Lessons Ignored

The world was stunned with the pictures released from Abu Ghraib, a prison in Iraq, revealing images of American soldiers harassing and torturing the detainees. It is said that 90% of the detainees there are innocent and that what the world has seen was only the minority of the army. However, the question was “how did this happen?”. How could the American soldiers, a group of valiant men and women who carried the promises of freedom to Iraq behaved in such ways?
Psychologists have conducted experiments that proved the causes of these scandals. They conclude that it is social context and surrounding people that brought about these behaviors. In an experiment by Phillip Zimbardo, a group of students were assigned into two groups, one act as the prisoners and another act as the guards. The experiment was intended to last two weeks, yet it was called off after six days when the subjects went too deep into their roles began to behave violently.
Another experiment by Milgrim also contributed to the fact that we all have the capability of doing evil deeds. Milgrim asked a subject to be the teacher for his experiment on memory, and for each time the subject received a wrong answer from the students, the subject will have to switch on electric current the runs from mild to severe to the student. This experiment was a fake, actually the student worked with Milgrim and did not receive any current; Milgrim was trying to find out how many people would switch on fatal current into a stranger. It turned out that two-thirds of the subjects went over 350 volts. From this he concluded that a subject is blindly obeying the order of the experimenter, showing no empathy for others.
What we have ignored is the fact that we all are capable of doing wrong things, and that our society is an important factor that influence our behavior.

INTELLIGENCE

1) How should intelligence be defined?

Researchers have come up with many definitions of intelligence, yet I believe that intelligence is a concept that involves interaction with environment, rational thoughts, problem solving abilities, and the ability to use our knowledge to adapt to the situation. It is about how well a person can deal with a situation or a problem.

2) What are the elements of intelligence?

According to Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligence, our intelligence is divided into 10 sub-intelligence: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, spiritual, and existential. However, the psychologists are still skeptic of whether there are more fields of intelligence than those given by Gardner.

3) Is intelligence testing valid? Reliable? Ethical?

I believe that the intelligence tests being given nowadays are valid to some extent for its scores cannot be used to define whether a person fits to a job or not and that many of the tests do not evaluate the takers’ practical intelligence except for WAIS. However, the tests given are reliable and ethical since they produce consistent results and the takers are not threatened by the results.

4) How can variations in intelligence be explained?

Genes, disability, society, culture, and education are what account for the variations in our intelligence for they affect a person’s abilities to deal with problems. However, these factors do not always lower our intelligence for there are some cases that a person with disability is gifted with extraordinary intelligence.

EQ Abridge Test

I scored 122 on the abridged EQ test. The results, compared to other people, were excellent. I am partially agree with my results for it mostly reflects who I am, yet there are times and situations that the results does not suit me. For example, I am not a self-motivated person-someone has to get me going all the time, yet the results explain that I am able to motivate myself. However, I think the results are quite accurate for an abridged test.

Buried Alive

Buried Alive was a true story of 19 people, most of them young and energetic, who survived a plane crash on Mount Andes in Argentina in 1972. For seventy days the people suffered and struggled to survive in the subzero atmosphere of Andes, the deadly blizzards, and the devastating avalanches. What got the survivors through these days were their motivations; their needs to survive. Soon after the crash the survivors longed for shelter, and quickly assembled one- the physiological need for shelter was responsible for their action. Then their need for food and water drove them to go out drinking melted snow, searching for any sign of food, yet returned empty handed and were forced to eat the flesh of the dead passengers. Besides physiological needs, the survivors felt the need to belong, to be safe, and to act as a group for they knew that only in consent they will find rescue. It could be said that the need for safety, belonging and love also played a crucial role in their prolonged struggle.

CLass Demonstration: Cognitive Style

For the demonstration on out cognitive, MR. Anthony handed each of us Gregorc Style Delineator, a test on personality to determine what kind of cognitive style we have. The direction was simple, to rate the words in a set of vocabulary from 4 to 1, according to how much the word describes who you are; 4 is the most relevant and 1 is not yourself at all.

The result was divided into 4 kinds of cognitive processes: concrete sequential, concrete random, abstract sequential, and abstract random. The score of the test can be achieved by adding the scores you rated the vocabulary according to yourself and plotting them down the graph. I found that I fell into the category of concrete random with a score of 35.

The 4 cognitive styles have different qualities, weaknesses, strengths, preferences and disadvantages as the following:

1) Concrete Sequential: This style of cognitive is an organized, punctual person who process things step by step and live with reality.
2) Abstract Sequential: A person who is abstract sequential lives in the world of knowledge, facts, concepts, and ideas. They perceive things as two dimensional. The also relies on models and theories to learn things.
3) Abstract Random: These people focus mostly on the emotion of themselves and others. They are very sympathetic and understanding. Their creativity lies in arts and imagination. They also have exceptional social skills compared to others.
4) Concrete Random: Concrete Random believe that almost everything have its hidden meaning; they live with the present and relies much on their intuition. They learn from looking at the big picture; they either get or don’t get what they are learning. In other words, the line is drawn solidly between comprehension and confusion.

Extending Reading: "It's Magical it's malleable, it's memory."

• Our memory is what makes us who we are today. In other words, selfhood is nothing but what we have experienced and encoded into our memory system. Whether it is the information about ourselves, others, or general knowledge that makes each one of us distinct from another. Our selfhood, in short, is created and can be affected by our memories. The article stated that memory is the bedrock of selfhood, meaning that it is the solid base of who we are and that our sense of self is quite strong. Yet, the idea is challenged with the fact that maybe our memory is not as solid as we thought it would be, and that changing just a part of it could affect the whole selfhood.

• The discovery that I found to be most interesting to me was that the fight-or-flight response is related to permanent memories. The fight-or-flight response is the arousal of body when encountered with threatening stimuli or environment; this involves increasing heart rate, blood pressure, muscle contraction, increase respiratory rate, etc. This makes me wonder how a memory could become indelible when we experience it with the fight-or-flight response. I want to know how the two systems, the memory and nervous, are connected and what really happens when we encode our memories when we are stimulated.

• The homunculus crisis, according to the article, is the mystery of what is controlling our memories, what brings old memories back when we are doing something since our neurons system in the brain is too far complex for us to understand.

• Lynch’s experiment is supported by the biological view of dreams interpretation since they also believe that dreaming enhances learning and memory. Moreover, Lynch’s experiment also shows that human’s memory is at work during REM sleep, and that learning occurs at that stage. Lynch has the same principle as the biological psychologist who studies processes of humans’ body and believes that our behaviors are affected by the chemical reactions in our bodies.

• Indelible memories often occur when we have encountered a fight-or-flight response, and that our body optimizes our memory storage by the use of hormones that are released. Moreover, indelible memories are important to us since it gives us vivid recollection of situations that might be threatening or danger, so that we would be prepared for it. Yet, some indelible memories are triggered by a part of our limbic system that is called Amygdala, which is links with our emotions. In other words, memories can become permanent, or even trigger post traumatic stress disorder- a psychological disorder where a patient is haunted by flashbacks of his or her memory- when it involves strong emotions such as fear, panic, stress, or excitement.

• There are two kinds of memory loss: amnesia and repression. Amnesia occurs when a person loses his or her consciousness due to a blow to the head, which often happens in accidents, and fail to remember what happened, or when his/her hippocampus is damaged. Repression, which is a defense mechanism that out cognitive system develop to deal with stressful situation, is when a person repress, or putting into subconscious, a repeating traumatic memories that has happened to him or her. The memory loss due to repression can be triggered and retrieved again after a period of time has passed.

• This statement can be explained using the knowledge we have about confabulation and decay. Confabulation is when we “fill in the gaps” when retelling a story. In other words, we might include something that is not in the original story into our retelling, making the story distorted. Another reason that memories are often reconstructive the reproductive can be explained using what we know about decay. Long term memories, when not being retrieved for a period of time, start to decay, and the story seems to me more vague and brief through time. This is why we are not able to recall exactly what is encoded into our memories, but just the important facts and events which had our attentions.

• The new paradigm of memory state that we are who we are by the memories of ourselves and being able to tell the stories about our own lives. Yet, our memories are not always precise; they contain both what is real, and what is fallacious. Moreover, our memories are the mixtures of what we saw and how we felt; it is both objective and subjective. Objective by the fact that the perceived images are true, and subjective that we added our emotions into the process of encoding.

• It is right to say that memories have strong effects on who we are, or our selfhood. However, memories do not always hold true according to the fact that our memories decay, got repressed, lost, and confabulated. We all seems to know ourselves and who we are well, yet scientist are not able to figure out what triggers our memories and what controls our emotion despite their biological approaches. Our memories define who we are, but no matter how familiar you are with your memories, there are still questions of how it functions and how the networks are connected.

Class Demonstration: Memory is often a reconstruction

Mr. Anthony asked us to remember several visual stimuli that were present for a few seconds each. Later, He handed out a piece of paper filled with words to each of us, and asked us to draw all the stimuli that we remembered onto the paper.

And here’s the catch, the paper that we receive contains different words, and that the purpose of this experiment was to show that we reconstruct the images we saw from the “cues” that were given.

The result was that people who received different cues reconstruct the images different from the real image. In other words, they then to draw pictures that are similar to the images of the cues more then what they remember. Though the result of the class did not appear to be quite the same with the actual results, some of the recollections made by the class are slightly different from the stimuli presented.