Well, that’s a wrap!

Well, since this is my last blog for . Psychology, I just thought I would reflect on what I’ve learned since being in this class. Throughout this class I found some quotes that I have saved from the book that I love. My favorite is: It’s your brain, not your heart that falls in love. The quote really makes a person wonder if we chose to love because we want to or if it really is our hearts that we fall in love with. I still think about the neurotransmitters at random times too. Most of the time when I’m watching TV they use these neurotransmitters in dialogues and when I hear one I usually point at the TV and yell that I know what they’re talking about. Then my parents look at me funny and shake their heads. I like it though when I realize that I’m applying what I have learned in psychology during random moments.

How Other People’s Expectations Control Us

This article was pretty simple to understand. It discussed how people change or act a different way by other people’s expectations. Through one study, men talked to women through microphones and headsets and were unable to actually see the woman’s appearance. Beforehand though, the men were given pictures of beautiful and not so beautiful women. By talking with these women they were to decipher if the woman they were talking to was beautiful or not. Through this study they proved the point that people expect attractive people to be more social and intelligent.

I found it interesting to see that people really do expect a person to behave in a certain way based on their appearance.

~Chapter 16 Blog… Not My Type~

The process of attribution is how one explains a person’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition. Basically, how one explains a person’s behavior based on actual factors and with no opinion. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition. So fundamental attribution error would be when one explains another’s behavior based on their opinions and jumping into conclusions about the person.

Stereotypes are the generalized belief about a group of people. Stereotypes are related to illusory correlations by both being a perceived belief of something nonexistent. For example, we are more likely to notice and recall only the instances that confirm what we believe.

~Personality~

I think that the environment around me and my family influences my personality. For an example, a child that grows up in a family that is always traveling and having game night, chances are that child is going to be an outgoing child because the family is interacting a lot. However, a child raised in a family where the parents are gone all the time and never goes out that often is likely to be a shy child. I found that the Humanistic Perspective theory made the most sense to me because it because I do believe that people try to be the best they are and want a positive outcome. I think that I have used all of the defense mechanisms in some way throughout my life. I think that I, along with a majority of people, used the projection defense mechanism.

In all honesty I did not enjoy the Moral Psychology video. Some of the comments in the video really made me a little annoyed, but I understand that this is only this man way of thinking. The other video was more interesting to watch and I found much of the information useful. It was interesting to see how one man changed his career based on his personality.

I thought that the tests were ok, but not anything special because I think that if a person happens to be in a bad mood when they take one of those tests can really change the results.

So it’s Thanksgiving…

With pretty much everyone going to family get-togethers and all the lovely meals this past week I thought I’d write something about the Thanksgiving week. One of the main things I hear around Thanksgiving time is “imagine the calories I’ll have to walk off this week!” and quite frankly it gets on my nerves. The same thing happens on every holiday. I think that people do tend to eat more than usual on holidays because there’s all that food and people don’t want to make their parents or in-laws feel bad that there is leftovers. Another things I hear around Thanksgiving of course is how the hunting season has been. Now I know that not everyone hunts and some people live in towns so they don’t have the same opportunities, but for those that do hunt it’s quite a treat. It’s hilarious to listen to all relatives and siblings when they come home from hunting, especially if they miss a deer because they can come up with some pretty fascinating stories. I find it interesting how most hunters just cant come clean and say “I missed.”

Think Yourself Healthy by Appreciating the Exercise You Already Do

I have heard a little about people thinking their way to lose weight, but I didn’t understand it much. This article was all about how a person could think their way into losing a couple pounds. In one experiment hotel attendants were told how much exercise they were already doing as a part of their job. Without doing any extra exercise or diets over a period of 4 weeks there was a significant change in all of their health measures. On average the weight loss was about a difference of 2 pounds. The article said it was like dropping a bag of sugar. It also claims that it’s the power of the mind-body link that helped lose the pounds.

I’m not sure what I believe when it comes to thinking about losing weight. I guess I don’t see how thinking would help a person lose weight. On the other hand, I do recall days where I just feel huge and other days when I’m comfortable with myself.

~Chapter 9~

This week went by pretty fast for me! I enjoyed all the riddles we did in class. The riddles really made me think in ways that I had to be creative and think outside of the box. I found it interesting how you can take the simplest things and turn them into a riddle like one we did; like the riddle about the glasses of water and how many people were on the train. I really like the riddle when I figured out which dog was in the green house and which dog ate crunchy kibbles. The other activity we did and we had to pick which was more common like cancer or heart disease in women. I learned a lot from this activity because I did not realize half of them. Overall, it was a fun week for me in psychology.