, I did not officially black out nor did I forget any long-term memories.
In response to measuring intelligence quotients (IQ) by IQ tests, I believe that they do not do a very good job at measuring through intelligence. Often times the questions are bizarre and very unorthodox, and thus are hard to answer. They often involve complex numbers or strange wordplay and are hard to answer. At the end of the test, some bizarre multiplication and other math is used to find your IQ. However, I find this inadequate. I do not believe knowing unorthodox puzzles is representative of your knowledge, as they are most likely not important to everyday life and are thus not practiced frequently. In addition to these magic IQ tests, school tests are not much more representative of your true knowledge. Knowing how your teacher writes tests is a way to increase your knowledge by seeing whether the answers are clustered together or spread out, how teachers use the “all of the above” or “none of the above,” the level of deception in wording à la attractive distracters or blindly choosing the first answer, whether or not spelling or grammar errors gives away wrong answers, and the use of the magic letter “c.” For the letter “c,” it has been said that it is the most often answer, but you should not automatically choose it but rather see in the instructor uses that knowledge to trick you. In addition to these teacher specific “hints,” other general patterns can give away the answer. For instance, the more common elements to an answer there are, the more likely it is. Although repeating the same letter can occur, the change that it occurs right after another decreases greatly each time it is used. Also, hardly ever are there “none of the above answers,” since the instructor is trying to see if you know something and would then not pull out of the question. Sometimes the answers to questions can be indirectly stated in other questions or directions. Thus, any test to try to 100% test IQ is bound to fail. To resolve this, I believe they should be discarded and more thorough ways of judging intelligence be implemented.
In response to detecting lies, I have found that methods from polygraphs to visually detecting lies are usually invalid and can be made to depict an opposite emotion. As your polygraph lecture earlier in the class year confirmed, polygraphs simply detect the characteristics of lies such as sweating and high blood pressure. On Penn and Teller’s show BS, an episode occurred on July 23 that stated how these machines could be fooled by tensing up at non-tense times by flexing the sphincter muscle or by controlling stressful elements such as breathing. In addition to polygraph tests, faking body language can be used to tell lies. I often do this to evade bad situations. Sometimes I will purposefully lie to little white lies so that I can train myself for when I have to say bigger lies. To do this, it is important to be all the way committed to the life and not change your mind unless it becomes apparent that the lie is not working or too much work has gone into the white lie. On smaller scales, it is important not to allow your voice to shake, as that is an instant sign of lying, and not to have your eyes water up. In addition, breathing through your nose not only gives cleaner air to the brain that is needed for the lie but also prevents you from choking for air that occurs if you were to breathe through your mouth, as any difficulties that occur in the nose can be passed by as a sniffle. Also, do not back down to the person you are lying to and try to intimidate them by inching closer to him or her. Probably the most important thing to do is to wait a while before talking, even when not lying, so you have that time to think about what to say. Of course, honesty also pays off greatly in the long run also.
In response to the social development of adolescents, I have not fallen into the book’s descrip-tion of likely friends. While most of my friends tend to be of the same gender, age, social class, and race, some of the descriptions do not hold through all the way. Though most of my friends are white, some are African American while others are Asian American and Mexican American. In addition, I have friends of different ages (usually within a year or two) and some friends that are girls. However, the main difference between my experiences are that my friends are I do not just have different believes, we often have opposite beliefs. A large amount of my friends view drinking as the highest way to have fun and a necessary way to start that fun. I however see it as a digression to having to alter your consciousness to have fun and distort your percep-tion of what is really going on. When it comes to church attendance, I just about always differ. Being an atheist, anyone who is religious is different from me, regardless if they go to church. Even with my Christian roots, I do not have friends strictly that are Christians, as a large portion of my friends are Jewish. In addition, I do not have many atheist friends, mostly because there are not that many out there. Lastly, my friends and I have very different education goals. With my high intelligence, I plan to attend a prestigious California four-year university while many of my friends want to go to community colleges where they can live away from home and party. Similarly, they do not care much about their grades in high school. In regards to what factors can group friends, I would say that all of them are correct except for what beliefs you have. In-stead, friends can come from necessity, where there are no other people to interact with and thus you are limited to just them.
Is human nature naturally evil or not? Sigmund Freud believed that it was, but Carl Rogers countered that and said humans are basically good. However, I do not thing such a complex issue as good and evil can be described with simply a blanket statement, and I do not think something as advanced and complex as the human brain could be described in a single sentence. Instead, I view human nature as changing to fit its needs. Using the influences of evolutionary psychologists, I believe that human beings are just like any other creature because they are all living and thus adhere to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This theory states that those individuals who are best able to survive and reproduce will do so and continuously improve the condition of that species. Not surprisingly, humans will follow this same process because they are just like any other species, albeit more advanced and much more complex. How humans are able to survive and reproduce often results in conflict. For instance, when there is a scarce resource such as food, water, space, and mates, individuals will often compete over that and will try to secure more of that thing as a reserve. Those who are able to survive longer, because of their “greediness,” will be more likely to pass on their genes in what Charles Darwin called natural selection. Thus, a middle ground is found between Sigmund Freud’s theory of aggressive and destructive humans and Carl Roger’s optimistic view of humans as peaceful and humanistic. When it comes to people doing good out of spontaneity, people are biologically motivated to help others of the same race (after their own needs are fulfilled) as that helps the human race expand. In a sense, life is paradoxical in that it naturally wants only the best individuals to continue but also wants the species to flourish.
In response to the Robbers Cave Experiment, I have experienced a similar situation. Last year, my team and I were practicing lacrosse. We were having a fun time together, with everyone being respectful to one another. At the end of the practice, my coach told us that we were going to split up into two teams and race against each other. The race was designed so that we crossed over two times. The members of the losing team were told that they would have to run an extra time. My coach left before the race, putting our assistant coach in charge. In the beginning of the race, everyone was competing admirably against one another, but after the first few guys (and when the race was beginning to end), the tension started to heat up. Some of the guys would give the other person the impression they were going to hit them when they crossed over in an attempt to slow them down. Often, this resulted in shoulders brushing against each other but some of the time people actually hit each other. Because we carry sticks in lacrosse, some of the people would hold them at the other person, trying to give the impression that they were going to impale them. Instead of trying to run fast, we focused on making the other team lose, so some people even intentionally hit the other person when the two lines crossed over. Eventually, all my teammates agreed that we should not hit each other. However, I was the last one in the race and I saw that we were losing and that I would be somewhat blamed for losing the race. So, I intentionally ran into another player of the other team but acted like it was his fault. When my opposing player and I got back (he had won clearly), everyone was yelling at each other and almost physically fighting. Our coach came back and saw what was happening and made us run several laps. Throughout those laps, we channeled our energy at one another to our coach, and we acted friendly towards one another.
My family, from my knowledge, has had two people with psychological disorders. When I asked my mom today if anyone in our family had a mental disorder, my mom surprisingly said yes and that my aunt had bipolar disorder. Although this was the first time I knew of this, I could see how she came to have this distinction, even with taking medication to limit it. Often she would become angry and not soon after would become jovial and want a hug (a manic episode). As the person states, she also had “boundless energy.” However, due to her medications, her disorder is greatly lessened so that she has characteristics of a cyclothymic disorder. Although I do not know when they developed this disorder, she was also known back in the day to “commit illegal acts,” as the book cites as characteristic of them. As well as my aunt, my female cousin appears to have anorexia nervosa although she has never been diagnosed with it. She displays several symptoms of it, ranging from being obsessed with body mass index (which she coincidentally calculated today when I was eating lunch with her) to being afraid of being considered fat. In addition, she does not have the highest self-esteem. Whether she has developed these behaviors because of the mass media’s focus of promoting thinness dangerously or because of track is unclear. Whenever she eats (as in today), she often orders low carbohydrate meals such as salads and even when she does so, she only eats a little bit of it and then takes it home. She also takes energy bars and Ensure. Lastly, she also runs a lot and exercises frequently. Although her conditions could be signs of anorexia nervosa, I do not believe that she has because she seems to be in control.
Through counterconditioning via systematic desensitization, I have learned to control my anxie-ty during strenuous and nerve-racking tests such as the Standardized Academic Testing (the SAT). The media, mostly movies and television shows, perpetuate the idea that the SAT is very important to getting into college and future success. Because of this, I was considerably nervous about taking the SAT. To overcome this, I did a couple of steps. First, I took the PSAT in my sophomore year. While this told me that I had a relatively good chance to get a high score on the real thing, I was not satisfied because it was above 200 and was not like the real test, which was longer and had an essay. The next year in March, I again took the PSAT with similar results. Feeling fairly confident, I took the SAT in the fall. I was still quite anxious, especially after the essay since I am not the best essay writer. However, as the PSAT had predicted, I got around 2000. Although this is good for many people, it was not for me. My family and I committed to taking the SAT again the next spring. To do better, I signed up for SAT review courses, but those were cancelled. For Christmas, my parents got me a huge 800-page SAT re-view book that I initially put aside but about a month before actually started to do. In addition, I started to go onto the College Board website and complete the questions of the day. When it was time for the big day, I was academically and emotionally set to succeed. Overall, I did very well. A few months after the test I received the news that I got a higher score. I had learned to settle my anxiety over the SAT in baby steps, something that can be hard for many people.
How to Figure Out Your Locus of Control
Indicate the extent to which each of the following statements applies to you. Use the following scale.
1 = disagree strongly
2 = disagree
3= disagree slightly
4 = neither agree nor disagree
5 = agree slightly
6 = agree
7 = agree strongly
2 = disagree
3= disagree slightly
4 = neither agree nor disagree
5 = agree slightly
6 = agree
7 = agree strongly
- When I get what I want, it's usually because I worked hard for it.
- When I make plans, I am almost certain to make them work.
- I prefer games involving some luck over games requiring pure skill.
- I can learn almost anything if I set my mind to it.
- My major accomplishments are entirely due to my hard work and ability.
- I usually don't set goals because I have a hard time following through on them.
- Competition discourages excellence.
- Often people get ahead just by being lucky.
- On any sort of exam or competition, I like to know how well I do relative to everyone else.
- It's pointless to keep working on something that's too difficult for me.
How to Figure Out If You Support Psychoanalysis
Issues in Personality
Indicate the extent to which you agree with each of the following statements using the following response scale. Place the appropriate number in the blank before each item.
Indicate the extent to which you agree with each of the following statements using the following response scale. Place the appropriate number in the blank before each item.
1 = strongly disagree
2 = disagree
3 = neutral
4 = agree
5 = strongly agree
2 = disagree
3 = neutral
4 = agree
5 = strongly agree
- Events that occurred during childhood have no effect on one's personality in adulthood.
- Sexual adjustment is easy for most people.
- Culture and society have evolved as ways to curb human beings' natural aggressiveness.
- Little boys should not become too attached to their mothers.
- It is possible to deliberately "forget" something too painful to remember.
- People who chronically smoke, eat, or chew gum have some deep psychological problems.
- Competitive people are no more aggressive than noncompetitive people.
- Fathers should remain somewhat aloof to their daughters.
- Toilet training is natural and not traumatic for most children.
- The phallus is a symbol of power.
- A man who dates a woman old enough to be his mother has problems.
- There are some women who are best described as being "castrating bitches."
- Dreams merely replay events that occurred during the day and have no deep meaning.
- There is something wrong with a woman who dates a man who is old enough to be her father.
- A student who wants to postpone an exam by saying "My grandmother lied . . . er, I mean died," should probably be allowed the postponement.
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