#13

During Asch's Conformity the children acted better when there was a democratic leader. This actually does not shock me. That seems like the probable answer. During Milgrmas experiement that was the one that surprised me. i thought that that many people would not go n with it but they did. I don't know what i would do if i was put in that place. i think that i would probably stop after it got to over half way but then again im not in the experiment and its different when you are not ther and you are judging on what you would do. In the Stanford Prision Experiment that surprised me that people acted that way. I would of thought that they would of been able to keep reality separate from the fake. Although i gues i would of got cought up in it too. the studies tell us that humans like to follow others. we like to fit in with the others around us and we don't like to stand out. we like to follow orders beacuse we dont want to get hurt if we don't. The human nature is very manipulative.
Social influence is when others do something and you feel like you have to do it too. Something that i often do is when people are talking about how they liked a certain movie or a song, i don't want to be the odd one out so i say that i like it too and i just go along with what they are saying. Another is when my friends say that they are excited about something and that they cant wait for it, even if im not all the excited about it i might still agree. sometimes just to not hurt their feelings and others just fit in.
The most interesting thing that i learned in this class is how the humans are influenced by others We don't like to stand alone and sometime we will do anything to fit in. One of my favorite chapters what the personality disorders. i don't know why but i really am interested in all of that stuff and it is just plain interesting to me.

#12

When someone has a psychological disorder they usually have ongoing patterns of thought, feelings, and actions that are deviant, distressful, and/or dysfunctional as stated in the book on page 594. there are different norms in all different countries. so we may look at people and say that that just isn't right but it could be totally normal for them. when these things become harmful to you or others this is when it becomes a psychological disorder. When someone acts abnormally it doesn't mean that they have a psychological disorder. its when it starts to hurt them or others that it is a psychological disorder and if they have to do something like check the stove 10 times before leaving thats a psychological disorder.
Schizophrenia is when someone has a split from reality that shows itself in disorganized thinking, disurbed perceptions, and inappropriate emotions and actions. The person will have delusions and voices that talk to them and tell them to do stuff. usually it isn't good things that these voices want you to do. They may also have hallucinations. there are 1 in 100 people that will develop this disease. it is actually more common than you think. This disease often ocurs in older men and women. It can also occur in young children, typically during the transition from childhood to adulthood. If i were to have this disease my life would be 100% different. I don't even know how my life would be possible. I would have to depend on my fmily more and i would not have very many friends. I would see things and think that they are real. I would try to hurt others and myself. This disease could ruin a family.
What i thought was intresting was the chart on page 631. It lists all the psychological disorders and the perecntage at how likely people are to get them. The top pf that list was any mental disorder. and econd was mood disorder. Another intresting thing was intresting was how they diagnose you with a psychological disorder. there is actually a book DSM-IV-TR. this defines a diagnostic process and 16 clinical sundromes.

#11

I have many different personality traits that make me who i am. Some of the traits that i consider to be good ones are the fact that i am very caring. I always want to help people and i always want the best for them. Some people tell me that i am too nice and that in the end i am the one that is going to get hurt. Another positive thing about my personality is that i like to people say that i am easy to talk to. I usually have something to say and i never try to hurt people with my words but it does happen. I just try to make conversation with others. Something that is not the best about my personality is that i am very shy. I don't like it when i don't know something and everyone else does. I hate surprises, usually. Sometimes they turn out fun but i hate not knowing anything. People tell me that i am a good listener and that when they need someone to talk to about their problems they know that they can always count on me to help them and just listen to them. Another good thing about me is that i like to have fun. I like to be with people and enjoy their company. Something that is not so good about me is that sometimes i let people walk all over me. i sometimes don't learn from my mistakes and it can often cause me pain in the long run, but sometimes its fun too. A good thing about me is that i cam trusting and when i say that i am going to do something i do it. I like to be a person that people can count on and that they trust in.
I would say that i am defiantly more optimistic than i am pessimistic. I like to have fun and just think the good of things and everyone. I used to be more pessimistic but i figured out that life isn't nearly as fun that way. So this summer i kind of changed how i looked at things and it turned out that you have a lot more fun that way.
Depending on the situation my personality does change. When something is to be taken serious i tend to look at it serious and when it is funny then i have fun with it. My mood, i guess you could say, changes with the situation. I usually know what i am supposed to be doing and when i am supposed to do it. Something that also changes st how shy i am. When i have to step up and do something that has to be done, i out aside my shyness and just do it. If it is just a regular situation though i like to be the shy one.
I tend to have displacemetn a lot. when something isn't going right or the day isn't going good or if i am mad at my parents i tend to take it out on my family or my friends. They don't deserve it, but it jsut happens. Another is Denial, this happended to me when my boyfriend broke up with me. It was hard to accept and it didn't seem real. It took a while for it to set in and when it did i tried to make it seem like it didn't happend and then i ened up getting all mad and having displacement again. I definalty have had repression. I do not remember a lot of stuff that has happened in my life. Some stuff i just dont want to remember and other stuff i just plain forget.

#10

One thing that i learned in chapter 9 was the overconfidence. People tend to be overconfident over stuff that they have never done before. Students are a prime example. They tend to be very confident on how they are going to get their assignments done and that they will get them done on time and that it will only take a short amount of time. I do this a lot. I push off my homework thinking that it will only take me a couple of minutes to do it. In reality it takes me about 3o minutes to get it all done. People that are overconfident are also often more happy in life. They tend to be able to make harder decisions easier.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. I think that I am emotionally inteligent. I am very sensitive to how other people are feeling and what they are thinking. It bugs me when someone is upset and they dont want to talk about it. Sometimes i need to learn that i can't know everything and that soemtimes i wont know what to say. The fact that i am very sensitive does sometime smake relationships harder. When i don't know what the other person is thinking then i feel frustrated. Some people are hard to read and you cant tell what they are thinking so then i don't know if they are mad or not. I tend to talk either a lot then or not at all. I think that it is important to be emotionally intelligent. Some people do not like to talk about what they are feeling. Sometimes you can just tell what is going on and ask that person about it. sometimes all someone needs is someone to talk to.
I thought that the part on creativity was very intresting. I never knew that there was 5 components of creativity. I just thought that creativity was somethign that you either had or not and that it was something like drwing a picture or painting something. I used to think that i had no creativity whatsoever. I could not draw and i could not think of ideas in school when we had to create a picture or something like that. I lerned that creativity is measured in Expertise - a well developed base of knowledge, furnished ideas, images, and phrases we use as mental building blosks. I don't think i have any of this. Then there is Imaginituce thinking skills that provide the ability to see things in novel ways to recognize patterns. I might have som of this. Then there is a venturesome personallity this seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity adn risk and perserves in overcoming obstacles, i might have some of this. Intristic motivation is being driven more by intrest, satdifaction, and challenge than by external pressures, i have none of this. Then there is a crative environment thsi sparksm supports, sand refines creative ideas. I so have this, i just dont like to use it.

#9

Memory is something that completely makes us human being. Your memory is what makes you different from everyone else. With memory you know what you have tried to do in your life and you know what has worked and what hasn't worked. We remember our family and their faces and how we are related to them. If we didn't have memory everyone would be walking around not knowing anything and we would be able to even talk to one another because we wouldn't remember how to talk. We would not know anything. We would be like walking dead people. We wouldn't have jobs and we wouldn't have a family because we wouldn't know who was in our family and we wouldn't know how we got to where we were. Life would be pointless. There would be no point to it.
Clive Wearing is a man that has a memory that only lasts for 7 to 30 seconds. Even if he cant remember what he has done he is still a man and a human being. He is someone that is loved and someone that matters. If i was his wife I honesty don't know how i would handle this. It would be a day to day challenge and something that you would have to do. It cant be avoided. I think that the idea a him writing in his diaries is something that is very beneficial to everyone. Her own memory must be very good. She has to remember everything that he doesn't which is pretty much everything.
Honestly, i don't really think of how memory works differently now than i did before. It is something that i am very grateful for and something that i don't want to give up. My memories are my memories. They are something that i will remember an that may change but they will always have a special meaning to them. I still trust my memories and i think that they can be changed and i know that they cant always be true but if you don't believe in your memories than what is there to believe in. I know that they can be changed and that they may be altered but overall i still will believe in my memories. In the memory challenge i found the penny on my second try. It might of been a guess but i was also able to narrow it down from the other options that did not seem right to me.
Something that i found very interesting was when people could remember sexual abuse from the past that they had forgotten about. When people went to sessions and when they looked back into their past they were able to figure out what had happened to them and who did something to them. Personally I think that this is something that should only be done if the person is in danger from it. Why bring up old memories that would hurt you or the ones that you love. Maybe what you think happened you are making up because you feel that you need answers and this ist he only way that you are going to get them. This provides evidence that sometimes when we think we seen something or something happend we are really only making it up and that it never happened. This makes my life almost harder. If you want to know something but it will hurt you then why do you, then why would you want to know. Curiosity is a very powerful thing and it will sometimes get us in a lot of trouble and it can ruin your relationship with someone. I think that this procedure should only be done to peole that actually need it and that cant live with their lives knowing that something happend but don't know what. Others don't need it, it could jut ruin their lives even more.

#8

Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. This means that when we hear a familiar sound that we will get something in return. Like in the video that was showed in class in Thursday, the man gave the other man a mint every time he shut down his computer. Overtime the desk mate just put out his hand when he heard the computer shut down because he was used to have been offered a mint. When asked what he was doing the man didn't know. He said that it was just something that was instinctive. Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which behavior is strengthened if followed by a reinforcer or diminished if followed by a punisher. An example of this would be when a small child is learning to be potty trained. If they don't go the bathroom while on the potty then they wont get some candy. But after a while they will learn that if they go to the bathroom when on the potty and not in their diaper they will get a piece of candy. Overtime they will learn that they will get candy when they do the right thing. The candy is an instinctive for them to go potty when they are supposed to. Clasical conditioning is when the child itself learns from its own behaviors . They will learn form their surroundings. Operant conditioning is when the child learns from the actions of others. Like the candy. The child learns that if they do the right thing they will get some candy for it. This applies to my life everyday. Sometimes I have to learn from my actions and others. Sometimes when i hear something like the door open I know that someone will enter the room. Or when I see lighting i know there will be thunder. I also learn that if I do the right thing that I might get a reward for it. Like if i drive safetly and do good in school, my parents wil buy me a laptop for school next year.
A positive reinforcement is something that makes you feel good about what you have just done. An example of this is like when i babysit all day for some kids that are not angels. When i am finished i get paid and the feeling of having that money that i actually worked for is defiantly a positive reinforcement. I get to spend that money the way that i want to and buy some stuff for myself that my parents would not buy me. Negative reinforcement is something when you know that you did something wrong. Like when a child is playing with toy and wont share it with the other children. The adult might say to them that its not very nice and dont you want to be a big boy and share your toys. The child knows that they should be doing the right thing but yet they are not getting yelled at or scolded. Punishment is when you know that you have done something wrong and you need something to do to repay what you have done. When i was little and with my sisters still, my parents , when we would fight, would not hit us or slap us but simply make us cleans the house or do some work outside or in the barn. This is how we learned to get along better or at least not fight with each other when our parents were around. We learned that if we did not get along and of we fought over the small stuff that didn't matter we were going to get in trouble for not getting along and fighting over small stuff.
In this chapter I learned that when observe others there are good and bad effects. These are called prosocial and anitsocial. Some of the prosocial are the manners in which people communicate. If you say hi to one another chances are that your child is going to be able to talk to people more freely and say hi just to be nice. Another is if you want your child to read, surround them with other people or children that are reading to help get them intreseted. Models are more effective than words. Some of the antisocial effects are agression. When parents tend to have a short temper their children will most likely tend to have a short temper also. A great example of this is television. Children watch way to much of it to begin with but they also see the actions beeing done. This is not a good role for children to follow. the violence on TV is only fiction but children don't know that and they think that it is real and try to follow what they see. For me this changes the way that i think about how my actions can affect others. especially children that i am around often. When i babysit sometime i think that the kids wont pick up on that and that they wont see it but they do. They are very observant. Children should be watching more positive shows on TV and when i have kids they are going to be limited to the amount of time that they get in front of the TV and what they will be able to watch.

#7

Sensation and perception are what many of us see every day. We see things and then we recognize them. We have five senses; hearing, touch, smell, taste, sight. With these five senses we can interpret what our surroundings are and where we are. When we something out brain has to tell us what we are seeing or if we smell something, our brain has to tell us what we are smelling. This is sensation and perception. Sensation is teh five sense and the the perception is how we interpret them.
One thing that I learned in Chapter 6 is optical illusions. Your mind can see only one thing at a time. When you look at a picture that could be either men marching or arrows going back and forth. You cant see them both together. You know that they are there but they aren't visible at the same time. this doesn't really change how i thing about anything but it does seem interesting to me. This changes my everyday life not really. I know that you cant see two things at once but this just emphasizes it more.
The article that i look at was Emotion, Learning, Attention and Perception. In this article it talked about how if you were looking down the barrel of a gun your thoughts might be interupted with emotion. he amygdala is an almond shaped structure in the medial temporal lobe, roughly in the center of the brain. While certainly not the only structure involved in emotional processes, it is the most extensively researched. You have two types of fear, observational and instructional. In both of these the amygdala is important. This was intresting because I never knew that there was one thing that controled your emotions. I thought it was just a bunch of things. This could be applied to everyday life beacuse when you start to get emotional over something you can finally know what is making you that way.

#6

I interviewed my grandma, nothing was really surprising to me because I already knew a lot of this information. One thing that I learned from my grandma is that teenagers today have it easier and harder. They are able to make more decisions on their own and have more independence, but with this independence there is also the risk of running into some bad things. My life is very different than my grandma's because her parents were very strict as to what she did and who she was with, whereas my parents still care but they allow me to make my owns decisions as to whom I want to spend time with and where I want to go. I still have rules, just not as harsh as hers were. I don't think that I would of liked to be a teenager during this time, I like having my freedom. Sometime i think that my parents are hard on me, I would of never been able to handle her parents.
I thought that the Parenting and Adolescence video was extremly true. I always fight with my parents over stupid little stuff that doesn't really matter. Sometime life is very complicated and its hard to live through it all. When you want to do something with your friends but your paretns won't let you even though there is no harm in it, or always getting the answer "beacause I said so." This gets very onfusing at times. I think that my parents gave me enough space and time to figure stuff out on my own but they were always there if I needed them. I think that because of this I will have no problem becomign an adult with responsibilities. I also think that my friend and the group of people that hang around with has also helped me to shape my life as an adult.
One thing that I learned in chapter 4 is that nature and nurture play a major role in how you will behave the rest of your life. Genes play a major role in decideing what color hair you have and how tal you are, basically all the physical features and some others. Nurture would be how your parents treated you as a baby and as a young child. If they were carign and loving you will turn out to be more people friendly and self confident, but if they were more negative in a way, you could turn out more negativer in your own life. This also includes how your parents act toward other people.
I learned in chapter 5 that children approach life with a basic trust. He said that children that are raised in loving sensitive families more offten than not, form a lifelong attitude of trust rather than fear. When people get older and into a romatic relationship, it is offten thought that they will have more self confidence and trust in that other person, if they were brought up with a trusting family. If people have been neglected when they were younger, they might have a harder time trying to trust another person.

#5 nature, nurture, and human diversity

Some of the things that I learned from this chapter was that when babies are born they are usually categorized. Some babies are difficult. They are irritable, intense, and unpredictable, while others are easy. They tend to be more cheerful, relaxed, and predicable. Slow-to-warm-up infants tend to resist or withdraw from new people and situation. These temperament issues tend to persist in the following years of the child's life. Temperaments are hereditary. What I also found interesting was that men have a stronger sex drive than women do. Even gay men tend to have more sex than lesbians. Casual sex is more often frequent among males with traditional masculine attitudes. Men tend to judge women as more attractive if they have a youthful appearance. This suggests that men look for a woman that has many childbearing years to come. Wome perfer men that will stick around. They look for a long term mate. Parents also influence how a child will grow up and what their attitudes will be. There is also a lot of peer pressure that is involved. But parents can influence the peer group also. I watched the video on casual sex this helped back up what I said before about how men tend to have more casual sex than women. Even gay men. Men tended to look for a woman that is a good homemaker and women for a man that would be able to provide for them. Thats not entirely the case anymore, since women are more equal they dont have to have a man that will provide for them, they can provide for themselves. This means that People are marryign people their own ages. Men don't need a woman that will be a good homemaker anymore becasue of the differene of the culure, although this does still exist and it will always exist.

#4

I listened to Teen and sleep. It stated in there that over half of teens do not get enough sleep. I am totally one of those teens. My life is hard enough to find time to be with family and friends and still find time for sleep. I am always yawning and seeing other people yawn in school or where ever i go. Everything that I heard was what has been said for a long time.
I learned that there are 4 stages to sleep. The first stage is when you experience fantastic images. Then stage 2 happens. This stage lasts for about 20 minutes. You can still be awakened in this sleep without too much difficulty. The next stage, stage3, is a transitional stage. Then you are in stage 4. This stage lasts for 30 minutes. It is in this stage that you begin to walk in your sleep or talk in your sleep.
Something that was kind of surprising to me was that we do have selective attention. Your brain cannot focus on 2 things at once. You cannot listen to 2 people talk and be able to say what each one was trying to tell you. You focus in on one subject and keep your attention there. When you drive a car at first you need your undivided attention, after a while you are able to do more things when you drive because your brain has become used to multitasking with this particular object.
I read the article "What? Me Bias?" and it was about people that are subconsciously bias toward President Obama, even if they voted for him. I completly argee with this. People are bias no matter what. Some of it is how we were raised while others is just normal for us and it is natural. We are bias no matter what the subject is. We all have our favorites and our least favorites. Sometime we don't know why we don't liek something all we know is that we don't like it.

#3

I looked at the "Seeing More Than Your Eye Does" and Contrast/Color "Illusion". The Seeing more than your eye does, was about how your eye has a blind spot in it, and your brain just makes up what should be there. It's not a small one either, it is relatively large. The contrast/color "illusion" was about how your eyes make the same color appear as a different color according to the colors around it. I learned that everything is not as it always seems. Your eyes sometimes makeup what you see or adjust it. Nothing really surprised me I had heard of this before but one thing that did surprise me was the one activity that I did with the colors, and one seeming darker than the other when in fact they were the same color. Basically everything is not as it always seems and this jsut bring the proof to this. I don't think that this really changes how we look at the world or how we live in it. We have adapted to this and don't think about it on a daily basis. I also never knew that they divide brains in living people to help with seizures. The patients were normal and did not have any side effects that where life threatning. I also learned that left handed peole are more numerous amoung peole with reading disabilities, allergies, and migraine headaches. It is also common in musicans and artist. There is really no more benefit or loss to being a left handed person or a right handed person.

#2

Research is everything when you are trying to figure out a problem. Without research you would have no idea what was the background and what you are trying to figure out. With research you will be able to figure out if someone already tried the experiment before you and if so you can decide what you want to try differently. An example of this would be, if you were a shy quiet person and you wanted to know if that made you less self confident or if you were the same as everyone else, you could do research on it and find out what other people have already tested or you could make your own experiment. Something else that I have learned was that random events have a pattern to them. We try to look for them and we often find them while we are trying to make scene of something that is completely random. Another is that our culture is what shapes us as humans. It shapes our behavior and our willingness to work, and our promptness and our frankness. Psychologist also study animals to learn how they communicate within themselves and how they react to one another. This way they will better understand what humans are thinking and what they are doing at times.

Psychology section 1

Before this class psychology to me was like the study of the mind. That's all I really knew. I've never really thought about it before this. After reading this I know that it has more to do with how your mind works and why we do the things that we do. Psychology has a major effect on my life. People always think about others and what made them get mad or what made them happy that day. We all use psychology with out even thinking about it. I learned that our common sense is not what we think is going to happen but what has happened in the past and how we learn from out mistakes. I also learned that hindsight is what makes us overconfident. At the time something can seem very difficult but when we look back at it it seems like it was easy once we knew the answer.

Introduction

My name is Courtney Nikolai, I'm from Stratford, and in 17 years old. Psychology is the study of the way that humans act and their reasons for thinking the way that they think and why we do some of the stuff that we do. This is important so that we can get a better understanding to why we do some of the stuff that we do. My parents were a big part of how my life turned out. They have always been there for me whenever I need them.