M3 Task - Life Story

My Life Story

Starting with the Past:

• Physical - I played Challenger League Baseball from the time I was nine years old to the time I was fourteen years old. It was my first experience of playing a sport on my own, on a team.
• Social - This is my Senior Prom 2015 with my friend Emily, her friend Jessica, and Michael.
• Emotional - This is when I was born, the reason it is emotional is because I was not expected to live.
• Psychological - This is a painting I painted last semester for my Art Class. It represents pretty what this did (my life story) The yellows are for the people who I care and who have helped me along the way (the bright spots in my life), the blue is for optimism, the green is for new beginnings, the orange represents the good and the bad, the dark red is the bad that has happened in my life.
• Spiritual - This is the old Church that we used to attend when I was young. The name is Rowden Baptist Church.
• Cognitive Development - This is me in my walker learning how to walk.

Now the Present:

• Physical - This is me when I am swimming, I love to swim because I am able to move on my own freely in the water.
• Social - This is a Chief I met who is related to Quanah Parker the last great Comanche Indian Chief.
• Emotional -  This is the last picture I have taken with my Grandma, she is currently in the hospital because she fell and broke her him. Right now we do not know what will happen to her yet, whether she will spend her remaining days in a nursing home, or if she will be able to go back home.
• Psychological - This is a picture of my blog that I have made for my psychological class.
• Spiritual - This is my family and I at "The Big Cross" in Groom, TX.
• Cognitive Development - This is a picture of my work on Canvas for HSU.

Finally the Future:

• Physical - I intend to do a lot more swimming in my future.
• Social - My plan is to be around the McMurry basketball program as long as Zach my friend is the coach there.
• Emotional - It will be an emotional time when I finally graduate college.
• Psychological - I plan on pursuing Sports Psychology as a career.
• Spiritual - I plan on finding another Church that suits the rest of us.
• Cognitive Development - I have several years left at Hardin Simmons, that means plenty of learning!

Personality Assessments

Personality Assessments are often used by employers to screen certain people for job openings. While this is one of the primary uses of the test, they are also fun to just take on your own. However I have found at time the test can have very confusing and often hard to answer questions because of the way they are worded. Personality Assessments have been around for quite a while as I recall possibly the 1800s or early 1900s.


I took the Jung Typology Test:
 My results are:

Extravert(34%)  Sensing(19%)  Feeling(34%)  Judging(9%)  (ESFJ)

• You have moderate preference of Extraversion over Introversion (34%)
• You have slight preference of Sensing over Intuition (19%)
• You have moderate preference of Feeling over Thinking (34%)
• You have slight preference of Judging over Perceiving (9%)

I do not agree with the test results because the test found that I would be good for Elementary Education or Nursing. I do not agree with this because those are not any of my interests. I am geared more towards sports and reading, and sometime writing than the medical profession. I am not the type that would be good for taking care of sick people.

Nature-Nurture Debate

Nature-nurture is a debate that has been going on for centuries, it is the discussion of whether or not our beliefs and our actions are influenced by our genes or simply the environment around us. While research has found that a lot of our actions are a result of our environment that we are raised in, they can also be effected by genetics. For example,  violent outbursts are sometimes attributed to the way a person reacts to certain situations, but genetic research has found that they may have already been previously programed to do so.

"Caspi et al. (2002) showed that among maltreated children, those who carried a particular allele of the MAOA gene showed a predisposition to violence and antisocial behavior, while those with other alleles did not."



Examples of both sides of the Theory at work would be:

• That of a basketball player, just because they are born with certain genetic traits which predisposed them to excelling at athletics, does not mean that they do not have to put in the work and follow diets to insure that they are at the top of their game. You can be born with all the physical gifts in the world but if you do not practice your craft, and make sure your body is in tip top shape, those gifts do not do any good for you.
• While people seem to believe that if a child is adopted at birth that they start to display the traits of their adoptive parents rather than their biological parents, this is not the case. While the children can pick up certain traits from their adoptive parents, they never lose most of their inherited traits, and can sometimes display aggressive or risky behavior that can not be explained by the adoptive parents.
• Researchers have found that if you take a litter of puppies that have been born to a certain set of parents, and put them with another. The puppies will most likely take on the traits of the parents that you put them with. The reason for this is because they emulate the behavior of their parents that they see. So unlike humans, dogs tend to go off more of what they see than what is genetically there.
• While most people believe that our political beliefs about certain issues are formed over time, research has also found that our political beliefs can sometimes be already ingrained in us because of certain genetic traits that our parents have given us. This is interesting because you would think that as we become older we would form those beliefs on our own but sometimes it appears that we are already meant to have those beliefs.
• It has been proven that children who have grown up with their parents reading to them, can sometimes do better in school. This is not always the case, often times it falls on the child to want to learn and to take the help that is given to them. While our parents can sometimes influence our education by the things that they do, it is often times up to us. We have to have the Nature within us to want to learn.

My Personal Take on it....

While I believe that certain people are born with certain traits that make them better at some things than others that often times the environments that we are born into can have a bigger factor on our lives than genetics. I believe that if you are raised in an environment where you are taught to do things a certain way, that you will pick up those traits and they will carry you throughout your life.

Some people say that people should rise above their raising, but it can be hard when you are genetic predisposed to feel a certain way or act a certain manner. Like the MAOA gene, it is hard not to act a certain way when you have to genetics to do so.

Source:

http://nobaproject.com/modules/the-nature-nurture-question

Sensation and Perception

I learned that our brains can get used to doing a certain task, and if you throw a curve ball to your brain it takes it a while to adjust. An example of this was whenever the group would tell us to place our hand on our head, we could not remove it until they said their name says to do this.

With our part of the project (Perception), I learned that just because our brain perceives something in a certain way, this is not always the case. We should take a closer look at what is around us. Example like this square, it appears to be a dark grey on top, and white on the bottom, but if you place your finger in the middle they appear to be the same color.

  For the sensation portion of the project, Jason placed two paper clips on Stormey's arm to see if she could feel them. Stormey said she could not, and Jason explained it was because the arm is a lot less sensitive then other parts of our bodies. He gave us an example that if we were to place the paper clip on our face that we would be able to easily feel it.


In closing, I believe that there are multiple ways to expand our brains and to teach the brain to perceive new things that appear around us.

Teen Brain vs Adult Brain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhJOpIZxyE 

I chose to research the teenage brain because I have often wondered myself why teenagers do what they do. I found it to be a convenient topic to discuss since my stepdad, Jim has a teenage daughter, Taylor. It was interesting to pick his brain and also be able to teach him different things about why teenagers behave in certain ways. By doing this I hope to help him have a better understanding and maybe in the future he will use the information I have given him when the situation arises. I was able to learn things that I have never considered.

• I always just thought that being selfish as a teenager was a stage they went through. I did not realize the brain had something to do with this. It was unclear to me that it was a biological issue. 
• Another thing that stood out to me about the videos was the issue about teenagers sleeping all day. I did not understand at first that the reason that they sleep all day is because they are trying to recharge their brains. The time that they are asleep is one of the only times that they can take a step back and re calibrate. 
• I was also able to delve into why teenagers do risky behaviors and take so many chances, it is because the part of their brain that effects decision making is not fully developed. This may explain why parents struggle to get their teens onto the right path and to have them make the right decisions.