steed016: April 2012 Archives

A concept of psychology that I will most likely remember in 5 years is sleep and dreaming. To me, sleep is a strange thing to think about. We are alive, but not fully conscious of what's going on. I find that dreaming is very interesting in the way that we perceive things that aren't actually there. There are days when I have very vivid and active dreams, and others where I can't recall any in the morning. I also find it interesting how we are paralyzed in our sleep so that we can dream without acting it out. Sleep and dreaming will always be a part of everyone's lives, and yet it's still so weird to think about.

I don't think I have ever sleepwalked, but I know someone who does and it just fascinates me. He has absolutely no idea what he does during the night. To me, finding out about what I do in my sleep would be a little scary because it would feel like it wasn't actually me. I have been told that I talk in my sleep, and I've been told that sometimes it sounds like a different, indistinguishable language, which freaks me out, because I only know English, Spanish, and French. Finding out strange sleep patterns will always interest me and I hope to learn about sleep and dreaming more in depth in the future.

I decided to take the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) for this blog entry. I took two tests, one on weight, and one on gender and career. The one on weight was supposed to determine whether I had a preference towards fat or skinny people. The test started by having pictures flash and I had to sort whether the person was considered fat or skinny by hitting either the 'e' or 'i' key. If I gave a wrong answer, it showed a red X, and I would need to correct the answer. After that, I was shown word like 'joy' and 'hate' and had to categorize them in either the 'good' or 'bad' group. Once that step was complete, I was shown both words and images and had to categorize them as either 'bad or fat' or 'good or skinny'. They then switched the groups to be 'good or fat' and 'bad or skinny'. I felt like the test was a little biased because it started with categories associating fat with bad words and skinny with good words, so then for the next test, it was harder to press a different key when the good and bad switched sides. It wasn't that it was harder to associate good words with fat images, but just the fact that you had to press a different key for the words was tricky. The results showed that most people had a moderate association with good words and skinny people and vice versa, and I feel that this was mostly because of the order and letters they had us pushing for the two categories. It also happened with the gender and career test. They had us associate family words with names of girls and career words with names of boys, and once again the test results showed that there was more of an association with female names and family words. If at the start of the test we learned to put career words on the 'e' key and female names on the 'e' key as well, I feel like the test would have shown different results.

If you would like to take an IAT test, here is the link: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/