Weekly blog assignment #12

I am enjoying writing my paper on the insanity defense. Actually, I am not enjoying writing the paper, but I am interested in the topic, which helps.
Across the Universe has some good music in it.
My lit circle book is confusing, but at least it's a fictional story and not like a boring informational textbook. Discussing it with my group helps.
Noah is in the closet right now.
It's Drier's last day. I think he's sad because he's gonna miss us.
I am actually enjoying Drier's rambling right now because it's about life and it's inspirational and it's not about school.

Weekly blog assignment #11

So, the AP test was not impossible, but it was kinda difficult, and no, I didn't not finish either section completely before time ran out. I was trying to focus really hard on the test so I had a moment of flow, where I lost all sense of time, as demonstrated by my not finishing on time.
I totally forgot what the cocktail party effect was, but once Drier explained it in class I can think of instances in my own life where I have experienced this phenomenon. For instance, right now Drier is listening so intently to the question that Patrick just asked that he doesn't pay any mind to the conversation between Noah and Cal going on in front of me, or the conversation between Jason and Dani behind me. Drier is experiencing the cocktail party effect. I had no idea what figure-ground was. When we discussed this question in class, Drier didn't know what it was either. The only person who kind of knew/sort of knew/guessed somewhat accurately was Sara.

weekly blog assignment #10

Today we discussed gender stereotypes in class. It was a fun discussion. It's funny how society sort of expects guys to not have feelings, and how all girls are expected to be caddy and overemotional. I can see where these stereotypes come from, because (like everyone else) I have seen real life examples of both of these stereotypes.
I would be interested to know how much of these gender identity stereotypes we develop because that's the way society teaches us we are supposed to act or if these are sometimes true because some people are just naturally inclined to have these particular traits.
Either way, it was funny to discuss these stereotypes in class.

Weekly blog assignment #9

Today we talked about food. I found it pretty easy to pay attention, because food is fun to talk about.
There is a quote in our textbook that says, "No one wants to kiss when they are hungry" or something like that. This quote is used in reference to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I totally agree with the point that this quote is trying to make, because when I am hungry or thirsty and my physiological needs aren't satisfied, I don't really care about much else.
I can understand why people have unhealthy eating habits, because food is pretty delicious and exciting. We tend to eat more for the pleasure than for nourishment.
After about two years of working at a candy store, chocolate is built into my diet as a staple. On top of having very easy access to chocolate, I am often in the company of people who-like myself-use chocolate as an emotional band-aid when they're depressed. Chocolate is pretty much a way of life for me.
This dependency on chocolate could go one of two ways: I will get fat once my metabolism slows down, or I will maintain my current weight in college, because I'm already used to being exposed to large amounts of appealing food. I think the first option is more likely.
Anyway, that's my personal connection to what we discussed in class today.

Article Summary

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=4&did=1649534431&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1271863161&clientId=14507#indexing

This article discusses a TV show in which the main character suffers from dissociative identity disorder and compares the portrayal of the disorder on the show with the realities of the disorder in real life. It also discusses some of the controversial questions in the mental health world regarding dissociative identity disorder.
The author says that the woman on the show is portrayed as having a more extreme case than typical and that most people with this disorder do not have it affect their lives to the extent of this Hollywooded up portrayal of dissociative identity disorder.
It also talks about the controversy over whether the disease is real, but also says that it is fairly easy to distinguish between the real cases and the fake ones, however most doctors say that they have seen very few believable cases. One real life example of this was the Hillside Strangler, who claimed to have multiple personalities but was discovered as a fraud.

Weekly blog assignment #8

We were just discussing Andrea Yeates' postpartum psychosis. Since it is postpartum, shouldn't it occur only for a period of time after her child's birth? I was under the impression that disorders such as postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis differ from regular depression and psychosis in that they are temporary and are brought on by a child's birth. If this is so, can Andrea Yeates legally claim insanity under a life sentence since her disorder is temporary?
Perhaps she doesn't belong in a mental institution for the rest of her life if she is not permanently psychotic. However, she may not exactly belong in a prison either, since she committed her crime during a period when she was insane.
Then there is, of course, the possibility of misdiagnosis. Maybe Andrea Yeates has always suffered from psychosis but has never been diagnosed, and after the birth of her children the psychosis was automatically associated to be postpartum psychosis.

Weekly blog assignment #7

Last night, I took the personality test on moodle. I think that my results were accurate. It said that I have a strong dependency on feelings and emotions, and am a mild extrovert. Stevie just said that she has the same personality type as George Washington and Judge Judy. For some reason, this doesn't surprise me because Stevie seems like a good and decisive leader like both of these people.
I think that perhaps we should not draw such a fine line between introverted and extroverted, because these definitions are somewhat subjective. Plus, we also discussed how the situation and the people you are with can alter the extent to which you are introverted or extroverted. So these personality traits are situational, and being classified as one or the other is merely a generalization at best.

Weekly blog assignment #6

Numbers say that intelligence test performances have been rising steadily since the Weschler and Stanford-Binet tests were created. The score that I received on the IQ test seemed kind of low to me, but when I looked on the graph it shows that my score is average for people in 2010, and is about 25% higher than the average score 100 years ago.
The higher average modern scores can probably be attributed to the better nutrition and possibly even education that we have access to today.
If your IQ can change as you age, is it possible that someone can be considered mentally retarded after a lifetime of what was otherwise considered average intelligence? And could the opposite be true, someone formerly considered mentally retarded could then be of average intelligence later in life? If these cases exist, they are probably rare, but to say that this is impossible would be too extreme.

Blog Assignment 3/23

6 Chapter 9 Concepts that we Used Today in Class:
1. Overconfidence-Drier was overconfident today that our solution to the record spinning problem was incorrect. Even though this belief was not correct, he remained confident in it.
2. Belief perseverance- Jason exercised belief perseverance during the nail challenge when I found a completely different solution to the problem. He still claimed that the problem could not be solved this way, even though I had discredited his argument.
3. Fixation-I exhibited fixation today with the nail challenge by turning the board upside down, balancing on the nail's head, and setting the nails on the wood. Once Drier told me that this was not the answer, I was stumped. This was the only perspective that I could see a possible solution to.
4. Heuristic-The puzzle with the different people and the cars could be solved using these thinking strategies.
5. Insight-We all had a moment of insight when Jason showed us how the nail problem could be solved, and we thought that we should have gotten the answer sooner.
6. Mental set-Patrick had the tendency to approach the record problem in a way that he had been able to make things move in the past, by using the rubber band propulsion system.

Blog

weekly blog assignment #5

Right now we are discussing the trustworthiness of the fMRI testing to verify if memories are valid or not. Sean made a good point about similar memories being lighted up in the brain, even if the person didn't actually commit the crime. I don't really trust current lie detector tests, either, because if the person is nervous or stressed, they might show the same physical symptoms as a liar even if they are innocent.
I also wonder if innocent people could create memories that they committed the crime, due to suggestibility from those questioning them. Or if the reverse is possible-people who have committed a crime could repress the memory or create an altered version, convincing themselves that they are innocent.
While I know that some abuse victims repress their traumatic memories, accounts of people who believe they have been sexually abused as children but didn't notice it until adulthood seem kind of sketchy to me. I'm sure that a lot of false abuse victims actually believe that they have been victimized due to imagined memories, but hasn't anyone considered the possibility that maybe some of these false abuse victims are simply crying wolf?
It's a good thing we have forensic evidence, because human memory is unreliable.

weekly blog assignment #4

I had recently read about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations. I have a fairly easy time figuring out which motivations fall in which category. It was a good example that we did in class today that we wrote down why we took AP psych and then classified them into groups of whether they were intrinsic or extrinsic motivations.
I agree with what Drier said about intrinsic motivations being stronger and creating a more effective drive in people. I feel pretty comfortable with the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, but it was good to revisit it in class today.

Weekly Blog Assignment, #3

I have a few connections to in-class content with personal experiences.
I have worked at a chocolate store for the past year and half. As a result of my frequent exposure to this setting, I can no longer smell chocolate. This is an example of sensory adaptation, because I am not alerted to the smell of chocolate anymore.
I also can make a personal connection to classical conditioning. Two years ago, I was sitting at a gas station after dark in my mom's van, waiting for her to buy a bag of ice from the gas station. Two men approached the van and started tapping on the windows and asking me to open them. They pulled on the door handles, and when I wouldn't let them in, they threw their bodies at the side of the van.
Since this experience, I have not gone to a gas station after dark. I refuse to because I am now afraid of dark gas stations. This is an example of classical conditioning. In this case, the unconditioned stimulus is the two men trying to get into my mom's van. The unconditioned response is my fear. The neutral stimulus is the dark gas station, which later becomes the conditioned stimulus because I have learned to link dark gas stations with scary, aggressive men. The conditioned response is a fear of going to gas stations at night.

weekly blog assignment, #2

Is Dani a mutant?
We read in the textbook reading that sensory interaction is supposed to improve your sensitivity to what you are eating, because you can smell it. When you take away that sense of smell, it is supposed to inhibit your sense of taste a little as well. This makes sense to me, since smell, texture, and taste all influence what we taste overall.
Our findings during the taste station were a little contradictory to this teaching, though. When Dani was using both her sense of taste and her sense of smell to determine which flavor of jelly bean she was eating, she only got four out of the ten trials correct. When she had her nose plugged, she could identify seven out of the ten.
Perhaps she guessed more accurately without sensory interaction because she was able to focus more intently on the one sense that she was able to use, kind of like how blind people sometimes have an acute sense of hearing.
Or maybe Dani is too cool for sensory interaction?

Public Service Announcements

These are the public service announcements that I watched...
Sara, Candice, and Lauren
http://www.youtube.com/user/appsychology1023
Lexi, Katie, and Joonho
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu9wKUIQG1I
Ben, Melissa, and Corey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?V=XR7-5enn7vY

My favorite of the three was Sara, Candice, and Lauren's because they did a good job of thoroughly explaining the different stages of development. They were specific with what each attraction has to offer for every stage, and the pictures were relevant to what they were talking about. Plus, this video kind of resembled an actual public service announcement. There was a lot of information and they told the viewers which stage each attraction is good for. All three of them talked for almost the same amount of time, and the information was presented in an intelligent manner.

Alzheimer's Articles

Those articles were really depressing.

First weekly blog assignment

I recently read about heritability in my textbook. Since it is a concept that I don't completely understand, I thought that I should write my first weekly blog assignment about heritability. The book defines heritability as the proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes.
I found an article on EbscoHost about a recent study that was done in Ohio on 2,900 pairs of twins. They were trying to research heritability, especially how they are likely to take risks, perceive sounds, and how similar their religious beliefs are.
It is hard for me to make a connection to my personal experiences with heritability because I'm not exactly sure which traits I inherited genetically and which traits I developed due to environment. However, I do have certain things in common with both of my parents, so it makes sense that I may have inherited these traits from them. I think that heritability is how many of these inherited traits I have in common with other people whom I'm not related to who have also inherited the same traits genetically.
Heritability has a lot to do with heredity because it depends on the traits you inherit. It also depends on your interactions with other people, because these people's genetically inherited traits may be the same as yours, and you must interact with them in order to compare these traits.

Neuroplasticity: Old Brain, New Tricks

I hypothesize that the occipital lobe somehow is stimulated by the spot on the sensory cortex corresponding with the tongue. This probably happens by the movement of the tongue stimulating cortical areas in the motor cortex. The motor cortex then sends messages to the sensory cortex in the parietal lobes. Just as a person with normal vision activates the visual cortex by the action of looking at an object, a blind person can activate the visual cortex by voluntarily moving their tongue. The tongue moving links with neurons in their association area. If moving the tongue can enable a blind person to see, then the tongue's association area must be located in the occipital lobe, because this is the lobe that helps you see.
The signal travels through the motor cortex, sensory cortex, and occipital lobe via the interneurons. As the signals are rewired, they are transformed into a response, which, in this case, means vision.

Nicotine

Nicotine makes receptors in your brain very active and your body doesn’t regulate the amount of nicotine that is released, so that many parts of your body could be stimulated at the same time. This stimulation of nicotine leads to an increase in the release of acetylcholine in the body, so there is an increased amount of cholinergic activity. This makes you feel more awake.
The stimulation of cholinergic neurons releases dopamine in the brain’s reward pathways. This neural circuitry causes you to do things that are necessary for survival, like eating. Having these necessities makes you feel good, so you are more likely to do it again.
Nicotine also triggers the release of glutamate, which enhances the connection between different sets of neurons and helps with learning and memory. So nicotine may remind you of previous experiences that you have had with nicotine and make you want to do it again.
In addition to these neurotransmitters, nicotine also causes your brain to make more endorphins in response, which may give you a sort of high.
Long term effects of using nicotine are risk of cancer, emphysema, heart disease, and stroke. Although one usually must consume a significant amount of tobacco in order for these effects to set in, people are advised to avoid smoking or chewing tobacco because the most dangerous thing about nicotine is its addictiveness.
Nicotine is an agonist, because it stimulates other chemicals rather than repressing them.
In order to better combat the effects of nicotine misuse, you could not exercise. This is because exercise produces endorphins, so you would have less if you did not exercise after misusing nicotine. You could also distract yourself from smoking in order to avoid a relapse. Some people use nicotine gum or patches. You could also do activities that you find pleasing, because this will naturally stimulate the release of glutamate.

You Tube project

I like how the YouTube project allowed us to be creative with our research. However, it was kind of stressful when the videos weren't very successful uploading at first.
It was fun to watch the videos in class. They were all very informative and entertaining. Some of them were very clever.

Writing Assignment #1

My expectations for this course are that it will be fast-paced and also require a good amount amount of reading. My expectations were fairly accurate, however I was kind of surprised the first day that we made a poster. Although, I thought that the poster assignment was a good idea because it saved time getting notes on all of the psychologists.
The Moodle quiz gave me a good idea about what to expect in the future on tests. I am glad that the first quiz was only 15 points, because it was a good indication of what I can expect on future tests.
I am looking forward to the curriculum. I am kind of apprehensive about how dependent this class is on technology. Also, it kind of stresses me out that our assignments are on multiple websites, instead of just one.
Overall, I think I will enjoy this class.

Quiz

The quiz was all right.