Topics in the News?
What I would like you to do is to start applying what we are learning in class to real world matters. Some might ask, "What good is learning psychology if we can't apply it to real world matters?" So that is what we are going to do with this topical blog assignment.
What I would like you to do is to either go to NPR (http://www.npr.org/ ), the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ ) or any news site listed at the bottom of this page (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ listed in their news sources) and read, watch, or listen to something that is interesting to you and relates to what we have been learning in the class.
Please respond the blog by BRIEFLY telling us in essay format:
What your topic is and what the piece you chose was. Why you picked it (what made it interesting for you) and what did you expect to see. What did you find most interesting about the piece
Next discuss IN DETAIL how it relates to the class using terms, terminology, and concepts that we have learned so far in class. Include definitions.
Please make sure you use the terms, terminology and concepts you have learned so far in the class. It should be apparent from reading your post that you are a college student well underway in a course in psychology.
Make a list of key terms and concepts you used in your post.
Let me know if you have any questions.
--Dr. M
I found an article named "Where Did I come From? Some stolen children don't want to know." I found this to be very interesting because some people who are now 35 years old are telling their stories of how growing up because they had been stolen as a baby. With help of a geneticist testing DNA, the people who did not know their real parents can now determine who their biological parents are and where they came from. Some people refused to be tested, while others willingly stepped up wanting to know. Those who refused to be tested were raided by police for any kind of DNA testing (toothbrushes). Blood tests were done but still no DNA testing. I think the police were right to have raided the people who were unwilling to take the test. This IS a crime and it's important to know our biological roots and the eugenics have helped out over time especially for this case.
I think this ties into psychology because obviously there's tests being done to figure out a connection between genetics with children and their biological parents. This reminds me of Goddard's intelligent tests in a way to test the Kallikaks Family for "feeble-mindedness," except more advance. It's just weird to think that there are many tests that can be done for measuring how intelligent we are (Sterns IQ tests) to even measuring how we are all connected with our relatives through a DNA test. It's even more weird to think that we can now decide on if we want a boy or girl as our first child, and so on. This was an interesting article and being able to test DNA has been helpful for the stolen children who are now adults seeking out their biological parents.
Terms: Goddard, Kallikak Family, IQ Tests, Eugenics
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/09/134364175/where-did-i-come-from-these-stolen-children-don-t-want-to-know
The topic I chose to blog about was how women are still not equal to men in the work force. NPR has an article titled “The Nation: Prepare for a Possible “Womancession’”. The reason I chose this article was because I do not pay close attention to things like this and I was not really aware that inequality among men and women was still such a noticeable issue. I expected to see examples of certain jobs that employ more women and examples of jobs that would not employ women. I found it interesting that during the recession women lost 366,000 jobs between July 2009-January 2011 and men gained 438,000 jobs. It looks like these differences are going to increase with time.
This topic relates to class in respect to how women’s rights have evolved over time. During the nineteenth century most women were part of the “women’s sphere”. The women’s sphere was the idea that women were to be a wife and a mother. Their main purpose was to raise family. This included getting married, having and raising children and enjoying it. Women were not encouraged to get an education because there was the belief that there would be severe side effects. Such as, engaging in too much mental activity would disturb the normal development of their reproductive organs. By the twenty-first century women still feel unable to climb past the “glass ceiling” this is the idea that women are unable to be equal to men. By the late nineteenth centuries there were more women choosing to attend college and gain a higher education, but it was still shocking to most people. Society was still very male-dominated. Relating back to the article, it is apparent that women are still on a different level than men. Females will most likely always be discouraged from certain jobs such as being a firefighter, cop, or any job that requires heaving labor. Women are thought of as delicate, nurturing creatures. Therefore, when they choose to go above and beyond “old-fashioned” thinking questions their drive. Why would they want to go through all that education and trouble when their only duty is to raise a family? This is not necessarily my belief, but the issue of inequality among men and women is still a real issue. Women throughout history have made huge impacts. Such as Mary Calkins who came up with paired-associate learning. This concept later became a commonly used method in cognitive research. Paired-associate learning involved individuals observing patterns of color patches and numbers for a certain amount of time and then they were tested over what they saw. She came up with this idea in the late 1890’s, which was a huge deal for a woman during this time period. Women gained the right to vote in the year 1920 and over time there have been other great advances in the job field, sports, government and so on. However, today women make an average of 77 cents for every dollar that a man makes for equal work. This does not make sense to me but it is how things have been for so long maybe people do not know how to change it.
List of key terms/concepts: women’s sphere, glass ceiling, Mary Calkins, paired-associate learning, cognitive research
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/08/134357162/the-nation-prepare-for-a-possible-womancession
The article I found was about measuring the bounce of a kangaroo and what spots hit the ground and when. They have these little white circle things that show movement of the joints of the kangaroos.
This reminded me of the part in our book that talked about Weber and Fachner and the two point threshold were you can tell when your feeling being poked in two different areas or just one. It also talks about absolute threshold and difference threshold which are right around the two point thresold, just a little off in both directions. They also talk about methods of limits which is pushing to the point were it can no longer be done. Methods of constant stimuli is where the listner is anticipating were the threshold lies. And method of adjustment is were the subject identifies the intensity of the stimulus until it is at the threshold.
Terms:Weber, Fachner, Two point threshold, absolute threshold, difference threshold, method of limits, method of constant stimuli, method of adjustment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12688654
This article discusses about Illinois being the next state to want to abolish the death penalty. In 2000 Republican Gov. George Ryan made international headlines for suspending executions. The last execution in Illinois was 1999. The victims families wanted to veto the bill for reasons of a life for a life view. What I apply this to is Darwin and the survival of the fittest. People in history wanted to get rid of people who were considered stupid. From Developing the IQ tests for immigrants and schools people used those scores to determine who was more mentally fit. Still today the role of the government deciding weather a man lives or dies for a crime still falls under the role of selecting the best person to live. By killing criminals for the crimes they committed they are unable to be free.
Terms: IQ, Darwin, Survival of the fittest,
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/09/134394946/illinois-abolishes-death-penalty
I decided to investigate the topic of Nativism. Nativism arose in the time when defensive nationalism was a important matter. It became a big concept when immigration started to increase again in the 1920s. Many Americans during this time did not want foreign ideas to impede in the American culture. Nativism is the idea that certain skills and abilities are wired in our brains at birth. We are born with cognitive abilities that help us to acquire and learn new skills. This is opposite of empiricism, who believed you learned things through experience and learning.
Psychological nativism grew due to tensions to uphold a national culture. Many people hated and condemned other cultural ideas and challenges to the American national culture. This targeted minorities groups and created Americans to prosecute minority groups for their ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_%28politics%29
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Nativism.html
http://www.essortment.com/perceptual-psychology-nativism-vs-empiricism-16772.html
An article called “Why bother staying married” talks about various kinds of relationships between couples. It explains how times have changed for marriages and divorce rates support their claim. What I was interested in in the article was the part where is talked about romantic love and how they can actually prove by mapping the brain that it can last over time. In a study to examine this researchers took a group of individuals that had been married for a long time (average of 21 years) and a group of individuals that had fallen “madly” in love in the past year. They used the fMRI to look at patterns in the brain when showing pictures of the person’s spouse to them. The participants were also showed images of close friends, highly familiar acquaintance, and a low familiar person to compare differences in results. The results of the study determined a strong correlation in the scans of recently in love individuals and the individuals that had been married for a long time. The individuals showed a greater response to the images of their partner compared to the other facial images shown.
I was interested in this article because of how amazing it is that they can do this. I honestly expected them to find more of a difference in the couples that had been married for 21 years and those recently in love. They really didn’t talk about the major differences there they just said that there was a correlation.
This is related to Psychology because determining where different emotions come from is a big part in Psychology. Understanding the brain and how it works offers much incite. This relates to class topics in that mapping the brain has been evolving since the 19th century. They started with Phrenology and it has evolved through the centuries. Josef Gall started this with his “doctrine of the skull” identifying what he thought each area of the skull contributed to in each person’s personality. When this proved incorrect, people began examining people with brain damage. Phinius Gage and Tan contributed to research on Broca’s area and the frontal lobe. Golgi began staining the brain to look at neurons under the microscope. All these things contributed to where we are today in terms of understanding how the brain works.
Phrenology, doctrine of the skull, Phinius Gage, Tan, Broca’s Area, Golgi
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-labier/marriage-advice_b_832574.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/213152.php
The article I read was about how dog's have problems with self-recognition. There has been many studies done, first with humans, and then with animals to understand if and when organisms can recognize themselves. Usually this is done with a mirror, in humans, and animals like chimpanzies or dolphins, a mark is placed on their head or somewhere else on the body, and if they recognize the spot on themselves like a "what is this doing on my face" type of reaction, then the self-recognition has set in. However, when this study has been done with dogs, they have failed time and time again. So the additional study that this article focused on was one where a dog recognizes and sniffs other dog's urine in the snow. It's owner marked where the dog's own urine was and realized that it sniffed a significantly shorter amount of time with it's own urine than it did with other's-- therefore giving us a small reason to theorize that the dog may recognize his own urine.
I found this interesting because developmental psychology is quite interesting, learning processes such as these are done with many humans and animals to decipher when certain processes kick in during an organism's development. Additionally when I just read the name of the article "Are Dog's Self-Conscious" I thought that perhaps the article had a anthropomorphic theme to it, but it did not.
Self-Recognition tests, specifically the mirror test that is referenced in the article was developed by Gordan Gallup Jr in 1970 based on observations by Charles Darwin. When Darwin visited a local zoo he held a mirror up to an orangutan and recorded his observations-- noting that the animal seemed to be making faces at the other animal, meaning the orangutan probably thought it was just another primate like himself.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/03/134167145/i-sniff-therefore-i-am-are-dogs-self-conscious
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
Terms: mirror-test, anthropomorphism, charles darwin, gordan gallup, self-recognition tests
My topic was comparative psychology and self-awareness. The title of the article was “I Sniff, Therefore I am, Are Dogs Self Conscious?” on the NPR website. I picked this topic because I am a dog lover and I remember seeing something about self-recognition in dogs when searching the web for one of my earlier dogs. I wanted to see what this article had to say about it. The thing I found most interesting was that there is a scientist took the time to find another way to see if dogs have a sense of themselves besides the mirror test because dogs use their noses more and their eyes.
This has to do with class because it looks at comparative psychology. Comparative psychology is the study of characteristics of humans and animals and how they relate to each other. Comparative psychology started with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Romanes began studying it after Darwin. He wrote a book about comparative psychology but in it he used anecdotal evidence instead of actually observing the animals for himself. He also used anthropomorphism, meaning he used human characteristics to describe what the animals were doing, making it more complicated than it really was. Lloyd Morgan came after him and worked with using the simplest explanation instead to describe the animal behavior. He called this the law of parsimony or Lloyd Morgan’s Canon. In America, Thorndike studied animals using his puzzle boxes, which studied how cats learned how to get out of them. Comparative psychology is still used today which is obvious in this article. I think dogs are a very interesting animal to study because humans and dogs have had a close relationship throughout time.
Comparative psychology, Romanes, anecdotal evidence, anthropomorphism, Lloyd Morgan, law of parsimony, Lloyd Morgan’s Canon, Thorndike, puzzle boxes
The topic I found was the very recent earthquakes in Japan. I chose it because it happened today and also applied to psychology. This piece talked about the psychology of Japan’s earthquake and how it served as a good psychological experiment.
The psychologist speaking during the video believed this situation was interesting because he said that one of the world’s worst earthquakes struck one of the world’s most prepared places. The reactions of the citizens of Japan showed some of the psychology of human differences. These differences could be attributed to the level at which they had been prepared before the earthquake. The Japanese were repaired due to repetition of their safety drills. This ties into a lot of the educational practices that psychologists have discovered over the years. Ebbinghaus discovered the idea of overlearning. Overlearning was the process of learning by repetition. If it required him 5 repetitions to learn something, and he repeated it 10 times, he would have committed 100% overlearning. Overlearning makes things stick in our memory better; therefore, becoming more resistant to the forgetting curve. He also realized that when practice sessions were spaced further apart, they were more effective than when everything was mass practiced in a single session. This sound like what the Japanese people had been doing all their life. They always practiced their earthquake drills, so when one occurred, it became second nature to get to safety. Mary Whiton Calkins also did research on the process of committing ideas to memory. Through the process of paired associate learning, she found that the frequency variable was the one most strongly associated with association. This adds more support for why the Japanese repeated these drills so many times throughout their entire lives.
TERMS: Ebbinghaus, overlearning, forgetting curve, Calkins, paired associate learning, frequency variable,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/impact_asia/9422713.stm
I found an article on huffington post about International women's day. The article was called "We Women Must Declare a Nonviolent Revolution". International women's day was on the 8th and it is a day to be aware of all women have overcome- no matter what race or ethnicity. The article stated that while we have overcome so much in the past 100 years of this day, from earning equal rights to voting, why have we stopped? Why do women not demand gender equality anymore?
I believe this relates to our class because in the early 19th century, there was something called a "women's sphere" which basically was the idea that women were to remain in the bubble or sphere, and be mothers and house wives. Women were thought to be less intelligent and less mentally capable of obtaining an education, with ideas that if a woman received education her brain would not be big enough to store all of it and there would be severe side effects.
The women's sphere isn't the only thing woman have overcome, either. There was a time when women were allowed to attend universities as an "observer" but never allowed to actually receive a degree. Titchner actually allowed many women grad students into his laboratory and advocated for their rights to get a degree but for some reason would not allow women into his elite group, "the experimentalists".
key terms: women's sphere, titchner, the experimentalists,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bianca-jagger/post_1817_b_834626.html
For this topical blog I found an article about how scientists believe that males used to have small spines on their genitatlia just like chimpanzees, cats, and mice have. It is thought that this DNA sequence was deleted in humans, but continues in other primates; also, another genetic deletion could have possibly led to the expansion of specific regions of the human brain. Scientists also came up with 510 stretches of DNA that humans have had deleted, but that our primate relatives still have. Scientists believe that these have been removed from human males because of the changes with the courtship of humans. The loss of spines could be related to less sensitivity, longer copulation, and possibly associated with stronger pair-bonding in humans and greater parental care for their children. This can be related to Darwin’s thoughts with evolution. As humans changed and paternal needs got higher and more necessary survival of the fittest, otherwise known as natural selection, kicked in. Natural selection is the process in which different traits become either more or less common in a population and it effects the survival of that population. Along with the changes in the penile spines, there are also the changes in the brain. Different areas of the brain increased in size and complexity, showing some mental changes between humans and primates. These changes can help explain how humans have evolved and come to the technological advances humans have made.
Terms: Darwin, evolution, survival of the fittest, natural selection, population
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12689692
The article I found was about shootings that I have been going on in Chicago schools and how so many children die each year from it. It also talked about how the police plan to crack down on this problem and try to fix it.
I think this has to do with psychology we are learning about this week with behaviorism. They need to decide how they plan to go about stopping the gangs from occuring. Will they be using unconditioned stimlus which is an uncontroled result happening because of something else that was also uncontrolled. Or they could use a contioned stimlus which is excatly like the unconditioned stimulus only it's controlled. These were founded by Pavlov.
-unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimlus, generalization, Pavlov
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/21/132678405/chicagos-schools-police-work-to-stem-violence
When hearing what is going on in Japan of all the radiation leaking out, it is easy identify the psychological stress that those people are going through. In class we talk about how people are able to cope with their surroundings, but when you look at what Japan has gone through since the tsunami, they really have been through a lot. I like to compare this with Brentano’s act psychology, which is the position that psychology should be the study of mental acts, not mental contents; with the perception of some event. For example one should not analyze it into elements, but examine the act of perception. When comparing this to the people of Japan, it seems like they are having trouble dealing with the mental stage as to what they are suppose to do next. Most of them are without jobs and without homes. A lot of them lost members of their family and being able to live through something like that will play a huge psychological role in one’s life.
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135145451/how-safe-is-safe-enough-to-engineers-it-depends
The article that I found was from the BBC, and it was talking about how genetic tests should be more available to people before getting pregnant. I decided to use this article because I feel that it would be a good idea to know ahead of time what possible problems a child might have, and also to know if you are likely to have a sick child or not. I was expecting the article to be about the genetic tests and about how difficult it currently is to get them.
While this article doesn't directly tie in to anything psychological related, it does relate to a subject in this course that has been brought up a few different times. Having the ability to test people for genetic diseases before they ever even have a child would separate people into different categories. These categories could be used in a eugenics type program where people could be forced to breed or people could be prevented from breeding based on their test results. This is the type of test that many of the psychologists such as Galton would have dreamed of. One of the biggest advantages of this type of testing is that it is more accurate than any type of IQ test could be, but it can only be used at this time for testing for genetic diseases. Were this to be widely implemented though, it could lead to more in-depth testing, such as testing for potential IQ, and physical characteristics. While right now it is a good thing, it could eventually turn into everyone getting tested, and potentially custom making children, as in the movie Gattica.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12983866
I researched an artile on bbc that talked about what happened leading up to the raid on the compound before we killed Osama bin Laden. I found this article interesting because of how psychologically strenuous it would be to be President Obama and his staff and even more so the Navy SEALs performing the operation. We have talked about in class the issue of intelligence. This is intelligence at its finest and took months of planning. Also in class we have talked about Artificial Intelligence. In finding Osama bin Laden, it is very apparent that we used the highest forms of artificial intelligence known to man to find one person amongst the world. One way that strikes me as very shocked is on the decisions that President Obama had to make. He chose to do a helicoptor attack instead of a bombing. The psychological stress put on him for his decisions is also very strenuous.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13257330
Haiti: What's Working, What's Not, What's Next
I listened to a story on NPR’s show Talk of the Nation that dealt with the progress that has taken place in Haiti. Being that Haiti had been struck by a devastating earthquake a little over a year ago it came back into everyone’s mind. They interviewed two individuals who had very differing views of NGO’s as to whether they are good or bad for Haiti in the long run. One individual held that NGO’s are helping build Haiti back slowly by training Haitians to take care of Haitians and to build themselves back up and to maintain a solid nation. I think that this is what we should always strive for in dealing with areas who have been struck by devastating natural disasters. The other individual held that NGO’s were basically cover ups that gave all of the long term contracts to American industries so that American’s could make a quick buck. He said that the U.S. had made Haiti get rid of their protective tariffs in 1960’s. When these tariffs were taken away American crops flooded Haiti’s markets and created an atmosphere/economy in which Haitian farmers could not compete. I found all this to be very interesting and as always it raises suspicion, but I would like to try to remain positive and trust that we are doing what is best for the Haitian people.
I think that we can look at our aid to Haiti through a structuralist or a functionalist viewpoint. Structuralism, our book tells us, is like anatomy, the purpose is to analyze. In functionalism, however, we look at how the various parts of the body function and work together in order to keep us alive. Harvey Carr matured functionalism by saying in his book Psychology: A study of Mental Activity that functionalism has always remained more of an attitude than a systematic theoretical position. When I think abstractly about these positions I can see how various organizations such as NGO’s and their work can be seen as being both positive and negative simultaneously. If we look at it from a structuralism standpoint then we see only what is going on the surface. This would be like the position of the second man in the interview. He admitted that we were helping the Haitians, however, we were implementing our own contractors for construction, crops, and the like and profiting off of it; a sort of disaster profiteering. However, I believe that the correct lens for this situation would be functionalism. This is a much less cynical approach. This views the system as a whole and how everyone lives and works together to keep us all alive. This would be like the first man in the interview. Yes it is true if you look microscopically then you will see us employing the use of American contractors. This is something that we should get upset about if that was all there was to it. However, we are hiring governmental contractors to train Haitian construction workers to build earthquake resistant buildings. The Haitians don’t have the money, tools, or training to build such buildings, therefore, they need teachers. Ultimately, this is the better option and will benefit the Haitians in the end more than if we simply let them reconstruct their buildings the same way they always have. If another earthquake they would be right back to square one. I like this approach and view to it much more. Just like Harvey Carr said, functionalism is more a frame of mind than a specific science. In the same way, we are assisting the Haitians, that is all that matters.
Terms: structuralism, functionalism, Harvey Carr
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/12/132865375/haiti-whats-working-whats-not-whats-next