Blog 13

These tests were strange to me. I made me question my so many people would shock somoneone on the strongest shock. two out of three people is alot people that would shock at the extreme power. that is what i found was intereseting about Milgrams obedience. from stanford Prison i found that I could understand that people could get itno character. what i don't understand is how they could find themselves that involved. it is easy to get carried away but not past what is morally right. They both explain human nature by that we has humans sometimes go agaisnt what we think is right just because of what we are told. it is called peer pressure. you wouldn't think it would be easy to change into someone or act differently than you normally would but for some reason it just happens. its hard to control your thoughts when it seems like they are wrong when deep down you think you still are rgiht.
Social influences happen everyday. weather you are around friends family or a lover. you tend to act a different way then when you are alone. i can think of two examples taht would be different then if i was alone. one is when im with my mom i usually am much more outgoing and act crazy when im out in public. not that i think it is wrong because if i did i wouldn't do it but if i was out in public on my own i probably wouldn't make such a scene. another example that comes to mind is at school with my friends. if someone does bad on school work and are like i don't care anymore, i tend to say yeah i don't care about school anymore or i don't care that i got a bad grade. but deep donw i am usually kicking myself for not doing better.
the most interesting thing i've learned in this class is that psychology takes part in alot more than i thought it did. at first i thought it was the way people interact, but i've learned that its not just that but its also within our ownselves. they way we grow, the way we think, the way act all goes back to our mind and psychology.

Blog 12

It is hard to decide if someone has a psychological disorder. just because they act other than normal or not the same, you can't just assume they have a disorder. The book states on page 594 that a psychological disorder is an ongoing pattern of thought, feelings, and actions that are deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional (comer, 2004). This could help in dicidind if someone has a disorder. If it is preventing themselves from normal daily living they should get tests done to make sure they are ok. However, different cultures may have different standards for their people so you can't just accuse someone of being pyschologically impaired. I have had personal experience with someone who is biopolar. biopolar is a mood disorder in which the person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mani. this person recently was diagnosed even though they are 40 years old. they lived their life not knowing they where biopolar. this person often became offended or mad at little things or little comments you made. i never seen he at an extremely level but he does change his moods really often it is hard to talk to them because you dont know if they are happy or going to get mad at you just for talking. the most interesting thing ive learned is about schizophrenia. i never understood what it was really or even that it has so many symptoms. i think it would be horrible to have this beacause you are probably often confused or disorganized.

Blog 11

I think that personality is what makes people either like you or dislike you. I have 5 personality traits i believe are positive. i am creative and i think this is positive because i like to be imaginative which helps when trying to put myself in others place, so i can relate to them. I am fun loving. I have fun making others laugh. i think that this is a positvie characteristic to have because everyone likes someone who can lighten up the mood. I am resposible which is deffinatily positive when dealing with work or school. if you are responsible, people will trust you and relay on you. I like the feeling that poeple can trust me because they usually return the favor. I am well organized which is a positve personality because it keeps me from become stressed to easily. I think this trait will help alot in school when i have alot of homework and not enough time to do it. Lastly i think that being kind is a positive trait. I am friendly to people that are kind to me. I listen to people if they have someting to say and i respect everyone that wants repect.
Three negative traits i have would be easily distracted, easily worried and easly agreeable. easly agreeable could be good or bad in some cases i guess. but to often if someone hurts me i usually just let it go, and sometimes i can't express the way i acually feel. Hold ing feelings inside is a problem because you can't really get that close to anyone because they never will really know your true feelings. I am a worry crazed person i think. This is negative because i constantly think what if this and what if that. in some cases this is a great trait to have because it gets you to think about the future and how what you are doing will affect you. however being worried it s a problem when i try to relax because a thousand different possibilities run through my head. lastly i am sometimes easily distracted if i am not very interesting in something. I can often pay attention if i am watching something. however if i am watching a teacher just speak and not doing anything and just talking i start to day dream. not good!
I think i am much more optimsitic than pestimistic. alot of times it doesn't pay to be pestimsitic because it just makes the situation worse. However, sometimes when one bad thing happens after the next i catch myself feeling a little bit more pestimistic because i just can't get that boost of energy to get me going again. I take the positive to the extreme and usually try to forget about the bad, hoping it doesn't bring my mood down. Two examples i can think of is when i am getting ready for an exam. I studied but know that i could of studies much harder, i try to think positve hoping that i will remember more than if i acted pestimistic. another example i can think of is when i am visiting my mom. i usually only see her for two days but instead of wining everyday saying we only have one day left untill i have to leave, we usaully make the most out of the weekend doing as much things as possible and haveing as much fun as we can handle.

My two adaptive traits are probably sociable and high energy. High energy is a pain in the butt when i have to sit still and be quite. I can change my triat to be quite and relaxed when the situation calls and high energy when im trying to make fun. this helps alot because i am more diverse and i can respect people but also make them laugh with my crazy personailty. I am very sociable when meeting new people and learning new things such as job shadowing. i know to ask alot of questions and express my thoughts. however if i am in a lecture hall at school i know to be quiet and try to get as much out of the time as i can instead of distracting myself and the people around me. this changes for the better. this benifits us because it lets us be more diverse with people. this allows us to beable to relate to people the same as us and people with different personailties.
I use reaction formation alot now to think of it. This means the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable inpulses into their opposites. i do this alot with school. if i do bad on test i am like well i don't care that much anyway when really inside, i am kicking meself for not doing better.
i use Rationalization sometimes. Rationalization is defese mechaism that offers self justifying explaations in pace of the real mor threatening uncounscious reason for ones' actions. This happens alot when i am talking with people. they say they didn't like someomthing or they did like something. so i agree with them where in reality i thought the complete oppositve. an example of this is when someone is talking about how much they admire a particular person i sya oh yeah i like them too but they really i don't. my other example of justifying rationalization is when i remember specifically that i was planing on hanging out with one friend until another friend said that she bought me a ticket to go to a concert with her that i didn't know about. i told my first friend that i really didn't want to go but that i had to because i would have to pay for it and i didn't want to pay for something i wasn't gunna use. but in reality i really wanted to go to the concert.

blog 10

I thought after reading chapter nine was that the different stages of language was really interesting and neat. it surprised me to know that just after a few months of birth, people already show signes of language developing. i think that it was so neat to read that they can read lips to understand different sounds and speech. by 10 months babies are resemabling vowels, or baby talk which is called the babbling stage in this chapter. that is just the beginning of our language developing.
after doing those exercises in class i found that for sure i am a very intelligent emotional person. i always knew i could almost read peoples minds. i can always tell how someone is feeling just by the way they move or their expression on their face. i also like to help people out if they have problems. my sister especially comes to me when she wants my advice on something no matter what it is, besides homework of couse. I think that is funny. with day to day things i like to put my imput on different things i know about whether the person wants to hear it or not. i feel like i can be alot of help. i think this will be important in my future career where i will be interacting with people all the time.
chapter 10 i learned something a little different. i liked chapter ten alot. I am interesting in finding out my intelligence just by taking quizes. i like to take quizes and find out what i am like, to compare if i am really like that or not. I always wondered what would happen if two identical twins took an intelligence quiz. this chapter answered that for me. I never knew that if 2 twins took the some test that they would be almost identical. im sure after living, twins have different characteristics granted they have same genetics but if they took the test like we took for an asignment, they probably would have different intelligence levels.

blog 9

Memory defines use as human beings because unlike other animals, we can hold onto information and store it for along time making us more complex. this happens because our brains are more complex allowing use to retain things in catigories of long and short term memories. i think life would be terrible because we couldn't even remember unconscious things. we could not possible live in a community if everyone could not remember anything, including not remembering to breath, eat, and live, causing dealth. it would be horrible to live in clive's shoe's because he had such a inteligent personallity before this disease. It would be so stange to have such a good brain and not even being able to access all the information you had stored. It would be devistating to have a loved one retain only but 20 seconds. It would be alot of stuff to take care of and not getting made at him because he doesn't know better. she is understanding and trys to help him remember things and is patient when he talks to her or what he has to say. i would try to be helpful in helping him think out his thoughts properly. i feel like i have a good memory that i often take forgrated. i feel bad for people with alzhiemers or another memory disorder because they can't think the way others can.
I also learned that some people remember certain things that occur better than others. If you see something, you may remember it better than if you heard something thing. I think it is amazing that our mind works by putting things together when we don’t even try to. The name for that in this section is called automatic processing or the unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time and frequency, and of well-learned information, such as word meanings. Once I read to that part of the section, I stopped to think how deciphering what a word means can be so easy and just so….automatic. when i recall some of my own memories, i think about this section and think if i am remembering my past experiences accuratly. I likes doeing the memory exercises with my mom. We compaired what she got and she did extremely better. I asked her why and hse told me she remembers them kinda by the that old game called siom. i thought that was interesting. i noticed that as i went on it became harder to remember because i had pervious words still processing. I found out that for myself seeing pictures helps me remember.

Blog 8

Classical conditioning was the first type of learning to be discovered and studied within the behaviorist tradition. Classical conditioning is the learning of a behavior activated by a stimulus and causing a response. After repetition of the stimulus, a behavior is learned, then considered classical conditoning. Operant condtioning is an application of consequences, where certain responses and cetain stimuli are connected. this connot occur without an environmental event.
The difference between these two conditions are this, Classical condtioning illistrates stimuli to response where as operant conditioning is viewed more as response to stimuli and discribes the likelyhood of occurance again. This applies to my life in the way that what is the propability of something occuring again. The stimulus is presented in my environment. When something good or bad happens, it causes me to act in a particular way. If i misbehave at home, my parents give me a consequence, the likelyhood of me reenacting that behavior is slim, especially if the consequence was negative.
Positive reinforcement is a key concepts in behavior analysis. Positive reinforcers are things like rewards, or things we will generally work to get. Positive reinforcement occurs when a consequence happens depending on a behavior, the behavior becomes more likely, and occurs only because of what happend before. An example of this is a toddler rarely makes it to the potty chair on time and never really makes an effort to, so the parent takes them to the toilet every 2 hours and gives them a treat if they manage to use it. the toddler becomes potty trained. the positive reinforcer is the candy, the expected outcome is that the child becomes potty trained.
Negative reinforcement is the increase of beahviors by stipping or reducing negative stimuli, such as shock. a negavtibe reinforver is any stimulus that, when removeda ftera response, strengthens the response. An example is getting up for school, the alarm goes off and u press the snooze button to get a few more peaceful minutes before your day starts. although the time is short, you are more likely to routine this behavior. this is negative because you are taking away something, in this case it is sound. the negative reinforcement is taking away the sound, and the expected outcome is that this will happen again just to get a few peaceful minutes.Punishment on the other hand is an event that decreases the behavior that it follows, almost like a consequence i think. punishment is not like negative reinforcement at all actually, its the total opposite. An example that pertains to me at my age is responsibility. For example i know it's wrong but if i come home later than what my curfew is, i usually am punished therefore not recieving as late of a curfew the next time i go out. punishment is having a later curfew taken away.
The most interesting thing i learned in this section by far is reinforcers, positive and negative. I never thought about how many reinforcers i come across each day that get me to do what i need to do. All these reinforcers have a huge inpact on the likelyhood that i will continue the behavior. It strengthens the chances in almost every behavior for everyone. who doesn't like an award for doing someting good. In some aspects this changes my outlook because i will probably take more time to stop and think after i do something. I will think, why did i do that? What made me want to do that? Did I get something out of doing that?

blog 7

Sensation is the feeling of something. when your senses take toll you are using sensation to understand the thing that you are feeling, smelling, or tasting. the perception is the way you perceive what you are exposed to. Your brain trying to grasp the concept and take it into the way you think is perception.
what i thought was really interesting is vision. what you see as i learned in the exercise, isn't always what it really is. the spectrum of electromagnetic energy is why we see colors. the light that is around us transduce into what our brain says we see. i can apply this to every day life by simply this.... We constantly see and our brains are constantly trying to transform what is there into something we recognize.
the article i observed is psychology of magic. I thought it was interesting because i never thought about magic being a part of psychology. The magicians had an audience of psychologists and neuroscientists. psychological misdirection is when the magician points to another part of the stage and as all the audience looks, the trick forms without anyone seeing. cognitive illusions is when your mind tricks your self into assuming the future when things such as elephants disappear. mental forcing is when the outcome cant be anything else. This happens when there is a deck of 52 cards. audience picks one and all the cards are 7 of diamonds.

I enjoyed taking the time to interview my grandma, nothing really surprised me since she is my grandma, i already knew alot about her. my teen life is way different from my grandma's. The styles are really different as well as i have a job my whole high school where as my grandma just worked on the farm some. another difference is that only 25 percent of her graduating class went onto college where as almost my whole class will go on to some type of schooling. I think that some things about being a teen back then would be cool, like the fact that movies were only 50 cents and the styles back then would be awesome. I thought the video was really interesting. When your young all you want is to be old and to be able to do things on your own. and when your older all you wish is that you could be younger again. I think as i age i will look back on being a teen and remember all the fun times at school, outside of school, and friends. I will probably look back and think how did i do that. school, work, homework, sleep, and all over again. I think my teen hood as set me up for life to come as an adult. I am very responsible and I think that striving for what i want will help me greatly. What i learned in chapter 4 was the indepth research on nature and nurture. I never thought about how much both sides effect who you are. human genome, hormones, talents are all nature and beliefes, feelings, expectations are all nuture. In chapter 5 i learned about preoperational stage. This theory is stateing that from about 2 to 6 or 7 years of age, childnren are too young to perform mental operations. I don't know if that is completeley true because some times you can be sureprised to know how much a child of that age can understand and think. this age children learn to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic.

Blog 5

The first video I watched I thought was extremely intersting because I never thought about as are society changes that preferences in males and females for the oppostite sex changed as well. But now that it is brought up it makes since for we are getting near the age of equality between men and women, the needs for a spouse changes durastically. In the second video I learned that each species is created to do what is in the genes of that animal. Each animal is good at doing what they were made to do. As humans we are made to think. After reading this chapter I learned that fraternal twins aren't genetically alike anymore than a normal brother or sister. I was surprised because automatically when I saw twins I assumed they were more closely related than me and my siblings. Another thing I found that was surprising is the nature vs. nurture debate. Its hard to catorgorize which has more of a reaction on a person but they are both equal in my eyes. However say a pair of identical twins are separated, they may have the same genetic material but may act completely different because of personal experiences and environment. another topic I thought hard about and that we covered in class is parents effects on their children. Parents may act differently toward each child just by their own personal experience. Parents have alot of credit when it comes to how their child developes. They may not realize that they act differently to each child and often wonder why one thing didn't happen to all their children and only to one.

I read the article written in the New York Times about Mr. Obama. I thought it was really interesting because I understood where the writer was coming from. Often Americans are bias about what a traditional American looks like. Even though Mr. Obama is American, people see him as another race just becuase of his skin color where as someone that is white and perhaps British, Americans would just assume that that person is American. I learned that so many times, people assum what they see to be true. I also learned that even myself sometimes are bias. This is relevant because Mr. Obama is the face of America and so often he is not even considered American, so how can he represent us. This article is interesting to me because I never realized how often I steriotype people. From this section I learned about unconscious thinking where you dont even realize you are think about a particular thing. What was most surprising to me was selective attention. This happenes everyday now that it is brought to my attention. If you are intested say in science, you will not even think about it before you remember every word your science teacher said. However say your next class is math. Your teacher starts to talk you will be off in day dreaming before you realize it. You are unconsciously blocking out what you dont want to hear. I agree with the sectiona bout why we dream. I think we dream to make since of what is going on in reality or maybe a way to worry. My evidence for this idea is that alot of my dreams are me worring about an upcoming event. I think my perspective is correct because usually you dont dream usually about nothing important and their usually is a purpose for everything.

Blog 3

The activities that interested me the most and that I participated in was where the eye hides something the brain sees. The activity in this one was to stair at an x and while closing your left eye, move closer to the screen and as you did, the black dot to the right disappeared. This proved that everyone has blind spots in each of their eyes but when both eyes are opened they are very hard to detect. The other activity I did was the color activity. Your eye automatically sees a color and you don't have to think about it or so it seems. Reality there are different waves that bring the color to your eye and tell your brain what color it is. It was interesting I thought, to see how the lighting can play with your brain making you think about what color the color really is that you are seening. What suprised me the most was the dot one. I never realized that one eye to the other really just sees the others blind spot. I never noticed we had them or maybe our brains just tell us to asume what is there or in other words just guess. I learned that you can't always believe what you are seeing. Have you ever heard I can't believe what I am seeing. That sounds crazy because if you are seeing something, that it obviously is true. However, I think now after doing these activities, that maybe I souldn't automatically believe what I see because maybe my brain is just making up for what I'm not seeing. I don't think these eye activities really change the way I preceive anything besides that our mind can often times play tricks to make us think something false. I thought that phrenology was really interesting. I couldn't imagin anyone believing the idea that the bumps on your skull makes you and gives you your smarts and character. Although in the 1800s, they didn't have near as much gagets to figure out the human brain. Another thing this unit got me thinking about was reflexes. So many things we do during the day we do and don't even notice. Automatic responses happen so often such as breathing or moving a particular joint all because of the spinal cord which holds so many nerves. I thought that video was crazy interesting. I never knew how important it was for once side of your brain to communicate with the other. I knew that left controled the right and vis vera. I never knew what seeing something on the opposite side of your vision would make you not process through your mind. Each move i make I'm thinking, what side of my brain am I using?

There is alot of important reasons why someone would want to research something. One reason would be to gain knowlege about something they are very interested in or maybe you have a question so you would like to find out the reasoning behind that something. We research every day whether we notice or not. It's not all about looking up things on the internet it could be anything from looking at directions to make a box of mac n cheese or even people watching to see what they do or how someone reacts to a particular instance. Relative research that I looked up was nonverbal communication and behavior article. I think it is a very interesting subject and I understand why it recieves so much attention. I enjoy people watching which is a great way to see people's nonverbal behavior. I've learned alot in just chapter 1 alone. I've learned that hindsight bias happens more than I notice. This is important because it happpens alot of the time. People just believe information givin to them to be true. I alos learned what a case study is. This is important because I believe it's a great step forward as far as using a person's hole life informationt o figure out their characteristics rather than just the way they act. Also I thought that where it talked about how when something normal happens you can't remember near as well as something abnormal. I take this in considering the fact that it is mostly true. Alot of the time you can remember for example someone calling your phone stating it's the police and they are looking for a suspect named john doe rather than someone calling with the wrong number looking for what's his name.

I used to believe psychology was only about human behavior and the way people interact with each other. But it's not only that I have learned. It is also about what molds people to what they are and how they act. All people feel different feelings at different times. Psychology affects your life because in life you go through different experiences and psychology is the study of why you acted the way you did at that time, whether you were angry or excited. I learned that it is important to not only be skeptical but humility. I found that interesting because to get to the underlying idea of things you must be aware of our own vulnerability and know how we will act if certain things occur. The other thing i learned that i thought was really intriging is how important theories are when trying to research psychology. i thought this was interesting because I understand now that it's an important step because it summarizes everything that was found in the research and at an easier way to review it.

My name is Kali and im 17. I go to Stratford High school. I am who I am because of my mom. I spend alot of time with her and I suppose she just rubs off on me and we act alike. I think psychology is important for everyone to know because its how humans interact and how we live on a daily bases. why do we do this? why do we feel that? That is what psychology is.

Psychology should be fun!