#PsychStory

Hope you enjoy :)

****The task is me... myself telling an inspirational story about someone else, other than myself.

I enjoyed telling Matt's story and I hope that I told it the way he would have wanted me to, like I said in the video that he could not do it due to scheduling conflicts. It was nice learning about his story.

I gained from this experience that you should keep pushing forward no matter what.

TELL YOUR STORY TO ENCOURAGE OTHERS... MMM'KAY?!

M4Task

I chose option 2 for the M4 Task project. I interviewed my caregivers parents.

Memory Week 8

There are several aspects of the chapter that stood out to me. One of the most prevalent ones was that there are different types of memory. We can somehow block out bad things that have happened to us, but depending on the mood that we are in the memories of the event/or events can come flooding back. We also have a tendency to make certain activities second nature such as, waking up and brushing out teeth. We do not have to think about brushing our teeth because once we do it enough, it becomes ingrained in our minds to do so.

Alzheimer's patients have trouble remembering names and faces, however if you tell them to take you to their house or to a place they frequented many years earlier, they can do so because they have travelled the path to those places so many times before. The reason for this phenomena is because their long term memories are not effected by the disease. The effects are felt in the part of the brain that controls short-term memory.

Science behind the phenomenon:

People were shown a crime but they all describe the same crime in different ways. This is why at times eye witness testimony can be shaky because people see things in different ways. They can be influenced by others takes on the same event. Other people can make you think you saw something. This was demonstrated by an experiment aired on the Discovery channel where people were placed into a room and shown a crime and asked to describe what they had seen. The test subjects were influenced by what the teacher said about the suspect's nose when she was describing the suspect. The teacher said he had a big nose, but turns out he didn't have a big nose at all, but she persuaded them to believe that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=9K7rbMBKb5Q&hl=en-GB

Learning Week 7

What stood out to me about the Chapter on Learning, was that there were so many different types of learning, and so many different ways in which our environment can effect our behavior. One example that really stood out to me was the portion on why we watch sports, because I watch a lot of sports and it was interesting to understand the mental approach of why we watch them. While I knew that we watch sports for it unpredictability, I did not realize it was the major part of why we watch them. If sports were regimented and we could tell what would happen, we probably would not have near as much interest in them. For example the text example of this would be the "home run theory" -  The theory is that if Mike Trout hits a home run, he will not hit another one for 17 more bats, the theory is that if we know this we would not be as inclined to watch, but since we do not know when his homerun will come it adds to the unpredictability and this is why we continue to watch.

The Science Behind "Learning":

• One of the best examples of the Science behind learning, is the dog experiment. Pavlov's Study was a experiment in which scientist placed dogs in an controlled environment with food. The first time they offered food to the dogs their mouths began to water. Doctor Pavlov then decided to include a sound with the offering of food. As the experiment drew on, he found that the dog's mouth began to water when they simply heard the sound. The food did not even have to be in the area for their mouths to start watering. The reason for this, is because they began to associate the sound with the food over time.

Real-World Application:

In conclusion I have found that most behaviors that we do are learned. While some are not easily unlearned, that does not mean that it is impossible. For instance, someone who is struggling with an addiction, can learn to not need the object or substance that they are addicted to with help and support. It does help to find ways to prevent themselves from indulging in it. An example of this would be like a certain smell that they learn to associate with the substance, if it is a bad smell they can be taught that whenever they are around the substance or object that the smell will come with it, in turn making them not want to have the substance or object anymore.

Sources: https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

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