stetl007: April 2012 Archives

The main concept that I am going to remember after taking Psych 1001 is that there is more to drug addiction than just deciding whether or not to take a drug. I have learned how drugs alter neurotransmitters that are released in the brain and that it is because of that reason that drug addiction is such a hard thing to overcome. I am very happy that I now know this information because after learning about it in lecture, and about ways that can be used to successfully end an addiction, I spent time learning more about drug addiction and learned about different ways that it can be fought. Since the brain gets habituated to the changes brought on by the drugs, more and more of the drug is eventually needed in order for the user to experience the same high that he or she once got. This is another reason why drug addiction is so hard to treat, sometimes a user cannot just quit, they need to slowly decrease the amount of the drug that they use until they are clean or receive a healthier substitute drug. Substituting drugs makes it so that the user is not at such a high risk for a drug related death, which is what occurs to heroin addicts when they switch to methadone.

Here the trailer to the movie Requiem for a Dream, which is a movie about heroin and cocaine addicts in New York.

A major criticism of Lawrence Kohlberg's theory on moral reasoning is that his model assumes that our behavior is influenced first by moral reasoning and then by our emotional reasoning. I find this very hard to believe because I think that when making decisions, the moral aspect is secondary to the emotional aspect. An example of where this is evident is with Sara Jane Olson. Sara was a former member of a terrorist organization in the 1970s. She had planned to bomb 2 LAPD police cars because they previously had killed members of her organization. She was not caught until almost 30 years after planting the bombs and it is at this time when Kohlberg's theory begins to fall apart. If moral reasoning had been the most important factor in decision making, then people would not have stood up for her because of how nice she had been later on in her life. Morally, it should make no difference whether a person was caught right after trying to kill 2 police officers and they had been in jail for almost 30 years or if the person didn't get caught until much later. In this case, however, because people became emotionally attached to her, they let their emotions guide their decisions instead of morals.