GAD Disorder

I am Generalized Anxiety Disorder classified as GAD. I worry excessively over things that might not even happen. I worry about all things pertaining to my life and do not have just one phobia. I have a difficulty relaxing and often am fatigued, irritable, and tense. I often cannot sleep and my muscles are tight. I cannot cope with stress. My fear and worry are uncontrollable and disrupt my every day life. I am a mentally and physically draining disorder.

My Personality Test Results

Today as we learned about different theories of personality, I took two personality tests to see how accurate they seemed to represent myself. The first test results claimed I have some "personality weakness" but I am "able to compensate for them." The results did not mention what the weaknesses were directly but said that I am diciplined and controlled on the outside but worriesome on the inside. I agree with the fact that I am an independent thinker and that I have a desire for approval. I also agree with the fact that I tend to be critical of myself but disagree with the suggestion that said I was insecure. The second test I took came from http://test.personality-project.org/survey/yourscores.php?G=2&Y=17&A=5.7&O=4&E=3.7&S=3.2&C=3.6&M=1&CI=12&Q=4. This test said that my highest rating was in the category of agreeableness where I scored in the 92 percentile. Agreeable people have an optimistic view of human nature and believe people are honest, decent, and trustworthy. In the categories of openness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness were all average. I believe these tests were pretty decent indicators of my personality. There were a few points made in the analysis that I did not agree with but overall I believe the questions were straight-forward and the results were pretty accurate.

Evolution of Nonverbal Emotion

Paul Eckman has made a considerable contribution to the psychological world. He earned his Ph. D. in clincal psychology from Adelphi University in 1958. His credited work comes from his research in facial and body expressions, also classified as nonverbal communication. The hit show Lie To Me was based off of his work and findings. His work teaches how to detect micro-expressions, or brief, split-second facial movements that detect emotions and lieing ability. A question that arises from his work revolves around the idea that nonverbal emotion can be explained by evolution. http://www.nonverbal-world.com/2010/10/letstry-to-understand-that-how-non.html ---> This article explains that nonverbal communication came about through evolution of survival skills. According to this article the ability to sense and react to sounds, smells, gestures, and postures are part of vital nonverbal communication for survival. The article goes on to explain emotion as “a pre-defined survival strategy or intention of reacting to environment or entities”. Through emotions, animals have learned to attract mates, know when danger is present, and develop a sense of belonging in the habitat of which they belong. Nonverbal emotion created a basis for survival and then evolved into a communication network used today.

Culture& Intelligence Reflection

  I believe that culure can play a large part in determining intelligence; but it doesn't have to. After reading the You Can't High Jump If the Bar Is Set Low article, I believe that by allowing kids to settle into racial stereotypes, you are an aid to their failure or lack of success. By stating what people think they know about other people's scores i.e. a man's score on a math test, a woman might not have as much drive to do better, thinking that she won't match up to a male taking the same test. The same situation can be applied to various racial groups as discussed in the article. A Study was conducted to see if sterotypes actually do play an important role in the success of students on various tests and the results concluded that by not stating stereotypic results before taking the test, racial minorities and females scored better than their counterparts who heard the stereotypes not in their favor. Steele, the psychologist who conducted the study set up a program at the University of Michigan gathered a random sampling of well-off and economically challeged students and held them to a high acedemic standard. These students did exceptionally well. The top two-thirds of the black students were as successful as their white peers. Compared to a control group of black students who took the "typical" path in college and accepted the stereotypes were not successful.  Steele's brother Shelby contradicted him and claimed that black students who do not do well suffer from "internalized" inferiority. He claims that students who face stereotypes should work harder and not cling to their status as a victim.

I think that exposure to different experiences and life situations (culture) plays an important role on the type of intelligence people have. I know that if I was told a boy would typically score better on a test, I would try really hard to score the same, if not better than the boy; yet I wouldn't hold myself accountable for a lower score, blaming my intelligence on my gender---which is a flaw in my thought process. I think that if teachers and professors hold everyone accountable to reach their fullest potential and knowledge regardless of statistics and stereotypes, there would be more success and less failure.

Forgetfulness

I feel as though my memory is not up to par but I learned that most information is forgotten within the first day of learning it. There are five key reasons why we as humans forget information. We could have encoding failure where our short-term memory does not encode information into long-term memory. Our memory can decay over time and our memories can degrade. We could have retrieval failure where our long-term memories are inaccessible. This is called the tip of the tongue phenomenon. (i.e. seeing someone's face but forgetting their name but you have a feeling that you know it) There is aslo a theory about motivated forgetting. We as people are motivated to forget painful, threatening, or embarassing memories. In class my group did a project to sense which is remembered more; a slideshow with pictures, or tangible objects one could feel. Our conclusion was that kids were close to half-and-half for each but more students remembered the objects they could feel. Each alternated between getting the movie first or the tangible objects first. This experiment could also be used to test proactive interference (old information interfering with new information) and retroactive interference (new innformation interfering with old information). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7isjhz1GpHg is a video of four ap psych students rapping about memory. Everyone learns and remembers in different ways and if song is a way that works for you, here you go!

Memory

Memory is something that everyone wants to maintain throughout their lifetime. Growing up paretns like to play the game "Memory" with their children to enhance memory skills young. I was never very good at this game though I felt as if I tried just as hard as other kids to remember where the matches were. This week in psych I think we explained why. I learned that memory can be affected by different factors and that people have short-term and long-term memory. I learned that some memories are automatic while others are take effort. Reading for understanding takes effort as does remembering where a handful of cards in a Memory game are. I learned that immediate,  brief, recordings are stored in sensory memory which is a temporary state. We then process information into a short-term memory where we encode through rehearsal. i.e. finding a memory card twice in the same spot after a turn has passed. Information goes into our long-term memory by experiences and connections that can be processed later. However, stages can be modified. Working memory is a second stage modification that picks-and-chooses what attention is drawn to in incoming stimuli and processes what it senses. I believe my problem as a child occured between my sensory memory and my working memory. According to http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/workout.aspx "In fact, working memory could be the basis for general intelligence and reasoning: Those who can hold many items in their mind may be well equipped to consider different angles of a complex problem simultaneously." I do not think I had a very good working memory because I found myself getting distracted from the game and my "pick-n-choose" method did not pick up the right information and therefore my memory of where i had chosen cards and what cards I chose did not implant itself in my mind.

Classical Conditioning

Ivan Pavlov was famous for hs classical conditioning experiements with learning and behaviorism. He noticed that when a dog was given food, the dog would salivate. To test learning ability, Pavlov paired feeding a dog wih a sound tone. After some time, the dog started salivating when he heard the sound tone. Pavlov's experiment lead him to create variables relating to the stimuli and responses he observed.  The natural reaction for the dog when given food was to salivate. Pavlov identifed this and called the response an unconditioned response (UR). The food given was the stimulus that triggered the salivating response so the food was called the unconditioned stimulus (US). Once the dog learned that a sound tone triggered food, the dog began salivating once the noise was heard. The learned response to the noise was called a conditioned response (CR). The tone was the learned and controlled stimulus that triggered a response and was called the conditioned stimulus (CS). Through Pavlov's work, many physchologists have realized that a process such as learning can be studied objectively. This site compares classical conditioning with operant conditioning with given examples. Operant conditioning is learning through consequences. One associates their own actions with positive and negative consequences, striving to recieve positive consequences. Try to see if you can distinguish between the two types of learning in the site listed below.


http://www.utexas.edu/courses/svinicki/ald320/CCOC.html