In Sickness & In Health: Freshman Seminar 2011

overview

2011-12-05T22:05:52Z

After being in this class once a week for a whole semester, I found this class to be somewhat useful. Discussing some topics was interesting yet some topics did not interest me. My expectations for this class was what I expected. It was a good learning environment with teachers that tried their best to keep the conversations going in the class room. Sharing personal experiences with the class was what I thought a good place for everyone maybe to express themselves to people who have gone through something similar. Although we were analyzing articles and other people's experiences, I would have to say that we the students are actually the ones that were getting physiological attention.

Looking back

2011-11-29T02:14:17Z

This class turned out to be one of my favorites I've taken so far. Even though I'm definitely not a psychology person, I was fascinated by all of the information I learned about our interpersonal relations. The stuff that interested me the most was the stuff on attachment, sex and support. I really liked finding out all of the benefits of sex because my sex education was definitely less than stellar and mostly based on scaring us off. Lots of the other stuff was very interesting and surprising a lot of the time. Some of the stuff on how to give good support was new to me and has actually come in handy to know.
If I could change one thing about this class I would set up the discussions a little differently. The blog posts were a good setup but I think it would have been helpful to have some more readings before discussion just so I would have more knowledge on the topic. I just found it difficult to make an observation or theory when I was very uninformed about the topic. Overall, a very good class though with good teachers :)

To answer the question about personality and attachment

2011-11-29T00:39:30Z

So it turns out that there was a fairly comprehensive study about this very same topic published in 2006. Here is the article, for people who have nothing better to do and want to challenge themselves: (Noftle & Shaver, 2006). Note that the authors were testing more complicated hypotheses as well, but that's beyond the scope of the question that was asked.

As a quick and dirty summary, it turns out that people who are high in neuroticism are also much more likely to be anxious, as well as more likely to be avoidant (although not as much). Moreover, it turns out that people who are high in extraversion are especially likely to be LOW in avoidance, as well as low in anxiety (although not as much). So essentially, their conclusion is that extraverted people are less likely to be avoidant (or alternately, that introverted people are more likely to be avoidant).

Of course, these are just correlations, and they are not ridiculously high correlations (although they are significant). Here is the correlation table that they provided in case you want to see for yourself.

A tangent

2011-11-28T22:12:45Z

Black Friday ridiculousness. There wasn't even a free tote involved.

2011-11-28T19:47:43Z

All of the subjects in this class we're so interesting to me, and I think what is most interesting to me is how all of the subjects tie together and lead back to your health and your relationships. I could tie a lot of our discussions back to my own life and my own experiences, and I understand now why some of the feelings that I had happened and how they affected me. I can't really say that there was one subject that was most interesting because they all gave me great info that I can use in my own life.

I have to say this class was definitely one of my favorites, if not my favorite. I like the structure of it and I loved discussing it all together. Sometimes I felt like people were holding back and I wish we could have been more vocal about some subjects. I never felt uncomfortable or nervous to say things, but I think if everyone had something to say or shared an experience I think the class may have flowed easier.

overview

2011-11-28T19:47:01Z

overview

2011-11-28T06:45:39Z

One of the topics from this semester that sticks out to me is the topic on support. It was really intersting to read about the different types of support and when kind is better then the other. I didn't realize that doing things that the other person may not notice is sometimes better. I really enjoyed the show that we watched that went along with this topic. I thought it was the perfect thing to show to help further prove when someone needs certain types of support. Another topic that I really liked was social networks. It's weird to think about how someone we don't know can play such a big role in our lives. After learning more about it it makes a lot more sense on how it does though. If someone decides to start working out and eating healthier it may motivate the friend to do the same thing continuing in a chain effect.
A topic that I wish we learned more in depth about was addictions. I think it would be interesting to learn about the hardships that people go through with trying to deal with their addiction and reasons they may have become addicted to whatever they are. Many times we only see the after affects of people with addictions but we don't get the opportunity to see what caused them to get to where they are. Also I would be interested to learn about how it affects their relationships with family and friends.

Class Summary

2011-11-28T05:22:26Z

Looking back on the class I think that what has stuck with me the most has been the attachment theory. I think that we covered that really well and I find myself thinking about it all the time. I watch the show Dexter all the time, and if you haven't seen that his mother is killed when he is very young. Don't judge me or the show based on my brief and poor summation, but he ends up being a serial killer. I never thought of it until after this class but he was attached to his mother and when she was taken from him he suffered from that detachment and never found anyone else to attach to. It made me wonder if real criminals had problems early in their life with attachment. I really liked the articles that went along with this discussion as well. They were interesting and informative.
I honestly cannot think of anything that I wished that we had covered. I think that the amount of time we have every Monday has given us sufficient time to go into detail about each topic.

Overview

2011-11-28T05:15:08Z

I have to admit that the topic on support both really surprised and interested me. I never really thought there was more than one type of support and that one could even possibly hold value over the other. I am still trying to apply these concepts in my life yet what they say holds true: that visible support is the most common and easiest to give. One thing that has not come up in this class that I have always wanted to know is based off an article I read stating that girls are more likely to cheat on a partner. They stated that this was done without the intention to leave their partner. In essence the idea was that the woman found better physical fathers for their offspring when they compared him to her partner and thus is victim to "flings" with other men. I was wondering if this theory at all held true? Of course this would not be true across the board, but it still would go against the stereotype of the "cheating husband" so often found in movies.

All in All...

2011-11-28T04:18:46Z

All in all, I think that we have covered a good variety of subjects. I cannot think of anything in specific that we have not talked about that I was curious about coming into the course. The subjects that we did cover, we covered in detail and I do not think that anything was mentioned and then dropped without discussing it.

My favorite part of the class was when we discussed food and relationships. Food is a passion of mine and I never really thought of the way relationships could affect eating, especially in the patterns where it was not necessarily a direct effect. I liked that we met with the other class on this occasion and it helped me to understand their topic even more.

Hindsight

2011-11-28T03:30:40Z

The topic that I have been thinking about most often is probably stress. Perhaps because at the end of my first semester of college there seems to be tons of it...! I found it fascinating that just the presence of stress can be quite detrimental to your health. Not just because of things one typically does while stressed (not eating well, not sleeping well, and so on), but having stress even when taking care of yourself the same way is unhealthy. Stress can be brought on by a myriad of things whether it be attachment, grief, and pretty much every topic we covered in the course.

I feel that we covered the topics quite well in general. However, it seems that while we exhausted what happens to health in many scenarios, I do not recall as much conversation around how to make healthy changes. It would have been interesting to discuss the different views people have on how to "fix" problems that come up involving relationships and health. Alas, it is quite possible I was simply focusing on other things and missed it (this has been known to happen to me).

As for the article about sex education, I loved the scenario at the beginning of the article. Open conversation is so healthy in general, and when the topic is something as serious as sex, it is imperative that it is talked about! I feel education complete with class discussion is the best way to foster learning and get teens (and adults) to be open with their thoughts.

Reminiscing

2011-11-28T02:48:01Z

My two favorite topics were social circles and the various attachment theories. It was fascinating to hear about the extent that people can influence you. The part concerning the infectiousness of suicide was frightening, and the amount one's eating habits can be changed is also quite intriguing. Learning about the attachment theories was also interesting because of the sway they hold over future relationships. Also, the attachment theories came up in my psychology class, so it made that portion of the test a little easier. In my opinion, we discussed everything very adequately in class. I do not feel as if we skimmed through any of the topics we set out to discuss.

Reflective Questions

2011-11-28T01:50:59Z

I really enjoyed our discussions about support. I found myself reflecting on it whenever someone was complaining about stress or telling me about something good that happened to them. I tried to remember to not give advice, but either be silent and listen, or just encouraging and showing them that I was there for them. When someone told me about how well they did on a test, I tried to be really excited for them and say something like "You worked so hard and deserved this." I thought about when I should be giving invisible versus visible support. I think learning about this topic will help me to become a better friend and girlfriend. If not a better one, at least one that is more aware of how I should be giving support. I also really found the discussions about attachment to be interesting. This makes sense since it is a very important aspect of psychology. It helped me to make sense of why some people may or may not act certain ways, or at least predict why that act that way. I think learning about attachment will make me be more empathic towards people who are "clingy" or seemingly unattached.
They aren't any topics that I think we didn't cover well enough. Each discussion was fairly thorough and I got what I wanted from each. This was my first class related to psychology, so there aren't any topics that I can think of that I want to cover and we didn't.

Flashback

2011-11-27T22:47:14Z

One of the major things that stuck with me was how women with many sexual partners were more prone to depression, I think that's something women our age need to be aware of. Another thing that stuck with me was the attachment types we learned about the first day. I have found myself diagnosing my friends as certain types. I also found the gender topic really interesting, and could relate to it because we talk about the more scientific areas of gender in my Evolution of Sex class, which really interests me.
I wish we would have talked about the sex topic more. It seems like we just kind of touched on how it can be bad, but not the ways it can benefit relationships. I also wish in every topic we would have talked about more scientific findings & expert's knowledge instead of everyone just sharing their opinions, and look at multiple sides of things. Like for grief we really only got one woman's story.

Looking Back at Class

2011-11-27T18:41:57Z

I thought majority of the topics we covered were pretty interesting. The one that stuck with me the most was the sex and whether it was a good or bad thing. I think that this was the most appealing because it provided so much information that I never knew. I had no idea of all the health benefits of sex because we are constantly getting the negative affects pounded into our heads. However I do understand that the health benefits are only there if the sex is healthy and at a reasonable age. I found myself telling all my friends the random facts that we learned about it just to see how shocked they were when I told them, as I found myself shocked about the information.
There wasn't anything in particular I could think about that we have not covered in class. We covered a lot of topics for only meeting once a week and I feel well educated in all of them. I enjoy discussing in class every week and hearing what all of my classmates have to say on the topics.