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.

The rumor chain activity

Mr. Anthony asked fro 4 volunteers to recite a story he has read to each other. He asked three of the volunteers first to leave the class and told a story about a hijacker to the first volunteer, then he called the others volunteer in one by one and let them recite the story to each other from what they heard from the previous volunteer.

The Result was as follow:

The flight information was lost
The Hijacker was called terrorist
The revolutionary army was lost
The cockpit was called the pilot cabin
The name of the pilot was lost and the number of pilot was two at the end
The name of the gun was changed from .357 Magnum to magma gun
The information about the radio was lost
The action of the angry passengers was lost

From the demonstration he concludes that the story got more and more condensed as it went from a volunteer to another. Some information got leveled, or cut off. Some was sharpened, or emphasized, and some information was added through assimilation, or changes in detail to fit the subject to the background of knowledge, which in this case was the number of pilots. This explains the concept of gossiping, that the news get more vague and dangerous as it spread.

Class demonstration 3: Meaning enhances recall

In this demonstration, Mr. Anthony prepared a set of twenty words on sheets of paper which have either the letter A or B on it. Then he asked us to memorize the words that he will show to us for a few seconds. However, he also asked us to do the following: if the sheet of paper has a letter A on it, count the syllables, and state whether the words have pleasant or unpleasant meaning if the word B was written on the sheet of paper. The hypothesis of this demonstration was that people would remember the words with the letter B on it better than ones with A.

The result was the following:

· We have a bimodal distribution with the modes at 15 and 10
· The range of the data was 10, spreading from 10-20
· 3 people remembered more A words than B
· 4 people had the equal amount of A and B memorized
· 9 people remembered more B words than A
· The average of the class was at 15-16 words

This shows that by giving meaning to the words, it is easier for us to encode them to long term memory compared to the words that we did not give meaning to. Moreover, I have used mnemonic device to help me memorize all the words, which is highly effective in this demonstration since I was able to recall all 20 of the words. So it can be concluded that in addition to giving meaning to the words, making stories and associating the words with other mnemonic devices also improve our memory on vocabulary.

Phillip Zimbardo: Discovering Psychology

This episode of Discovering Psychology introduced us to one of the most significant ability of our brains, our ability to retain the incoming stimuli and process them, our memory. Our brain is able to hold as much as one hundred trillion bits of information, yet a number of them decay through time. Our memory is divided into three parts, sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory. Our long term memory is like the storage of all information we know about ourselves and the world. Prior to being stored in the long term memory, every sensory input is processed through our short term memory, which has the capacity of 5-9 objects, and fades as soon as we shift our attention to other things. Scientists have long been trying to discover where our memory lies and how the process work. The video introduced us to Ebbinghaus, a psychologist that did an experiment on how our memory works by memorizing unrecognizable patterns of letters and study the effect of learning. Besides Ebbinghaus, scientists experimented on rats to see if removing any parts of the brain tissues has any effect on memory. The result was that regardless of the location where the tissues are removed, the rat exhibit memory loss in getting along the constructed course. Moreover, studies on memory have led to the detection of deterioration of our brain tissues due to Alzheimer’s disease from the experiment on rabbits to see the location of the brain that they encode information about learning. By applying this test to human in form of the tone-wind-blinking classical conditioning to the patient, we are able to discover early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in human.

Class Demonstration : M E M O R I E S

Demonstration 1: Immediate memory Span

In this demonstration, we are asked to remember a series of numbers ranging from 3 to 12 numbers, and recite them when a series is read. After checking the results, which I ended up making a mistake at 9-digit number, Mr. Anthony explained that our sensory memory span can take in about 7 things at a time, and that regular people can remember things in the range of 7-9 stimuli. Yet he told that there are several students who were able to complete the series until 12-digit number. Moreover, he explained the use of chunking, a strategy that would help us remember series of numbers or words by putting them together in little pieces of 3 or 4, and recall them as sets of number. This example of chunking can be seen in our daily life through telephone numbers, social security numbers, and words that are written.

Demonstration 2: Short Term Memory

Again Mr. Anthony asked us to remember, but this time in series of words. He read out about 20 words to the class, which some of them repeated. Then he asked us to write everything we can recall. As a result, the mean score of the words that the class remembered was 7. However, there were some astounding findings in the results of the demonstration. It is that some of us remembered the words that were not there. Mr. Anthony later explained that we constructed the words that are not there by ourselves from making associations with other words, this kind of memory is called the constructive memory. In addition, Mr. Anthony went into the impact of the serial position effect, or the primary-recency effect, that most of us remembered the words that came first and last and not the ones in the middles. Moreover, there are words in the list that could be chunked together to remember such as toss and turn, and that there was a word that was different from others and we remembered it by its distinctiveness, which in this demonstration was the word pineapple.

Unit 7- Cognition: My First Memory

The thought was vague; I recalled sitting in the dark room in the middle of a day, looking around, trying to find out if there is anyone who could not sleep like me. I was in pre kindergarten at the time. It was about noon and every child was taking a nap, which was the daily routine of our school. I was about 3 at then time. I remembered that I was kneeling down on the floor, waiting for the recess to be over, and that I could continue playing with my friends.

After having written down our memories into our blog, Mr. Anthony asked us to share some of our memories in class. Then, he categorized the memories into 3 kinds of emotional effect; positive, negative, and neutral. It can be seen that most of our first memories are ones that had strong emotional effect on us. In addition, he explained that the actual first memories can be recalled after the age of 5, and that most of the memories we had before that are the retelling of the adults, or from the stories shared in the family.

Reflection on my Progress in AP Psychology

So far I have to say that I am quite satisfied with my performance in AP psychology class, yet there are some certain aspects of my study habits that can still be improve in order to achieve better performance in class. Firstly, I have to constantly remind myself of the tasks or the work that I am given for I sometimes forgot about what I have to do or assignments that could be essential. Moreover, I need to be more attentve and enthusiastic in class discussion and lessons since my weakness is that I am not good at self-study, so I have to obtain as much knowledge in class as possible and be very attentive during lessons.

Our Cheating H E A R T

1. What is the thesis of the article? (One or two sentences only.)

It is that humans are not designed to be monogamous. In other word, due to evolution, humans tend to be more polygamous, or having more than one mates throughout their life.

2. In what ways are the strategies employed by men and women to pass on the next generation at odds?

The men employ the strategies of cheating on their mates by looking for every chance that they can reproduce in other to pass on their genes and keep their traits away from extinction. On the other hand, women tend to look for the healthiest and strongest males with favorable traits to provide them with fertile offspring. However, women also seek comfort and protection from their existing spouses.

3. What conclusion does the article draw about monogamy?

It tries to convey to us that we, human, are not designed to stay with one mate for our life, but to be polygamous. In other words, we are more likely to cheat on our spouses for the fact that our biological structures and survival instincts are telling us to find more and more fertile mates and look for opportunity to reproduce. Not only biological factors that influence our mating behaviors, what seems to be the reasons that people tend to cheat on their spouse are sociological factors such as money and fame. Moreover, it is not only up to our genes that determine our fidelity to our spouses, but also our moral and decisions.

4.) In your own words explain the last paragraph of the article.

It is saying that humans are moral since we have our own ability to make judgments and reasoning skills. However, we are naturally not moral beings. We are what and who we choose to be, it is our awareness that makes us moral.

5. What are you personal reactions to the article?

I felt that this is a controversial topic since being unfaithful to one’s mate is considered immoral in almost every society in the world. However, it is right for the author to say that deep down inside each and every one of us, we are polygamous animals since the theory has been proven valid by many researchers and scientist. I have to agree with the author that we are monogamous or polygamous by our moral and reasons, or ability that separate humans from animals. It is up to us to decide whether we would be moral and live according to the rules and obligations of the society, or be no different from the animals on discovery channel.=)

Principles of Biological Psychology

This perspective believes that every single behavior, thought, and feelings are from the cause of chemicals reactions and cell activities in our body, meaning that what goes on in our minds are of the effects of chemicals and that our body and mind are related. Moreover, the body, though seems to be a complicated structure, can be divided into systems and many subsystems and that a complex mental process can be traced back to the simplest part of our nervous system, the neuron, that signifies whether the body will or will not generate a reaction, this is know as the all or nothing theory, or fire or not fire. Biological Psychology also focuses on how each of our brain hemispheres works and coordinates. Each of the hemispheres has its own unique ability; the left hemisphere is involved with language skills, and the right hemisphere is involved with spatial skills. The fact that our hemispheres are intact makes it possible for the left and right hemisphere to communicate and transfer the information that suits the tasks of the brain. In addition, although adult is more sophisticated and intelligent than babies, babies seem to have a lot more neurons than adults. Why? It is that the nervous system and the brain of a child are like a blank paper, and that the unnecessary neurons will be eliminated throughout the development of the brain. In other words, the child’s brain interacts with the surroundings and experiences and that what is necessary will be kept in order to survive.

The Boy Without a Penis

This story of a boy who had his penis operated off during a circumstition that went wrong is a solid example of the 'big issue' that psychologists around the world are arguing about: nature vs. Nurture.
During the 1960's, people tended to believe that behaviors of human are shaped by their past experiences and how they are raised. However, the case of David Reimer changed the whole idea. His family intended to raise him up as a girl, but the hormones in David opposed. I believe that David had suffered a lot through his life mentally. He had been traumatized by the fact that he was deceived by everyone around him and was distressed when he was rejected from society during his teenage. That would probably left him with a scar that would not heal by time, resulting in a tragic ending when David decided to commit suicide after losing his jobs and being seperated with his wife when he was 38.
This has proved to the world that it is not only how a person is raised affects his/her behaviors, but it is also the biological factors; the genes and hormones, that play significant roles in determining one's behavior. This case of a boy without a penis, though ended tragically, has contributed greatly to the study of psychology and opened the eyes of many psychologists.

Check Yourself

Scientific attitude is all about being skeptical, open-minded, able to distinguish between assumptions and biases, and able to ask questions like ‘how can it be?’ and ‘Why is this happening?’ in any given situation. However, people with scientific attitude are not irrational. In other words, they consider the possibility and existence of the answers to the questions before asking, and be open-minded to other’s opinions.

By approaching a phenomenon with scientific attitude, we will develop smart thinking, or critical thinking, it is a way to come up with a conclusion by designing methods and experiments required in order to answer the question that you are skeptic about

• B E S T of the Century •

It has been almost a century that psychotherapy has benefit millions and millions of people around the world. Those who have joined the seminars, group therapy, workshops, and individual sessions were proven to be really ‘helped’ by the therapy. But how was a subject in which we called ‘a new science’ accepted and grew worldwide in such a short period? Here are the examples of the major changes that occurred during the 1900’s that have turned psychology to a global and modern interest of the population.

Since the dawn of the new century, psychologists around the world learned to cope with their patients and the diversities among them. In other words, they learned how to deal with different people from different background to extend border of psychology and making it applicable to everybody regardless of gender or ethnicity. In addition, the psychologists now are more open-minded, meaning that they now accept other approaches that are different from their own and apply it with their patients, while the psychologists in the beginning were opt to be loyal to their perspectives. Besides how psychologists approach their clients, other reasons that would justify its phenomenon growth would be how the subject is applicable to many of the fields whether it is business, industry, education, labor, or even religion. Finally, the developments in neuroscience and medical treatment have provided psychotherapy with many new options for the therapy, including improved medical and treatments, making it more effective and less time consuming.

Not only how psychology have transcends the borders of beliefs and logics that made it one of the most popular subjects nowadays, but there are many great discoveries during the 1900’s that have ensured the credibility of the subject. In my opinion, the five most significant discoveries during the nineteenth century are:

1) The experiment on gender roles conducted by Matina Homer in November 1969. In the experiment, Matina arranged a question for both her subjects, which were a man and a women, and by studying how both of the volunteers answered the question, Matina concluded that female are more likely to avoid success compared to male. Then she asked both of the subjects to take an achievement test in two separated rooms, the results came out that her female subject scored higher. After that, she asked her subjects to do the test again, but now in the same room. Though scored higher on her first test, the female volunteer seemed nervous and stressed out, and she scored lower than the male volunteer. The result in this experiment explained how women react differently to success and stressed their motive to avoid success. I believe that this experiment is approached by the socio-cultural perspective stressing how our behaviors and attitudes are influenced by our gender background and stereotypes, and that it is important to know how different people react to a situation and how female workers should be encourage in their field of profession in order to be more efficient and productive since they are wiser than a lot of male workers.

2) Development of operant conditioning by B.F skinner- he believed that our behaviors are influenced by the reinforcements or the consequences of the behavior whether it is reward or punishment. For example, a baby would not do anything that would make its mother upset since she scolded or punished it last time. B.F. Skinner was probably one of the most influential psychologists in the history and what among the first who believe in Behavioral Psychology, an approach to an explanation of human behaviors.

3) Philip G. Zimbardo took a socio-cultural approach to explain the cause of our behavior in his famous Stanford Prison experiment in August 1980. He put several students in the roles of prison guards and prisoners for a period of time. However, he had to cancel this experiment since the students were becoming more and more hostile. Though the experiment was called off, it is a solid prove of how our behaviors are shaped by our roles in society.

4) Introduction of ‘learned helplessness’ and ‘depression’ by Martin Seligman in June, 1973. Seligman suggested how ‘helplessness’ in adults can lead to depression, a state of mind which every one of us has faced during our lifetime. Seligman made an important discovery about learning and how important it is to be given roles and responsibility since young age in order to prevent depression when faced with miseries during adulthood. In his theory, Seligman took a cognitive perspective in identifying how depression occurs in adult.

5) Hans Selye and his discovery of ‘stress’ in March, 1978. Selye applied a theory from physics to human to see how human body reacts to threatening situations and found out the roles of stress in illness, mood, and performance. In my opinion, this is the most important discovery made in the century since people nowadays have to deal with stress almost every waking moment in their lives, and that Selye’s neuroscience perspective on stress helped us learn to cope with stress and other threats in our lives.

B I G I S S U E

A sample of a survey about our perspective on rationality/irrationality, satbility/change, and Nature/nurture have been distributed in class today, and its results after going through a calculation will indicate what kind of person am I, a pessimist, an optimist, a rationalist, or a dreamer? My results showed that I am in the middle between being rational and irrational, as well as between preferring changes and stability, and that I slightly agree on the subject that society shapes behaviors of people. After reviewing the questions and comparing it with the categories and the scores I get, I found that questions are somewhat relative to the purpose of the survey and my characteristics and perspective is well described by the results.
However, I believe that the results of this survey could be made more accurate by extending the length and variety of questions. Moreover, it could be applied to cover other kids of subject besides rationality, stability, and nature/nurture.

WHY we do WHAT we do?

Scientists have spent decades since the beginning of psychology to answer the question of why do we behave like we are today, and they came up with different theories based on their different perspectives and ways of research. A behaviorist might say that behaviors of an individual are shaped by his/her past experience of the consequence of that behavior(rewards or punishment) While a psychoanalyst says that our behaviors are motivated by means of survivals and desires. Others might say that we act according to our environment and people around us, or from examples. Some might say that our behaviors are inherited. In other words, it is our genetic differences that shape our behaviors. However, this question has not yet has a solid and correct answer to it.

my MOTIVATIONS of studying PSYCHOLOGY

Curiosity can be claimed to be one of the major reasons why I chose to study Psychology for that I have always wonder what makes people around me, or even myself, behave as we are today, and why does each and every one of us has a different personality. I believe that by studying how our behaviors are affected by our cognitive processes, chemical reactions, and/or disorders will bring me to a conclusion of why we act in such ways. Moreover, it would enable me to be able to cope with situations or problems that I might have to face in the future by applying what I have learned to my everyday life, and this might be a help to others that are troubled too. In addition, for every individual in this world has a different personality, I would be easier to deal with different kinds of people using the knowledge I gained from the class.