The lesson that will stick with me even after the course ends is what we learned about human development and more specifically, how infants develop mentally.
I used to work in a daycare that had a few infants and when taking care of them I was always surprised by how much they seemed to comprehend the world around them (remembering favorite toys, responding to voices etc.) At the time (this was a few years back) I thought that a lot of it had to be in my head because I'd always thought, before I spent any extended time with them, that babies weren't really capable of observing much.
The lectures with Professor Koeing were my favorite of the semester because I was able to learn that those cognitive abilities that I thought I saw in the infants I took care of were actually there and I wasn't just seeing things. The studies we looked at during this section of the course, particularly the ones involving babies and language comprehension were full of information and concepts that I will retain years from now especially when I reach that point in my life when I start having and raising kids of my own.
ramsb020: April 2012 Archives
I find it very interesting the the Lilienfeld text, which normally has no problem going into specifics was actually quite general on the many different facets of physical attractiveness. Sure, on page 446 the book discusses briefly the example body weight and how men from different cultures prefer their women to be a different size, but that's really the only example given and it's an example of something that is (relatively speaking) out of the woman's control.
I decided to research the internet to see what else there was and I was surprised to see that most of the websites I came across focused almost entirely on completely elective processes that people in other cultures undergo in order to appear more attractive to the opposite sex.
The best website I found (linked below) features what various cultures find attractive and what the women (or men in some cases) do to themselves in order to have these traits. For example, in the Kayan tribe a woman's beauty is judged by how long her neck is and so from a very young age they begin the process of "stretching" their necks out by wearing brass rings that elongate the neck and thus make the girl or woman more attractive by her culture's standards.
Even though the article goes into deeper detail than the textbook does the information between the two remains pretty consistent: different cultures find different things attractive (446) and, generally speaking, men focus more on physical attractiveness than women (445).
Here's that website I mentioned above: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/3798150-beauty-ideals-around-the-world
