This experiment conducted by Harry Halow shows us the concept of contact comfort. The definition of Contact Comfort is "The positive emotions afforded by touch"(Lilienfeld 386). As you can see in the video, Harlow has a scary monster that he has built that has all of the characteristics that will scare a baby Rhesus monkey. These include loud noises, moving parts and big glowing eyes. When he exposes the monster to the monkey you can see the monkeys reaction as he freaks out and almost instantly runs to his fake terry cloth mother. Whats interesting about this is in the cage, the monkey has both a terry cloth mother that is soft, warm, but doesn't have nourishment and a wire mother that doesn't have cloth and is wire, but has nourishment. Harlow wanted to test whether the monkey will go to a figure that offers nourishment, which was the scientific basis at the time, or a figure that offers comfort. After his results you can clearly see that the monkey preferred to go the the figure that offered more comfort than the one that just offered nourishment. You can also see near the end of the video how the monkey seems to want to stand up to the machine instead of cower away. This also shows that he feels safer around the terry cloth figure because he thinks it will help defend him against the monster. This is what Harlow name Contact Comfort and changed how people view how we attach onto figures such as our parents.
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-women-who-live-together-menstruate-together
If you are a lady you have probably heard somewhere that if you spend a lot of time with another woman your menstrual cycles will "sync up" and that means you will have someone to share tampons and groans with every month. This wonderful phenomenon is called menstrual synchrony. Psychologist Martha McClintock who in 1971 started studying women in UK dormitories coined the term menstrual synchrony. In her initial study she found that women who spent more time together reportedly began to sync up periods. McClintock believed that pheromones influenced cycle length but a study by Zhengwei Yang and Jeffery C. Schank found that McClintock had the women in her study use the recall method to collect data in her interviews and they also found other data collection errors. This along with a host of other studies done since has found that women don't synchronize their menstrual cycles.
So why is relevant to psychology? In reading this article I found that McClintock's experiment wasn't replicable, she should have done the experiment more than one before basing more research off it (confirmation bias?!). But honestly, after more experiments in the same vain, people have found Occam's Razor to be true in this situation. If women are spending a lot of time together it is obvious that they will have their periods at the same time at some point.
Amnesia is defined as loss of memory due usually to brain injury, shock, fatigue, repression, or illness. When I here amnesia I always think that someone has lost all sort of memory of oneself and everything from the past. According to the textbook there are two types of amnesia, which are retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is when we lose some memories of our past, but not as all movies portray it to be. Anterograde amnesia is when we lose the ability to form new memories. I am sure everyone has either heard or seen the movie Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy and Bourne ultimatum. These films is based on a guy named James Bourne a former CIA assassin suffering from extreme memory loss. This guy had different identities through out his life as he worked for the CIA. He some how found a way to get away of the life of being an assassin, but the CIA still tries to track him, for reasons Bourne can't remember at all. So through out these movies He gets pieces of his memory back to solve the mystery. It seems that this movie shows the many misconceptions made about amnesia. Movies generalize amnesia as loss of all memory even of who they are, but that generalized amnesia is exceedingly rare. It is important to have amnesia explained in better terms to lessen the misconceptions. It would be better to have a way to know more about things than just relating it to movies we watch.
One of the things that seemed fascinating to me in chapter 8 was the description about how infants learn how to communicate. I never thought about how quick and important their developments at an early age are.
The auditory systems of the unborn infants develop by the fifth month of pregnancy and they can identify the voice of their mother and recognize their native language. This recognition was tested by measuring how much the infants sucked on the pacifier when they heard the mother's native language and an unfamiliar language. It was apparent for the researchers that there was more sucking when the baby heard the mother's native language even when a complete stranger was speaking.
As the infants continue to develop they begin to babble. The babbling, which refers to meaningless intentional vocalization, is important because the babies begin to use their vocal cords to familiarize themselves with the phonemes of their native language. It also helps them to fine-tune the vocal tracts and the ears to adjust to their own language.
This video from YouTube shows us what looks like a meaningful conversation between two infants. Before reading the chapter I would've just said "That's so cute!", but now I see this as quite an impressive phenomenon!
VIDEO HERE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY
Also it was interesting to find out that comprehension of the speech occurs actually way earlier than the production of it in infants. The production occurs at about the age of one, but comprehension could happen months in advance. The growth of the vocabulary grows gradually, but later on the rate increases and by the time the child goes to kindergarten he or she may know several thousand words.
In addition, an important milestone in speech development occurs when the kids move from one word sentences to using several words at once. More syntactic rules continue to develop during early years of school.
Nearly everyone has important memories from their childhoods that they recall with great detail due to their significance. However, most of us fail to remember the majority of our memories from our early childhood. For example, try to think of your earliest memory. Difficult isn't it? The explanation for our failure to remember much of our childhood is called childhood amnesia. For example, I often have a hard time remembering things from my childhood that one would assume to be extremely significant, such as the personalities of deceased relatives, the layout of my old house, or even the names of my closest kindergarten friends.
There is also the phenomenon of false memories, and this is often highly correlated with early childhood "memories". These false memories are memories of things that never happened, but that we believe happened. For example, there is a famous study in which psychologists asked subjects to recall meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney World, and many did agree that they remembered meeting Bugs with extreme detail. However, this would be impossible because Bugs is not a Disney character. I also have the false memory of believing I had the stomach flu during elementary school one fall. However, the truth is that I went on a road trip to South Dakota.
Childhood memories have always been difficult to recall, due to childhood amnesia, and there are also memories that we strongly believe occurred that are nothing more than figments of our imaginations. Try to experiment by asking yourself to recall certain memories from your early childhood, especially memories that you are uncertain of, and then checking the accuracy of those memories with parents or other adult individuals who were there. After experimenting with this you may be surprised by which memories are actually based off of past events.
Amnesia seems to show its face quite often within the plot of computer role playing games, appearing in Fallout: New Vegas, Baldur's Gate II, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and (not surprisingly) Amnesia: The Dark Descent. In each of the examples above the main character is struck with a case of retrograde amnesia, meaning that they can't remember parts, or, in some cases, all of their memories before the start of the game. While in the real world retrograde amnesia doesn't occur nearly as often as anterograde amnesia, which is the loss of short term memory, in the games it helps the plot move along fairly well, while anterograde amnesia would produce a much less coherent plot as the character would forget what he is doing every couple of seconds.
In particular the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent has amnesia right at the center of its plot as one would guess from its name. The character, Daniel, wakes up in a spooky mansion remembering only his name, where he lives, and that some terrible creature from another dimension is haunting him. The plot then moves along as he discovers notes that he wrote to himself before he induced the amnesia in himself. These notes will often trigger flash backs where parts of his memory comes back to him. In this case Daniel has lost the ability to use his episodic memory in that he cannot recall specific events in his life, but he can still figure out how to light torches, read, open doors, etc... which implies that his semantic memory and procedural memory were unaffected by what every process brought about the amnesia.
As mentioned before Daniel often recalls parts of his lost memory after being prompted by notes to himself or locations in the game. This implies that whatever memory was lost to him might not be permanently lost but rather "hid" by the brain due to hide traumatic events. While this was self induced on Daniel's part, this does have a basis in the real world as there are cases of people that have suffered form dissociative amnesia which is caused by the brain blocking attempts to recall the memory due to its traumatic nature.
While amnesia as it is presented in video games is not a truly accurate representation of how it works in the real world I would expect it to hang around in the plots of these games, as it leaves it up to the player to fill in the back story or allows the game to slowly reveal the past to increase the level of immersion experienced by the player.
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Because of majoring in Retail Merchandising, I am really interested in Higher-Order Conditioning and I will discuss this concept in detail using a successful retail brand - Abercrombie&Fitch as an example. Higher-Order Conditioning is a form of learning in which a stimulus was previously neutral is paired with a conditioned stimulus to produce the same conditioned response as the conditioned stimulus. The products that consumers would choose to purchase depend on previous shopping experience or stimuli the brand provided, so Higher-Order Conditioning play an important role on building a brand image. Take Abercrombie & Fitch as an example, one of the most important factors that makes A&F become so successful is a host of new stimuli that A&F provided besides classical conditioning. To begin with, a lot of people are familiar with the special smell when entering in A&F store and the fragrance smells attractive, invigorating, warm and exciting, thus every time you smell A&F perfume on somebody, we will know that he must be wearing A&F style and associate the feelings that A&F fragrance bring to us with this person. In addition, A&F advertisements are well applied the concept of Higher-Order Conditioning. Models on A&F advertisements are all beautiful women or handsome men who present sexually attractive poses and they look strong, energetic, sexy and fashionable which are images A&F want to impress the consumers with, thus A&F achieved great popularity because many consumers unconsciously thought they are sexually attractive just like the models after purchasing A&F products. I am still wondering about, from commercial perspective, how close does a brand succeed correlate to Higher-Order Conditioning and how much efforts retailers should focus on utilizing Higher-Order Conditioning in their advertisements?
Being from a Mexican decent much of my family speaks only Spanish forcing me to learn it fluently since birth. My mother says that I learned both Spanish and English around the same time not one after the other making me fall under being "bilingual." Bilingual is defined as both fluent and proficient in reading, writing, speaking and understanding two distinct languages. Bilingual is to be able to communicate with others who are native speakers of the language.
It is important because understanding how people learn more than one language, aids in becoming bilingual. By being bilingual, trilingual or knowing many languages we are able to understand other cultures and connect with multiple groups of people instead of simply one. It helps us to understand not only the history of our own country or ethnic background but also that of many backgrounds.
The main question I have, is why is it easier for a person who speaks more than one language to learn another language, than it is for a person who speaks one? What in the brain makes it simpler for the mind to learn? Another question is why there is not a great influence of learning more than one language in the United States as there is on learning the "core subjects?"
When reading through the material, one topic that interested me was the idea of infantile amnesia. This is the term given for fact that humans do not have any memories before the age of three or four years old. Personally this is in line with my first memory, which was of a party for my fourth birthday. This idea explains that although some people claim to have their first memory before the age of two, these memories are almost always either false memories that actually did not occur, or memories that actually have taken place, but later in person's life. Evidence for these finds include the brain structure and development of an infant not having the capability to support memory function. It has been shown that the hippocampus plays a crucial role in the ability to perform long-term memory. In infants the hippocampus is only partially developed making it likely that we do not have the ability to support maintaining and storing memories. Other theories state that infants do not have an understanding of a "self", making it impossible to store memories in any meaningful way.
These findings give insight to contradict the theories and ideas of certain belief systems. One theory that was reviewed in the book was a belief maintained by people who believe in scientology. The theory states that many people remember stressful and degrading conversations that took place while a person is still a fetus. The believe that these conversations are thought to cause depression and low self-esteem later in life. The findings from infantile amnesia state that this is actually impossible.
In our text beginning on page 277 the authors introduce us to a very controversial issue regarding repressing and recovering memories. One side argues that some memories, such as sexual abuse or traumatic events are repressed and then recovered some time later. The other side of the argument sites the fact that there has been very little proof or evidence to help solidify the theory that people suppress and then accurately recall the memories in question. They also site the growing example that painful memories actually are "remembered too well."
What I would like to talk about is how important it is to use skepticism and avoid ineffective strategies such as hypnotism. However, we should keep an open mind and do not simply dismiss people who may have memories and periferal evidence to support those memories.
In a recent case, Cathy Olson vs. William Holden, Cathy Olson was awarded 10 million dollars (The highest amount ever awarded in the St. Cloud district) for damages involving repressed memories of sexual abuse. You may be skeptical at first, but I think people need a little more background. Not only had William Holden been sent to Jail for a case involving Cathy Olson when she was only 14 (for only two years), but he had several violations. Cathy Olson did not have any contact with him until only a year ago (nearly 30 years) at a family meeting. She claimed that upon seeing him that she remember additional violations. After speaking with syblings who had also been involved in the past incident, they confirmed her newly recovered memories. And not only family members testified, but old friends who she had not been in contact also came forward to confirm her story.
Some might argue that it was a plot for money, but what most people are unaware of was that when Cathy Olson initially contacted a lawyer, her only goal was to send him back to jail for the additional crimes. However, because he had already served jail time for that particular involvement, he could not go back to jail. Her only option was to pursue a civil law suit, in which the goal was money. The next thing that most people don't realize is that Cathy Olson will most likely never see any of that money. Most will go to her lawyer, and a the majority (7.5 million) in putative damages, meaning not for Olson.
In this case, in my opinion, the evidence favors the idea of recovered memories. I think that it is always important to have evidence to back up any claim or memory, and if they are logically invalidated they should be disregarded accordingly. However, if there is evidence, as is the case here, they should be considered relevant, to say the least.
You can read the full article here:
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/03/william_holden_10_million_sex_abuse_victim.php
