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The Id is a part of Sigmund Freud's hypothesis on the structure of personality. There are three parts to the structure: The Ego, which is the rational part of a person's mind; the Superego, which is a person's sense of right and wrong; and there is the Id, a person's basic instincts and impulses.

The Id focuses on pleasure, on what a person wants to do for themselves. The libido, or sex drive, is the most commonly known drive of the Id, though there are many others.

Rocky Horror Picture Show is basically a 90 minute long explanation of this. One of the most prominent lines in the film/play is "Give yourself over to absolute pleasure," and the whole movie is pretty much one giant singalong orgy, so I thought posting a song from it would be a nice example.

Groupthink is concept where when people of a group need to come to a consensus on a topic they tend to work towards coming up with an idea thats favored by all instead of putting actual thought into the decision. This is very counter productive becuase the point of creating groups is to combine everyones knowledge and in fact it just dumbs everyone down.

Personally ive experienced this a lot. It seems to me that when im in groups everyone seems to have much less input then if it where their actual opinion. Sometimes in group when we split the work amongst the group we can get more thoughtful input on each little bit and end up with a final product that reflects the groups combined intellect. I had more typed out but i just tryed adding a picture and it deleted this whole blog post and i had to do it over -_-

The "Big Five" model of personality has become the basis for many personality assessments. Many companies these days even have potential employees take the test as part of an application process. The model is very popular but is it truly a reliable test of personality?

The first question i raise is what is personality? Personality is an abstract construct. How can one measure it and give it a numerical value when it is not even clearly defined? I think these kinds of test can be helpful to tell us more about ourselves. What it cannot do is give a definitive answer on who we are. These tests are not falsifiable. How can you give a numerical vale to how open one is to new experiences?

Another aspect i question is the way the tests are given. Not every person will interpret test questions the same. If each person will take the test in a different way how can the "Big Five" test be considered reliable? Also, when given for interview purposes, clever individuals will simply answer the question to what they think the company prefers. Not only can individuals choose answers that seem favorable for other people, they may choose answers that they WISH were true about them. It is hard to admit faults, plus people have a very different perception of themselves compared to how others see them. Companies should not rely on these tests, and if they want to really find good employees, they should interview the person more extensively.

Although very controversial, this technique of analyzing handwriting to evaluate a persons psychological aspects is still pretty popular now. It's even popular enough to have had even institutes in the U.S. offer a degree in it but still even now has three schools out of the US offer a degree in it despite its controversy leaning all the way to pseudoscience. The way which graphologists measure psychological aspects is relying the heuristic that certain ways of writing always produce certain aspects of a person's psychological being. These so called commonalities are then used on other handwriting and passed on.
I think that the book should have put this in their "Errors in Personality Assessment" section because it almost exactly resembles other erroneous tests. An example would be physiognomy which is detecting personalities from facial expressions. The only difference would probably be that this one seems so exaggerated it poses a higher extraordinary claim than graphology.
I definitely think that this pseudoscience is just another way people have dressed up people's tendency to judge others by their cover. Although there is low reliability between what people have tested on the test and the actual person, graphology is still popular because always want to have simple and pretty obvious reasons for personality which is more complex than they want it to be. I'm not really sure why they haven't used other controlled experiments such as twin studies of personality and handwriting to rule out this assessment that is highly controversial. Probably the best explanation is that people will always be people.

Criminal profiling, beginning in the 1880s, is a tool used to help investigators profile unknown suspects or criminals and produce an offender description. The description concluded can contain personality traits, behavioral and demographic variables, such as age and race. Police investigators gain possible personality traits of the offender by examining the crime scene and answering questions of the behavior. For example, in a murder case they would answer questions about the planning of the murder, the day it happened etc, the method and manner of the murder, the victim selected, and about the disposal of the body. Criminal profilers examine evidence from the crime scene, also sketches and the witness' testimony to derive a profile. The profile is based solely on the facts of the case. Many criminal profilers work as expert witnesses in court and provide the court with an unbiased testimony. In order to help solve the crime the profile is matched with possible suspects, and narrows down then list. The suspects are then brought in for questioning, just because an individual matches the criminal profile does not mean he/she is guilty of the crime. Criminal profiling just provides the investigators with more information and brings them a step closer to solving a crime. Examples of criminal profiling are found in many television shows. Although not portrayed completely accurate the show Criminal Minds solves many crimes with the help of criminal profiling. This video gives an example of profiling by noticing behavior, which gives a feel to how criminal profiling is done.

Many popular books have made claims that there are differences between children based on the order in which they were born. Claims have been made that, "first borns tend toward achievement, middle-borns toward diplomacy, and later-borns toward risk taking. Realistically, these claims do not have enough evidence to support that they are actually valid. They are exaggerated and there is no consistent associations made between birth orders and personality.
One science historian, Frank Sulloway, examined the associations between birth order and attitudes toward revolutionary scientific theories and found that later-borns were 3.1 times more likely to favor revolutionary ideas than firstborns were. His findings raised the possibility that birth order may be important in nonshared environmental influence but not nonscientific disciplines.
I personally have an older brother and a younger brother. Just observing from my family, the claim made isn't particularly true in that my younger brother has always had more of a cautious and shy personality type, where i have been more of a risk-taker. I believe that this is a very interesting topic and claim being made, but so far there hasn't been enough evidence to say that birth order really matters in any way.

One recent Psych 1001 topic that has especially interested me in the past few weeks is the concept of personality tests. There are two main ways in which personalities are tested. The first is through self-report inventories, which are usually in the form of a questionnaire that one fills out, and the results are analyzed directly. These tests are objective, and almost all based on the 'Big Five' personality traits. The second is through projective tests, which are more indirect measures, that often need interpreting by multiple people. An example of this might be the Rorschach Ink Blot test, where people are asked to analyze what they see in a blot of ink, and their responses are analyzed for personality traits.

I have encountered a number of objective personality tests in my life, namely during job interviews. I was curious as to the accuracy of such tests, and the controversy that may surround them. Reading up on "Psychometric Success", some of my questions were answered. I found out that employers often use personality tests to identify characteristics that are crucial to job success, that can often not be accurately represented in an interview. There are, however, many people that would argue that these tests do not accurately measure all facets of one's personality. There is also controversy in the fact that many companies that manufacture these tests are quite secretive about the methods they use to determine which answers to questions correspond to which personality traits. However, in recent years, the use of these tests has greatly increased due to the fact that they are very easily administered over the internet. From my personal experience on these tests, I believe they are an accurate and fair measure of basic personality traits.

During week 11, the discussion sections were grouped off based on a short quiz we took during week 10. We weren't told what the quiz was for and how they would be graded, but when we came back to class the next week we were separated into different groups. We were asked what vacation spot we would like to go to and what we would do once we got there. In the end, our discussion leader told us that it was a practice. Based on our quizzes, we got different variations of being conscientious or extroverted. Our discussion leader told us that during discussing our vacations, our groups showed characteristics of whichever group we were put in. For example, I was placed into the high extroverted and high conscientious group; therefore we were louder and done with our decisions on time. But the low extroverted and low conscientious group had trouble finishing their assignment on time and they were quieter, less willing to talk in front of the class. That whole experiment tied into the discussion topic of the Big Five.
The Big Five are the five traits that come up multiple times during personality measures. They are: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
We can use these five characteristic traits to describe people and how they will react in different situations.
I believe that we can use these tests to determine the basis of a person's personality, but should not define the person or be used to determine what the person will do or will be in the future.
The pictures on the bottom show the different personalities that a person who scored higher on each of the traits might have.

As I was watching "Fight Club" today, it made me wonder what a lack of sleep can really cause in some people? In the case of Edward Norton, the result was extreme!

Norton suffered from insomnia, which either caused his schizophrenia or triggered a pre-existing condition. In the movie, his name was Jack, but would unknowingly refer to himself as Tyler Durden. What he thought he was viewing second hand, he was actually doing the actions himself, proving his perception of reality was off by a large margin.

In "Fight Club : A Ritual Cure For The Spiritual Ailment Of American Masculinity" it says that in every person's psyche, there is a chance to have two conflicting personalities, ego and shadow. Ego controls psyche, and when ego is messed with like lack of sleep like Jack experiences, the shadow has a possibility to take over. Which is why Jack became Tyler. Jack's shadow causes him to start a club that fights underground, and eventually leads to a terrorist group.

So unless you want to become a schizophrenic with no ability to tell real from fake, I suggest that you get your full eight hours in on most nights!!

Meditation is defined by a variety of practices that train attention and awareness. Meditation is a very commonly seen in many different world religions. Today, meditation is a very good stress reliever, and it is used by all different people, all around the world. Meditation traditionally was practiced in order to achieve insight and spiritual growth. However, in most Western countries, meditation is solely practiced to achieve stress reduction.

There are two different types of meditation seen most commonly, concentrative meditation, and awareness meditation. Concentrative meditation is when you simply focus your attention on a single object, such as your breathing or a candle flame. This is beneficial in stress reduction, as it causes a slow, deep, rhythmic breathing, which is said to be one of the best stress relievers, promoting relaxation. Awareness meditation is entirely different, as your focus is not on one thing, but several. So, awareness meditation stimulates your attention to flow and to examine any and everything that comes to mind. All various types of meditation are said to have other benefits other than stress reduction and relaxation. These benefits include: heightened empathy, creativity, self-esteem, and alertness. There is also said to be a decrease in anxiety, interpersonal problems, and reoccurring depression as a result of regular meditation. Meditation can be used in a variety of psychotherapies and other medical scenarios to treat mild pain, to enhance blood flow to the brain, and to increase immune function. It is unclear why meditation has such good results, as it could be from any of the other factors that go into it. Overall, no matter what the reason, meditation is seen as a good stress reliever that many people can benefit from.