Through the whole course, there were so many examples about how human's functions been affected by biological factors rather than psychological factor itself, or the two factors function together to result a phenomenon. This is very important for people to understand what they have experienced were really come from other than the clear evidence in front of their eyes.
There are certainly some other important and interesting topics in the course; the chapter of memory and the chapter of human development have all gave me some very interesting ideas. However, these are interesting knowledge at the front, not the ones would help people improve and extend learning and critical thinking skills. Compare to those, the idea of thinking about psychology along with biology was particularly important to me.
We have learned about some topics like the drugs' effects to the brain and dreams relation to biological activities. Before, I only considered our thinking process as part of consciousness, did not really noticed anything happened without awareness. Also, I have not been thinking about how biological activities in our body will affect our brain and our thinking. This helped me built a way of thinking which lead me to consider and connect the major evident factors with other factors in the deep environment. I would say this is the most important thing I learned in the course.
hanxx523: April 2012 Archives
First of all, I should mention that myself have experienced some situation when I found someone is very attractive but not anyone else agreed. I am an international student, since the first time I went abroad, my friends and I always find there are many examples showing that people from different cultures, different geographical locations, or different races may have different judgement of what is beautiful to them. Sometimes, some girl not seem to be attractive to me could be very attractive to someone else from other countries. This situation should have been well explained by the texts on textbook about physical attractiveness. As been explained in the textbook, the results are most likely due to the similarity between the person and whom the person find is beautiful.
There are also some other examples and survey results been found on the internet. In one article, the author talked about many different beauty standards around the world. (the link is: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/3798150-beauty-ideals-around-the-world) Some of them are very or somehow familiar to me, a few seem to be very shocking when the first time I saw them.
The image above showing a kind of make up that was very common the ancient China. People from other countries may find this to be unacceptable or even scary. Myself found the picture with two people with dots on their body is not very easy to accept as beautiful. Based on the cultural influence, I would prefer the human skin to be clean and smooth, even for the males.
