Assignment # 6: November 2011 Archives

I believe the most significant concept I learned from psychology is cognitive economy. Cognitive economy is the short-cut for us to mobilize as less resource in mind as possible to solve the problem. It is one of the most adaptive abilities possessed by human beings. If I can be sure about the answer at an 80% confidence level within few minutes, why should I bother to spend another one hour to demonstrate that it is 100% true? Instead, I can apply the extra one hour to do other tasks and make my life more efficient and colourful, such as inventing a machine, sending someone to the moon and so on. Although sometimes cognitive economy encounters difficulties on the reliability, overall it efficiently meets our needs on daily life. On fields requiring high level of accuracy, we have computers to work on these non-creative and time-consuming tasks.

Furthermore, cognitive economy also motivates creative activities. For we are misers on thinking, it is so boring for us to do the same thing time after time. So we just apply tools and invent machines to save our time and energy on reasoning. For me now, there is no need to worry about any spelling errors in this post. The word software itself corrects the errors.

The concept in psychology that will remain with me from this class is Piaget's different stages in childhood development. From my experience with my own childhood and watching my siblings and younger cousins grow up, I can think of many instances where different stages of development were obvious.
Piaget's four stages of development are: the Sensorimotor stage, the Preoperational stage, the Concrete Operations stage and the Formal Operations stage. The Sensorimotor stage takes place from birth until the age of about 2 years and is "marked by focus on the here and now." Basically children's knowledge, thinking, and experiences come from their physical interactions with their surrounding world. The Preoperational stage is from 2 to 7 years of age and is "marked an ability to construct mental representations of experience." So things like playing pretend, basically using language, objects and drawings as representations as ideas, are evident at this age. The Concrete Operational stage is from 7 to 11 years of age and is characterized by the ability to perform mental operations, but only for actual physical events. Basically this is the age where conservation concepts and sorting toys and other things become regular behaviors. The final stage is the Formal operations stage that happens after age 11 in which abstract thought, logic, and hypothetical reasoning are present (Lilienfeld 373-374).
The stage that I have the most memories of was from the age of 7 to 11 years old, so the Concrete Operational stage. I remember constantly sorting my toys and lining up the good-guy action figures across from the bad-guy action figure. I also remember seeing this development in my siblings as well. My little sister, in fact was the one who exhibited these aspects the most. She was constantly sorting her dolls and continuing to play pretend. This is why I feel these concepts will stick with me after I'm done with PSY1001, because I have experienced them myself and have fond memories of those experiences.

Ironically enough, maybe because of the availability heuristic, I believe I will remember the concept of conformity from psychology forever. Conformity is all around us almost all the time and that is why I think I will remember it the most. In five years, I see myself with a job and a significant other. Conformity will be a part of my life, maybe even more than it is now. Conformity plays a significant role in my life today. For example, I usually want to go out to eat at different places than my friends or family but I'm usually outnumbered for a different restaurant. I can tell you that I always choose to go eat with the rest of the group because nobody wants to eat alone. In five years, I will probably end up doing the same thing if a group of guys are going to lunch and if I have a wife or a girlfriend, it hurts to say that I will probably end up doing what the others want but conformity is a reality. Conformity will be a part of most people's lives as long as they live and it will be a part of mine too. That is why I think I will remember the concept of conformity for five years and probably forever.

There are many concepts in psychology, many of which are vague and have no concrete definition. One the main concepts in psychology is personality It boggles my mind how there can be around seven billion people on Earth, and each person has their own personality. A concept I will remember five years from now or maybe even longer, is personality and the ideas behind it.

The Big Five takes all the describing words in a language and packs them into five categories. If you know four of the five scores of someone, the other unknown category score allows for an extremely large range of different personalities.

There is evidence that personality is hereditable. I've always thought of myself as the opposite of my family members, which seems to be true at the surface. Looking at my family, I realize that I have many similarities to them in the way I act.

Some behaviorists believe that personality is just a subconscious survival instinct. They believe people feel they are in control, but in reality they are acting out of instinct. Personality being genetically influenced makes this viewpoint very plausible. This idea scares me, because I like to believe that I am in control of my actions; even if sometimes I, like many others, blame my wrong actions on others.

Personality is a blurry concept with many factors that make it hard to make a pinpoint definition for it. It is a fascinating topic with many opposing viewpoints.

As I sat here thinking about what part of psychology I would remember years from now many things came to mind. I know I would remember everything about disorders and addiction, since people in my life, including myself, have experienced these things. I know I would remember the things about romantic relationships because as a young woman I of course am interested in romance. The one thing that stuck out above all the others was the theories and ideas behind happiness. I have spent many years trying to find this elusive idea. For the past five years I was convinced that if I was just skinny enough, if I just lost three more pounds, then four, then five, that smile would finally appear. That didn't happen though. Instead I found myself constantly in and out of treatment centers and hospitals. Finally last winter it got so badly severe and I was so malnourished and refusing treatment I was legally committed to a treatment center for six months. Trust me, I was the opposite of happy. You would have thought that at 70lbs. I would have been thrilled, but I was just the opposite, I was miserable. I had nothing in life but my eating disorder. After learning about happiness I can see why I was so miserable. While there is no clear cut theory on happiness or what makes people happy, researchers have some idea. They say that marriage, friendships, and college make people happy. While being too young for marriage, I was out of college and had virtually no friends (its hard to even have a conversation at that stage of the disease). They also say that religion, being republican, and exercise help with happiness. I was certainly getting enough (obsessive) exercise, but my religion went pretty much out the window. And while I'll NEVER be a Republican ;) I think that even having things in the world you care about politically make a person happier. Gratitude, giving, and flow are the final three that research has found give people a sense of happiness. I had none of those. Now, after six months of treatment and six months of being at a "goal weight", I can finally say I am happy. I do things for others, and am grateful for the things others do for me. I can concentrate and get into a flow when I'm doing things I love, or when I'm studying. I have made new friends and have rebuilt friendships. I am in college and loving it! I go to church again and exercise regularly, but not excessively. And while I'm still a Democrat, I think I am the happiest I've ever been. When, in the future the going gets tough and I want to go back, I think remembering what really makes people happy, not weight or money, will serve me well. I read an interesting book awhile ago called the Happiness Project. I would encourage others to read it as well, it kind of goes along the same lines as this. Here is the website : http://www.happiness-project.com/

In five years from now I think I will remember the concept of the Strange Situation study done by Mary Ainsworth. In her study she decided on infant attachment styles by seeing how an infant reacts when its' parent leave him/her in a room with a stranger, and then also how they respond upon the parents return. She concluded that there are four main categories infants will generally fall into. The most common is secure attachment in which the infant becomes upset when its' parent leaves and then becomes content when they return. Another is insecure-avoidant attachment which the child is indifferent with parents departure and has little reaction for their return. Insecure-anxious attachment is when the infant panics when their parent leaves then has mixed emotions when parent returns. Disorganized attachment is the rarest and is when the infant is inconsistent with their reaction responses (Lilienfeld).
Children is one of the interest areas I truly enjoy learning about and I am looking into a career that involves being able to work with them on a day to day basis. For this reason I found her study on a child's attachment style to their parents very fascinating. Recently in the past years many of my immediate cousins have had children of their own and after learning more about the attachment styles I can identify and understand why some of them could care less if their mom or dad leaves them to play with unfamiliar people while others make a big fuss about their parents leaving them.

The concept in psychology that I think I will remember five years from now is the two-factor theory. This is because it practically taught me how to make the boy that I like to feel more attracted to me. From the Psychology: From inquiry to understanding text book, two-factor theory proposed that emotion is produced by an undifferentiated state of arousal along with the attribution of that arousal.
This theory is then strengthen by a classic study conducted by Schachter and Singer (1962) in which adrenaline is used as the attribution of arousal. From this study , I learned that I can make the boy that I like to be more attracted to me by increasing his adrenaline so that he will be more excited when his is with me. For example, he will feel that I look more attractive to him after riding a roller coaster with him or after playing bungee jumping with him rather than sightseeing with him in a flower garden.
My understanding is further verified by the test conducted by Dutton and Aron (1974) in which they had proven that male will feel more romantic emotions when passing through a woman on a swaying bridge rather than on a sturdy bridge.
All in all, the two-factor theory will be one of the concepts in psychology that I will remember five years from now as it taught me ways to attract people.