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?" "Are we learning from the past or are we simply repeating our mistakes?" So that is what we are going to do with this week's 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/ ) there are some good news source links at the bottom of the following 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
about the history of psychology. Write an informative response to the
article. How you go about it is largely up to you, however it must read
as though a college student half way through a semester of class wrote
it. Correctly use the terms and concepts we have been reading about in
your response.
When you are done, copy and paste the URL at the bottom so we can go and see the sources you used.
Let me know if you have any questions.
--Dr. M
The article I read was tilted Politics 2012: A Landslide of Women. This article caught my attention because of the title and I was curious to know what it was about; I would say that I read a lot of articles when titles involve something to do with women. This article talks about how women are finally starting to run for congress, before the election there were only eleven women in congress (one in the senate and ten in congress). This year there are 181 women running for congress, whether they are good candidates isn’t the point, the point is women are finally feeling as if they have a chance and will be taken seriously. From a females point of view we need more women in the Capital, from left to right, liberal, conservative, women have simply got to get a larger toehold in the government; which is the only way and the best way to achieve real balance in Washington. Thinking back to the year, 1914 where women were first granted access to vote, even though it is almost 100 years later women are still fighting for their voices to be heard and to be taken seriously in either the work force or in general. As a feminist I believe we are not an equal country no matter what the laws or what people say, men are still above women in many ways, and if women getting into congress will help equal out the line between males and females then so be it. This fits into chapter 6 of our book, on the discussion of Education for Women and Minorities. This section of the book talks about how women back when women’s rights were meaningless still got their voices out, still received an education, and achieved so much; feels as if women today are too scared to let people hear what they think. In the 19th century, women were merely looked at as being a mother, wife, and homemaker; this was known as a women’s sphere. In the earlier years it was not only discouraged that women pursue any type of education but it would have unpleasant medical consequences. A Harvard medical school professor actually recommended that women quit school once they hit puberty because too much mental activity could retard the development of their reproductive organs. This unfortunately is not surprising to me; women have come a long way since then but women to this day have to fight for their rights and fight to advancement. Women still don’t have the same rights as men, for example most men and women who start a job at the same time and with amount of education it is more likely for men to advance with a pay raise when compared to women. Most of these issues are still something women fight for today, of course it is a lot better now-a-days than it was 50, 20, or even 10 years ago.
I read an article on The Huffington Post's website called “Breakthroughs in Energy Psychology: A New Way to Heal the Body and Mind.” When I saw this headline I thought of some various now defunct types of psychology that I read about in the book. Some were pretty weird and turned out not to be valid but not without some time being believed to be real. Other ideas or new types of psychology now seem normal but back when they first came out probably seemed just as weird as the EFT tapping therapy.
This is a therapy that combines eastern and Western therapies to help people with PTSD, depression, anxiety or just coping with this modern world. EFT uses meridian points in the body where one will tap a certain point while a stressor is spoken about by the patient. “Acupoint tapping sends signals directly to the stress centers of the mid-brain, not mediated by the frontal lobes (the thinking part, active in talk therapy) explains Dr. Church, Ph.D., who has been researching and using EFT since 2002. Because EFT simultaneously accesses stress on physical and emotional levels, he adds, EFT gives you the best of both worlds, body and mind, like getting a massage during a psychotherapy session."
Tapping seems to have some good backing with a study showing it is effective and over 10 million people worldwide have tried it out. It works with the amygdala to improve cortisol levels. This therapy is said to help with high blood pressure and maybe even cancer because “releasing cortisol too frequently, as we seem to be doing in response to the ongoing or "chronic" stress of modern life, may have serious, even scary, impacts on our physical, mental and emotional health. In fact, living in this kind of biological "survival mode" may be making us more vulnerable to everything from cancer to heart disease, and more.”
There are still many skeptics of this therapy. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found this “Writing in The Skeptical Inquirer, Brandon Gaudiano and James Herbert argued that there is no plausible mechanism to explain how the specifics of EFT could add to its effectiveness and they have been described as unfalsifiable and therefore pseudoscientific.[4] EFT is widely dismissed by skeptics, along with its predecessor, Thought Field Therapy[5] and has been described in the mainstream press as "probably nonsense."[2] Evidence has not been found for the existence of acupuncture points, meridians or other concepts involved in traditional Chinese medicine.[6]”
This therapy in the future with future studies could either be shown to be a “pseudoscience” like phrenology or it could be proven to be valid. We won’t know until more studies are done. Only one study was cited in the article and that is not enough to say if it is good or not.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-ortner/emotional-freedom-technique_b_1349223.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Freedom_Techniques
For this assignment I found a really interesting article about the “Psychology of Facebook: Why We Act Differently Online”. Although this may not directly correlate with Chapter 10 of our book, I still found it really interesting. All in all this article talked about how people act online in comparison to real life. It asks the question, “Why do we feel empowered enough to act a certain way on social networking platforms like Facebook?”, following up with the fact that we are required to sign in with our real names, but nonetheless, a study by Wilcox and Stephen at the University of Pittsburgh found that we are far less charming online than in real life. In a series of five experiments, the authors illustrate the effects of social networking has on the individual. Their main argument is this, “people present a positive self-view to others”. They call it a “licensing effect”, in other words, you begin to feel good about yourself, so in turn, you feel a sense of entitlement, which then leads to an increase in self-esteem and decrease in the ability to control yourself.
On the flip-side, there was a study performed at Utah Valley University in 2011, this study found that the longer college students surfed around on Facebook, that they began to feel worse and worse about themselves and their own lives. This then leads to the problem of can self-esteem both rise and fall at the same time via the same social networking platform? The study from Utah Valley University found that users who didn’t know their Facebook “friends” very well believed that “others had better lives”. This then in turn lead to lower self-esteem. The article then gives 7 reasons why people act differently on Facebook, than in real life.
They are taken word for word here:
“1. We know we’re being watched
2. We can choose what information people see about us.
3. When we feel comfortable online, we sometimes go overboard.
4. Reading other people’s posts can make us less self-aware.
5. We care less about what our ‘weak ties’ think.
6. It’s easier to hate online personas than it is to hate people in real life.
7. We want to impress our friends.”
*If you want to read a more in depth analysis of these seven reasons, just read the article.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/facebook-psychology-7-reasons_n_1951856.html#slide=1619877
While I was doing Thursday's assignment, I remember reading about how various techniques from behaviorism are being used in the classrooms of our education system. While this didn't surprise me all too much, I did remember reading that it was becoming increasingly helpful to students with developmental disorders, including autism.
When we got this assignment, I decided to try find an article related to such a thing, and found an article on NPR called "Classroom Yoga Helps Improve Behavior Of Kids With Autism". I had heard that some schools were trying yoga in the classroom, but hadn't really heard about additional benefits.
The study was done by a professor from New York University, who focuses on occupational therapy, who surveyed teachers of students with an autistic spectrum disorder. What they found was a decrease in stress on these particular students in addition to reduced aggressive behavior, decrease in social withdrawal and hyperactivity. According to researchers, anxiety fuels negative behavior, especially in autistic children, and this creates an outlet for students to relieve stress. The systematic way they do yoga every day also assists in some autistic children needing structure, with the same routine. This being taking the mats out, breathing deep, assuming various yoga positions, tensing and relaxing muscles, and singing at the end.
Students as a whole have found that a relaxing exercise such as yoga has also been found to increase concentration, performance, strength, motor coordination, and social skills in the student body as a whole.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/12/162782583/classroom-yoga-helps-improve-behavior-of-kids-with-autism
The article I decided to read was called Depression disproportionately affects those in poverty. After reading this article it reminded me of chapter 7 and some of the issues discussed. The first thought that came to mind was social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was a theory in the 19th century that believed social progress resulted from the conflicts in which the fittest or best individuals would prevail. According to the report poor people have a greater risk of health problems along with higher depression rates. In 2011 there were 280,000 adults that reported answers from all socioeconomic classes. Of those polled 31% of people in poverty reported depression while only 15% not in poverty reported depression like symptoms. This related to social Darwinism because in this case there is a direct link to the poor and more risks of health issues. People today are looked at by their successes and many cultures base those successes on the amount of money you earn. Our society seems to be one of those. With the upcoming election several of these issues have been brought up. Romney feels that more wealthy individuals will increase the economy while giving tax breaks to the poor isn’t helping to stimulate our economy. Medicare and health insurance is another topic being discussed by the candidates. According to this study poor people are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like smoking. 33% of those in poverty smoke compared to 19.9% of those not in poverty. This could lead to higher health care coverage due to unhealthy choices made by the lower earning financial groups. It is very interesting to read an article like this and apply it to older less used terms like social Darwinism. The term survival of the fittest could be applied to this study based on the research results. Although being poor is not a choice it can still cause trickle down effects to the rest of our society. Chapter 7 discussed this very issue but it was also a different time frame so survival at that point is different that it is today. This report states that 37.8% of people in poverty reported having trouble affording medicine or healthcare compared to just 16.5% not in poverty. This percentage difference could become an issue down the road when their children need medical assistance. If individuals are unhealthy and or ill it makes it more difficult to work and earn wages which in turn could lead to poverty. The healthier people are the more likely they are to produce healthy offspring, BUT not always. This is a cycle that eventually could separate the rich from the poor. Although the term social Darwinism isn’t used much anymore due to Nazi Germany during WWII this article seems to be suggesting that your financial income can affect your state of mind along with your state of health. I found this article to be very interesting because of the percentages given and the comparison of socioeconomic groups. Even though the article never mentioned social Darwinism there are some comparisons to the rich (superior) vs. poor (inferior) that could give you the idea that’s the point they are trying to get across. Depression is a disease and without proper medical diagnosis and medicine/therapy this could lead to a repeated cycle by the poor and their offspring.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/31/depression-disproportiona_n_2049802.html?utm_hp_ref=health-news&ir=Health%20News
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
The article I read about in the Huffington Post was 7 reasons why people act differently online through Facebook. The article explained that people behave very differently when they are online and sometimes even say things they wouldn’t normally say or do in person. In one study they described how people feel much more disappointed when they read close friends comments and others feel very empowered. This study focused mainly on how social media directly affects people’s self esteem and self control which directly relates to the experiments famous psychologists like Pavlov and Watson did in our past chapter. I think it is very interesting to see how in modern times there are still new ways to learn about how our behaviors can change and alter with technology. It seems that this study has the same relationship as Watson’s where the researchers are trying to figure out if we can alter certain behaviors and what causes them in this case with social media. Pavlov’s idea of different personas and how individuals act towards a situation is also correlated with this article as people act differently to Facebook statuses or likes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/facebook-psychology-7-reasons_n_1951856.html#slide=1617327
When I first read the huffpost article Is "Daniel Kahneman Really the World's Greatest Living Psychologist?" it brought up a lot of points about psychology and psychological concepts that we have discussed in class.
First off they started talking about many different psychologists, including Zimbardo, Bandura (who apparently is the most quoted psychologist ever, not who I would have guessed), and others like Skinner and Darley. But they really dont' mention the fellow in the title, Daniel Kahneman. So right after reading the whole article I had to look the guy up, because I had never heard of him myself (although college does seem to isolate people temporarily sometimes from big news) and I came upon the Wikipedia article about him and he has done a lot of different things. Much of his work is dealing with cognitive psychology issues and he also helped head the idea of having hedonic psychology (similar to positive psychology and focuses on the outlook that people have on life). He very recently came up with hedonic psychology and found that people often tend to focus on something that may not have a very big impact overall in their lives and they emphasize it to the point of them being stressed out over it or truely believing it will have an impact on their situation. The famous one that Kahneman did was he asked people in the Midwest and California how happy they were and how happy they thought their counterparts on the other end of the country were and why. When asked the Midwest people thought that the people living in California would be happier and be living better lives than them but in reality they showed an equal level of happiness and satisfaction in their lives. When asked why they thought California people would be happier, midwesterners said that it was because they lived in California. Leading one to believe that people percieve the whether as a stereotypical factor of happiness when in reality that is something that doesn't tend to affect someone's happiness in life.
Now while this and other experiments done by Kahneman are very important in the big picture of trying to understand human beings and how they think about things there are many things to consider when calling him the "greatest living psychologist". First off one must consider that there are many different areas of psychology that happen to be extremely different from one another. Each having their own great discoveries and experiments. But hardly ever do you see people comparing the "greatness" of a social psychology experiment to say a clinical psychology experiment. They are almost two completely separate fields (which may be one of the reasons that psychology is a major with little prerequisties to take any of the classes here. They don't nessecarily build off of one another like say Spanish or Biology would). Kahneman's specialty is in neuroscience believe it or not and no one is calling him a bad neuroscientist or even a bad psychologist but he is working in a different subfield then a lot of the rest of psychology.
Finally one has to consider how subjective the judging is of this "honor" that has been given to him by BBC and The Guardian. Although is impacts on the world of psychology are significant (apparently so recent though they have not had the chance to be published), who's to say how significant? And what significance means? Like I mentioned earlier, a strongly significant thing to one person may not be so for another.
Overall I believe this ties back to our class not only because the article includes significant historical psychologists that we have discussed but it also brings up the point that I think our book makes a lot when it has separate chapters for the many areas of psychology. That the many subfields of psychology may not be as closely related as people would like to think. There are many chapters in the book that deal with something completely different in the last but they are both significant to psychology.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-heffernan-/greatest-living-psychologist_b_1098817.html
-Original Huffpost article about the "greatest psychologist of all time"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
-Widipedia on Daniel Kahneman
I read an article in the Huffington Post that reports that people in lower socioeconimic statuses are more susceptable to depression as well as at risk for developming other health problems. To me the article itself was pretty self explanitory and I beleive that most people already realize the fact that the poor have lower health. However, the questions that is really intreaging is why that is the case and what will happen if it is not corrected. The article first mentions that 31 percent of people in poverty have depression compared to 15.8 percent of those not in poverty. The article also mentions that those in lower SES are likely develope all medical conditions with exception to cancer.
The explanation of this in the article by the Huffington Post says that this phenomenon is primarilly due to the access of health care. This can take effect at many levels, with some of them being health insurance, access to healthy foods and the ability to exercise. In the context of insurance as it realtes to health. 38 percent of individuals below poverty are without health insurance, and only about 14 percent of people above poverty go without health insurance. The correlates directly to the application of preventative care and regular examinations. Without the means to pay for them (money, health insurance) they are forgone until a problem becomes present, which of course may be too late.
For the most part this is the reason that the article gives for the development of higher health problems (particularly depression), but I have read other information on the topic that lead me to believe that that is only one very small piece of the puzzle. It is true that the availability of health care can have an impact on health, but most statistic prove that it is not as importnat as you might beleive. Those who get regular examinations are only minorly likely to increase their health. Something that seems to show great effects oh health are the psychosocial factor that are around it, that is if you feel poor than you are. Subjective SES is a topic that is being discussed more and more as having adverese effects of health.
Subjective SES says that no matter how poor you are doesn't matter as much as your subjective placement of yourself on the SES ladder. If you place yourself lower than you are (which most people do) than that will put more stress on your body, which in turn wears it down physically and mentally. The goes hand in hand with social capital or those that you hang around or who are in your community can make you feel worse of better about your SES.
All of these theories can be related back to the topic of social darwinism. For some they see it as a highly genetic thing and for others it can be seen as highly environmental. Are those people that have lower SES really inferior to those that have higher ones or are they just handed a bad situation that proves to be harder to excape from than anyone has ever amagined. This is the age old question that many people have been fighting over for centuries. It seems that the more research that is done the more it seems to point toward the issue of social or environmental factor having the greatest effect.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/31/depression-disproportiona_n_2049802.html?utm_hp_ref=health-news&ir=Health%20News
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=b7dde3c6-8409-4794-810e-c150b0b61237%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=104&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=afh&AN=18752259
The article that I had read was entitled “The Industrious Lives of Halloweens Ghouls” by Reema Khrais. It had discussed how the zombies, killer clowns, and axe murdurers go the extra mile to making sure the customers get what they paid for, to be scared senseless that is. Their life is centered around inducing people’s fear, and it reminded me of Watson’s study of trying to induce, condition, fear in Little Albert.
Watson’s experiment showed and explained how Little Albert grew to be afraid of the white rat, through a series of trials and associating the white rat with a loud noise that startled him. Every time he saw the rat he was conditioned to fear it because he associated it with the loud noise that had always scared him. This caused me to wonder what conditioned us to be so scared of the things in horror movies or haunted houses or mazes. It could be that something happened during childhood, but could that really be prevalent among the millions of people that are scared of the same things? Were we conditioned when we were babies to be afraid of the certain things just like Little Albert was?
It also got me thinking about different reasons why we are afraid of the things we are. I’m personally very afraid of clowns, but it was because of a movie I saw when I was really little. That same scenario couldn’t have happened to the many other people that are scared of clowns though, and I wonder what else could have contributed to other people’s fears. I also don’t know why I’m still afraid of them to this day. Logically I know that they’re harmless, except for John Wayne Gacy, and are to entertain children. But when I see them all I picture is the movie I saw when I was younger and try to get away from them as fast as I can!
I think that more extensive research and experiments should be conducted in order to answer some of the questions that still radiate around the causes and prolonging of fear.
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/31/164044212/the-industrious-lives-of-halloweens-ghouls
I found an article on the BBC website entitled “Anger management video game monitors child's heart rate”. This article fit right in with our chapter on behaviorism. I really liked this article because unlike so much of what we see in pop culture this had a positive tilt to it. The article discusses a device that is placed on the child’s hand that measures heart rate. Anyone who has watched a teenage boy in his X-box knows how irate and wound up they become while in the middle of a battle or some intricate part of the game.
With this device the player loses the ability to shoot enemy spaceships in this case if his or her heart rate becomes too high. In the study two groups of boys ages 9-17 years were compared. Researchers gave both groups the usual treatments for anger management and one group also spent 15 minutes playing the “Rage Control” game. The study showed that the children who played the game in five of their sessions were better at keeping their heart rate down. Although this was only a pilot study researchers are exploring other games geared at younger children like racing cars or building block games to start this earlier.
The kids did report that they felt better and they had more control over their emotions. I think Skinner would be proud! I thought it was really neat that instead of simply talking about managing negative emotions they were giving the kids something solid to practice and learn with. I think it will be interesting to see if these things catch on and how they shape various levels of cognitive behavior therapies.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20080417
I chose an article I found on Huffingtion Post. The article’s title is Cooked Food Allowed Evolution of Primates’ Big Brains. After reading this title I automatically thought of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The article talked about how around 1.6 to 1.8 million years ago our ancestor, Home erectus, learned how to roast meat and tuberous root vegetables over a fire. The significance of this is huge. Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you're trying to boost your species' brainpower. That's because humans would have to spend more than 9 hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates. By learning to cook meat and vegetables, this lead to primates being able to grow larger brains. This article ties in directly with Darwin. Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. If our ancestors had not started eating cooked foods, their brains (more than likely) would not have evolved to what we have today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/cooked-food-diet-primates-brains_n_2033975.html?utm_hp_ref=science
I found an article from the NPR website titled “Behind A Halloween Mask, Even ‘Good’ Kids Can Turn Into Candy Thieves. I chose this article in the spirit of Halloween just passing and I was overall curious on how these kids became thieves on one day where they get candy for free.
The article states that children take advantage of their disguises during Halloween to not just steal candy, but money as well. It’s mentioned that not only kids, but adults as well can be influenced by a certain situation to violate social norms. The main thing they focus on is the disguise, the anonymity of their costumes, which causes children to turn kids into thieves.
A study led by psychologist Edward Diener set up certain circumstances in which children would have the opportunity to steal. A woman greeted the trick or treaters and showed them to a table which had a bowl containing candy and another bowl containing coins. The children were told to only take one piece of candy and that the money was for a charity. As the woman left, children took more than one piece of candy and took some of the coins. Most groups divided the candy and essentially robbed the woman in the study.
Now I chose this article because it mentions leadership. In chapter 10, Lewin studied different behavioral reactions of leadership styles in adolescent boys. Each style of leadership was followed by a different reaction from the boys. He found that boys tended to be aggressive as the leader wasn’t around. In this article, once the woman (the leader/superior) left, the children became aggressive and took advantage of the ‘free’ candy and money. Although when the children arrived, one child was supposed to be in charge, making sure everyone only took one piece. However, each child picked to be the leader went along with the other children in the stealing.
Psychologists discovered that when children came with a parent/adult or were asked for their name or address, before going to the table, their honesty levels greatly increased. The moral of the story is anonymity can cause wrongdoings and in certain circumstances with no leadership/supervision, children cannot be trusted.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/31/164030718/behind-a-halloween-mask-even-good-kids-can-turn-into-candythieves
The article I found was on NPR.org, and it was about a bread dish used in a prison to modify inmates’ behavior. This week, we read chapter 10 on the origins of behaviorism. Although the chapter didn’t cover behavior modification, it is a type of behaviorism, so it influenced me into picking article.
The article takes place in Baltimore, Maryland’s Correctional adjustment center. This center uses a special meal to instill fear into their inmates, and to discourage negative inmate behaviors. When an inmate acts out, he is forced to eat a meal called “prison loaf” for every meal for a certain number of days, usually a week. Guards say that the number of assaults on inmates have dropped by 50 percent in the two years after they started using this behavior modification system of the prison loaf. Despite its horrible taste, this loaf meets all nutritional requirements. It consists of a mixture of wheat bread, cheese, carrots, spinach, beans, vegetable oil, potato flakes, tomato paste, milk and raisins. The article even gives the recipe for if you would like to try it out for yourselves. Maybe mothers can use this on their unruly children. The guards are using this as positive punishment for the inmates. The addition of the prison loaf is meant to decrease the likelihood that the inmates will act out in the future.
http://www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/2002/apr/loaf/
The article I chose was on the Huffington Post website. The title of the article is “Did You Know It All Along?: The Psychology of Hindsight Bias”. The article deals with how our minds deal with the future and past in regards to hindsight bias. For example, when people don’t know the answer to something (e.g. who the next president will be) they might have opinions about who they think it will be, but overall are uncertain. However, when a new president is elected peoples uncertainty tends to disappear and their thought process changes to “I knew that candidate was going to win”. This phenomenon is known as hindsight bias. Hindsight bias makes our memory of the past seem solid, knowledgeable, and more predictable than it actually was when we lived through that past. Hindsight bias has been one of the most researched topics in psychology in regards to decision traps; with over 800 scientific papers published since the 1970s.
While reading this article I thought it related to the experimental study of memory covered in chapter 4. During this time Herman Ebbinghaus introduced a new perspective on memory by applying it to research. His goal was to learn more about memory by experimenting with it considering not a lot was known about it during this time. Although Ebbinghaus is mostly recognized for the creation of nonsense syllables, I think his contributions to the experimental study of memory directly relate to this article. Without Ebbinghaus attempting to use experiments to study memory, hindsight bias wouldn’t exist. Although some may say it’s a stretch to credit Ebbinghaus with current experiments in regards to memory, I think it’s important to note that he first introduced the idea – therefore he deserves at least some credibility to the research done in this area after him. One can make the argument that his experiments in regards to memory have in some inspired what we known about memory today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neal-roese/did-you-know-it-all-along_b_1973985.html
The article I read was from the BBC website. The article was written by Adam Curtis and focused on B.F. Skinner’s operant pigeon conditioning. The past few chapters have focused on behaviorism and I have always been interested in the insight of behaviorists.
Curtis told the readers that citizens are nudged to do the right thing because if it was up to them, ordinary people would do good or bad things. Behavior modification could be used to make the world a very reinforced world. Skinner used his research on pigeons to “nudge them to do what he wanted them to do.” Operant conditioning was used on the pigeons in 1970, and showed how the conditioning can be used in human society. The whole idea of conditioning is reinforcement, and using gratification to manipulate behavior.
One of my favorite parts of the article stated: “modifying human behavior in these ways raises serious political questions, not just about individual freedom but about who decides what is good or bad behavior. That part got me thinking if behaviorism in schools, or on animals is violating freedom rights. Is manipulating a desired behavior worth the outcome?
There were two films in this article that visualized the research of Skinner and his pigeons. The pigeons would perform a “good behavior” to wait for food. The second idea showed Skinner working with humans in a mental hospital where he was modifying the client’s behaviors. The political idea of individualism is valued in America, and in the time of 1930-1950’s research was dominated by behavioral approaches. The ending of the article talks about the CBS television company using behaviorism for consumerism in views.
Media, and politics wanted to use manipulation to gain views or votes. Conditioning was used at its best to go inside the heads of these people to benefit the companies and politicians.
Is human’s feelings being limited when behaviorism takes place? Does Skinner’s techniques of operant conditioning violate liberty of citizens and animals? Those questions left me stomped after reading/watching videos on behaviorism within the last 60 years.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/11/post_1.html
The video that I watched was of an elephant, which is said to have Korean language skills. In this video a man says different words in the Korean language and the elephant sounds to be saying the words right back to him. The researchers say he has learned to imitate human speech. This video reminded me of how we talked about evolution in class, and how it is believed that animals learn to adapt over time.
I also watched another video that was on elephants, and it was about a bee alarm call sound that was set off that made the elephants move away from where the bees were, because elephants make that noise when there are bees near, so the researchers recorded that noise and played it back to the elephants and they moved away from where they were even when there was really no bees around. It kind of reminds me of the Little Albert experiment where a loud noise was made when he was shown a certain animal, so then when he saw that animal he associated it with something he was afraid of and cried.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20169426
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8640894.stm
The article I found is about cells, tissue, rats, and mice that may have been lost due to the recent hurricane. New York University Hospital lost power when the hurricane hit on Monday afternoon. They have been without power since, and this could result in the loss of an enormous amount of research (several years worth). This is a serious problem in the field of cancer and heart disease research because if this data is lost, these researchers will have to start all over. I feel like this incidence relates to a lot of what we have read so far in our book. Throughout the history of psychology, researchers have tried and failed and overcome many setbacks in every field. If every time Watson, or Pavlov, or any other psychologist from the past failed and gave up, we would be nowhere close to where we are today. It is important to push through any setback if you want to accomplish anything. Each chapter has told of trial and error, and still these people pushed on and worked hard until they found the results they were looking for. I think that is a very important thing to learn and keep in mind when doing experiments in psychology, or in any field. This story is a very devastating one to hear about because of the amount of work that has been put into this kind of research, and then only to have to restart again. I know this was a setback due to a natural disaster, but I am sure researchers in the past have dealt with issues like this, or simply just issues such as trial and error. Everything is a learning experience, and I believe this is one also. This hospital will find new ways to store their research so that it will be safer next time. I think this
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/31/164048905/nyu-cancer-heart-research-threatened-by-sandy-power-outage
I went to the New York Times and found an article telling about the death (and life) of Arthur Jensen who was described as “one of the most important psychologists of his day.” He was for many years a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialty was individual differences and he focused on intelligence. His best known book was titled, The Bell Curve (1994) and was coauthored with Richard J. Herrnstein.
Jensen’s research, his own and his analysis of that of many others, led him to conclude that IQ was the best predictor of success in life, was more than half determined by heredity, and that there were racial differences. The last idea resulted in death threats and attacks from many different researchers.
Jensen focused on g, or the “general factor’ intelligence, the factor that spanned many different kinds of tests. He also wrote a book, Biases in Mental Testing, in which he argued there was no evidence of cultural biases in tests at the g-factor level.
Jensen’s work relates directly to the ideas of Francis Galton and the other British researchers who studied individual differences. Jensen also used reaction time to study IQ. This part of his work relates to the material we covered on reaction time. He called this book, Clocking the Mind: Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences.
One of the people quoted in the article said that when Jensen wrote a paper in 1969 that “a large portion of psychologists wouldn’t have believed that there was a hereditary basis for intellectual ability. Now, there is very little argument about that in the field.”
I found lots of other articles and comments about Jensen on the web and would like to learn more about him as he seemed to deal with so much of what we studied on the development of intelligence tests.
URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/science/arthur-r-jensen-who-set-off-debate-on-iq-dies.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
article titled: Arthur R. Jensen Dies at 89: Set off Debate About I.Q.
I read the article "tough times, even higher debts for college graduates". This article talked about how college students are having a hard time finding jobs that need their degree after graduating. This means, someone would get a degree but end up working part time jobs as waitress or bartenders, yet a degree, is needed for most jobs if you do land one. I think this relates to evolution in a way that before, a college degree was something someone did beyond what they needed to. Now, to make any money and support a family or yourself, you need to have a degree that can land you a job (if that job is available) that requires your degree. This also reminded me of Thorndikes puzzle box learning and relating to the trial and error. A lot of college graduates go through the process of schooling and cant find a job right away, but eventually some of them land that job a few years after. They had to jump around a bit, but found the one that works for them and through spending time at different places, they find what suits them the best. From the behaviorism side of this, why do we make the same mistakes? why are there not more jobs availiable because we all know that more people are going to college and more people are able to do these jobs, but these jobs don't exist.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/18/163137239/tough-times-even-higher-debts-for-college-graduates
I chose an article from the Huffington Post about politics because as much as I am bothered by the corruption in both political parties, it has to do with psychology. The article is all about the Fox news channel focusing on the Benghazi attack and not hurricane Sandy. I find myself thinking about this psychologically because of how consumed our culture is with politics. I know Fox news has a reputation for being conservative just as many news stations have the same biases. It isn’t just the conservative side that sparked this, but both sides that are the real issue. People can believe in something so passionately to the point that they cross judgment on another human because their thoughts are different. To me, a world where everyone agreed and had the same views would be boring. It is uniqueness that causes individuality and we talk about independence and being special or standing out from the crowd, yet we judge and criticize anyone different from ourselves. It is interesting to think how these perceptions started and where they come from in our mind. I feel like compared to my elders, I was the news much less and they look at that as a bad thing and I need to educate myself. I sometimes thing watching the news only makes matters worse by focusing our attention on things that really shouldn’t be taking up our time. The news is supposed to cover things like weather and I think in this situation especially because it is weather that is affecting a whole region in our country. I feel like the attention should be on those people and we should be focused and worried about our people’s well-being. I know government is important, but when politics is too much of the focus it just causes the fight for power and us to lose focus on what really matters. This article can relate to many things is the chapter, but what sticks out the most is emotion. Emotions play a large role in psychology and also in our society. It is interesting to think about why politics have so much control over people’s emotions. Part of me thinks it has to do with nurture and the older generation was brought up more traditionally during more conservative times. One of the main emotions with little variation is fear, which I find ironic. I think sometimes people judge what is different simply because they fear the unknown. I look at fear in a different way and find interest in the unknown and beauty in the uniqueness.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/fox-news-benghazi-obama_n_2059933.html?ir=Media
With the election coming up next week, I decided to look into the Politics section on the huffingtonpost website. I came across an article written by Marlo Thomas titled, Politics 2012: A Landslide of Women! This article covers the woman’s place in the United States Congress. In 1972, there were only 11 women in Congress before the election, and they picked up four more seats, which was actually huge for women during that time. So, after the 1972 election, there were only 15 women in the Congress. However, in this year’s election, there are 181 women running for Congress. I was very surprised to see that the first woman elected to Congress was almost 100 years ago as Jeannette Rankin was elected in Montana in 1916. I would have thought it would have been closer to 1950.
However, women still aren’t happy with the amount of women in Congress. At this time, women only hold 90 of the 535 seats in the Congress. This is only about 17 percent of the seats and women make up about 51 percent of the population, so I can understand why they may get upset.
It’s upsetting thinking that women are still failing to be equal in this country. I think it’s great there are so many women running for Congress in this year’s election. They’ve definitely come a long way since the early 20th century, but I feel like they still have a ways to go before they become completely equal. Politics isn’t the only area where women are dealing with inequality to men. It seems like they aren’t equals in the work force either. It’s no secret that if it came down to a man or a woman with the same qualifications, the man would have the advantage, and hopefully that will change in the future. Men and women are equals, and they’re capability of doing a job is the same if they have the same qualifications. It’s obviously getting a lot better as the years roll on, so I’m going to be optimistic and hope that men and women will be completely equal in every aspect of the country sooner rather than later.
This relates to the history of psychology, because there was information regarding the hardships women and other minorities faced in the field. Just like almost everything else, it took a long time for women to be respected in psychology. They weren’t even allowed a college education as one man even said they shouldn’t receive any education once they reach puberty as it could damage their reproductive organs. That’s just crazy to think someone actually believed that. They finally opened the door to women receiving a college education in the 1850s, so they could be teachers. The opportunity to pursue other occupations soon followed. In closing, I think every reasonable person can agree that women deserve the same opportunities as men. It’s great to see how much of an increase there was in women in Congress. I’m excited to see how much more it will increase when it comes to the next election year.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marlo-thomas/politics-2012-a-landslide-of-women_b_2019230.html
After searching forever to find something that was not political, I settled on the second most popular topic in the news today, Hurricane Sandy. I listened to a news report that talked about the aftermath of Staten Island following the storm Sandy. In the beginning of the article I picked up on how the people had been conditioned to believe that they would be fine to simply wait out the storm. One woman talked about how she had lived through multiple hurricanes while in the house she was currently in. She stated that nothing ever happened before. There was ever only mild flooding in the past. She had been conditioned to believe that the hurricane warnings would only lead to mild flooding and no danger. Due to the fact that she was conditioned to believe that everything would be fine, she stayed in her home until the final moments before she either had to leave or face death. As a result she’s very lucky that it wasn’t any worse. The entire ocean seemingly flooded in on her house and it was much more severe than simply “mild flooding”.
Another interesting part of this news story is that it could lead to some possible reactions as previous learning or conditioning has been contradicted. Individuals were lead to believe that since past hurricane warnings lead to little to no serious occurrences, they had no reason to be concerned in the present. However, their learning had been contradicted with a counter example that disproved their beliefs. It will be interesting to see how the people of Staten Island choose to react to this dissonance. They were conditioned to believe that a hurricane warning would lead to little danger and mild flooding. As a result, they did not get scared or listen to the warnings. Therefore, extensive damaged occurred and lives were lost. This could lead to what Darwin might refer to as adaptation. Perhaps now homes will be rebuilt farther from the coast or even built more intelligently. People may adapt where they will listen to future storm warning. Their beliefs about the power of a storm might have a new less generalizable meaning to them. Perhaps intelligence has been increased in relation to hurricanes and how to react.
Temperament may also play a role in this learning. Pavlov talked about how different temperaments can cause people to learn differently as well. The individuals caught in the storm seemed to experience some experimental neurosis. A warning similar to all others was given in regard to the hurricane. They were unable to differentiate between a milder storm warning (past) and a more severe storm warning (Sandy). This inability to differentiate due to the over generalizablity of the warning caused anger and fear that seemed to give individuals a more neurotic status.
Terms: experimental neurosis, conditioning, differentiate, generalizable, dissonance, adaptation, Darwin, temperament, neurotic, intelligence
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/02/164202923/after-the-storm-staten-islanders-see-silver-lining -NPR
The article I found was based on a study done by Edward Diener and was published in, Journal of Personality and social psychology. Ultimately the article is over the subject of nature versus nurture and how innocent people can do bad things given different situations. The study was done over trick or treater’s ranging in ages from 4 to pre-teen. How the study was conducted was that children were given a list of 27 houses they could go to and all costumes covered the children’s faces so that everyone was anonymous. At each house children were invited in and taken to a table with two bowls on it. One bowl had candy and the other bowl had coins. The children were instructed to only take one candy a piece and that the coins were for charity and were going to be picked up later. Then the greater would leave the room to see how the children would respond to the situation. Researchers were hidden in different spots to observe and record the behaviors that took place.
It was found that most of the time children took more candy than they were instructed and even took coins. In some occasions the children would take all of the candy and coins and leave immediately, stealing. This happened in circumstances where there was no effort to identify the kids and no leader was assigned to make sure that everyone did what they were told. In cases where kids were asked their name and address and where one was appointed as a leader to make sure that everyone followed orders, stealing decreased dramatically. These were not bad kids, most were too young to really understand the severity of what they were doing. In these cases it was the situation that was king and predicted weather the children would steal or not. This study shed light on the idea that bad people do bad things because this is not always the case. The power of the situation is a dominant factor and good people can do bad things, to prevent this we need to make sure that there is a sense of identity and leadership to hold people accountable for their actions.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/31/164030718/behind-a-halloween-mask-even-good-kids-can-turn-into-candythieves
Many of my friends know that I act just about the same on the internet as I do in person. I will post my opinion, whether or not I think it is appropriate. However, with graduation coming up, I have completely privatized my Facebook page and removed all pictures with any sign of alcohol. The article that I chose to read was called “Facebook Psychology: 7 Reasons Why We Act Differently Online”. The difference between Facebook and other chatrooms is that on Facebook we sign up using our real names. This makes it so that we aren’t exactly anonymous, yet it’s not quite us in real life.
In their study entitled “Are close friends the enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control”, conducted by Professors Keith Wilcox (Columbia University) and Andrew Stephen (University of Pittsburgh), they searched for why people act differently online. They explain that people try very hard to promote a “positive self-view” to others. (I think that this is pretty obvious). This leads to a boost in self-esteem, but a decrease in an individual’s self control. The professors explained that this newfound self-esteem give people a sense of entitlement and they sometimes post things on Facebook that they would never say out loud.
In 2011, the Utah Valley University did a study about Facebook as well. They concluded that the longer a student searched facebook, the worse they felt about their own life. I believe these findings are contradictory. One study is saying that Facebook boosts one’s self-esteem, yet the other study is claiming that it lowers one’s self esteem. The difference in the studies was that the Utah Valley study focused on people that didn’t know their Facebook friends as well and seemed to think that the other people had “better” lives. On the other hand, the study by Wilcox and Stephen focused on Facebook friends that were “closer”. Stephen and Wilcox claim that intimate interactions with close ties via Facebook lead to a higher self-esteem.
The following are the seven reasons why we act differently on facebook than in real life: 1. We know we are being watched; 2: We can choose what information people see about us; 3: When we feel comfortable online, we sometimes go overboard; 4: Reading other people’s posts can make us less self-aware; 5. We care less about what our weak ties think; 6. It’s easier to hate online personas than it is to hate in real life; 7: We want to impress our friends.
I tend to agree with these reasons of why we act differently online. It’s a very interesting concept that we are basically able to make ourselves look like any type of person online. It is much harder to do this in real life. Facebook and other social media sites have become such an important part of many of our lives. This article also included at the end of the article a link to another article called “Are you a psychopath if you don’t have a Facebook?”
This second article I read was also very interesting because it pointed out something we’ve been learning about in this class. PERCEPTION. People’s perceptions of someone without a Facebook profile can sometimes be quite negative. The article defends these people without profiles with the following: 1: Some people like their privacy; 2: Some people don’t want to go crazy with lonliness; 3: Some people actually want to disconnect; 4: There are other social networks online.
This article brought up a few great points that I believe relate to our readings through communication. First off, some people actually WANT to disconnect. They do not want to be constantly bothered by others. I think with cell phones nowadays that we are never actually able to escape work or really have time to ourselves. This is support enough to say that people without facebook profiles should not be labeled as “psychopaths”. Also, the article said that some studies have shown that social media actually make people less social. The relationships via Facebook/Twitter can actually be seen by some people as a “alternative” to actual socialization. This is a big problem, because it could lead to people being scared of actual face to face communication.
The way I thought these articles really related to what we’ve learned in class is the thought of evolution. We are in the process of “evolving” as we speak. I would love to hear what Darwin would say about technological evolution. The point that the article made about social networks making us less social makes me a bit scared. I would ask Darwin what he thinks about “reverse evolution” if I had the chance. Could we possibly, or have we already gone back in socialization? Think about it, not only social media, but technology in general has made it extremely easy for people to avoid face to face communication. I remember in high school there was a kid that always would “creep” on girls on the internet, and through text messaging, yet no one ever heard him speak a work in real life. It’s a scary thought of what we could be doing to ourselves with technology. It’s a great thing, but we need to make sure we don’t lose other skills because of it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/facebook-psychology-7-reasons_n_1951856.html#slide=1619878
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/07/facebook-psychopath_n_1752993.html
The article I picked was entitled, “Facebook Psychology: 7 Reasons Why We Act Differently Online.” We tend to perceive themselves differently online than how they do in real life. People tend to be more brutal on the internet even though on websites like Facebook it clearly says your name is front of what you post. People tend to write things on Facebook they would not ever say out loud. Researchers believe people try to present a positive view of themselves to others and in turn this leads to an increase in self-esteem, but also a decrease in self-control. What I found interesting was that a study from 2011 found that the longer a college student surfs Facebook the worse they end up feeling about their own lives. So a social network has the power to both raise and lower our self-esteem. It seems that people who know their Facebook “friends” have high self-esteem, while people who didn’t know their Facebook “friends” very well ended up having lower self-esteem. We have the power to decide what people see about us on the internet. You pick what you decide to post on Facebook. So we can limit the amount of negative things people see about us. The problem is sometimes people feel too comfortable with the internet and this leads to a loss of self-control. Some people also believe that heavy use of Facebook can lead to more impulsive and indulgent behavior in a person. Since people feel more open to say things online, it makes it a lot easier to hate how someone is online than it is to hate a person in real life. A person may be feel the need to censor what they put online as much as they would censor it if they were talking to someone in person.
This article relates to this class because a lot of experiments and research was done before this information was released. These researchers are doing the same things as all the psychologists we have been readings about. They had an idea or something sparked their interest, so they decided to investigate it farther and found evidence to support their claims. They were even surprised by some of the results, this also happened too many of psychologists we have been reading about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/facebook-psychology-7-reasons_n_1951856.html#slide=1619878