You don’t know me!

I can almost guarantee that anyone who has not seen me outside of class has made a fundamental attribution error about my personality. As I said in my first blog post, I am terrified of speaking in class, so people in my classes think I am extremely shy and probably afraid of social settings. This really isn’t true at all. I am usually a very confident person and I’m not really all that shy either.

It’s interesting that we all make errors like this one. I’ll admit; I had a roommate last year who I determined was a cold, hateful person, because she was always yelling at me and my other roommate in the middle of the night. Looking back I really doubt that she’s the horrible person I thought she was at the time. In fact her yelling probably had a lot less to do with her bad attitude than the fact that my other roommate likes to scream all of her words when she’s intoxicated. (This was almost a daily occurrence, and it says a lot about my other roommate. God bless her poor drunken little heart.)

We recognize when people incorrectly judge our personalities based on isolated instances. Many of us even have a good understanding of the social-cognitive perspective of personality without ever having read about it. We change our personalities because of and/ or to manipulate our environment. For example, I am a lot more carefree around my fiance than I am when I’m talking to my boss, so why are we so quick to judge a person based on an interaction in one environment or in one instance? I’m sensing an epic battle between what we know to be true logically and what we believe to be true with our gut. Sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and realize that other people are probably very similar to us. We have dynamic responses to different environments, so logically, other people are probably the same way. Snap judgments might make us feel like we know someone, but really we’ve only seen a snapshot of their life. You would have to know someone very well to be able to attribute a certain behavior to someone’s personality. (Disclaimer: Just because I know this does not mean I won’t still make this mistake. I’m human like that.)

I think my bootstraps are broken : /

How many times have you heard the saying “pull yourself up by your bootstraps?” I am someone who has an internal locus of control. I believe that I control my own destiny, and that if I don’t accomplish something, the only one I can blame is myself. I used to think that people with an external locus of control, people who believe that outside forces control their destiny, were just looking for someone else to blame for their failings.

After reading the section of the book on prejudice, I’m beginning to wonder if many people with an external locus of control have a point. What if their lives really are out of their hands?

Ugly confession time: I have been guilty of prejudice against the poor. I won’t lie. (It’s sad and I’m ashamed, but there it is.) I have looked at a homeless person on more than one occasion and felt sickened that they were standing on the street trying to take my hard earned money instead of just getting a job. (Ugh…That felt icky to write.) See, the thing is, I don’t know this person. I don’t know their story. For all I know, this person could have had a wonderful job at a great company when they had to quit to take care of their dying spouse, and when they returned to the job market they were unable to find work and ended up on the street. It’s a perfectly plausible story, but do I consider that when I see an unwashed person standing on the corner with a cardboard sign? No.

The worst part is that even if this person did have a good job in the past it would be extremely difficult for them to get a new  job at the same level. I can only imagine an employer looking over someone’s resume, asking why they were unemployed for so many years, finding out the answer, and promptly ending the interview. I mean, who wants to hire someone who was so irresponsible that they became homeless? (Just-World Phenomenon) We must have worked harder or wanted a better life more, right? (Us and Them)

Is this person really in control of their own destiny anymore? Can they have the America dream if they just really, really want it? I wonder…

Deindividuation=The Internet

Have you ever been on an Internet message board? If you have, then you probably understand what I mean by the title of my post. If you haven’t, well, let me sum up the strange world of groups on the Internet. I visit a site called “the nest.” On the more popular boards there are groups of regulars who discuss everything from politics to becoming a stay at home mom. (It really is more fun than it sounds.) The reason I make the connection between message boards, like this one, and deindividuation is because anonymity  turns these seemingly normal women into evil witches who lack the ability to think for themselves. I know that sounds harsh, but I have seen these women tear into each other over the weirdest things.

For example, one day one of the more vocal people on the board started a thread about how getting married before your late twenties/ early thirties means that you are basically an immature child and you are doomed to divorce. Another woman who was not a regular came forward to explain that she was only twenty, but she was already married and very happy. What happened next was basically a bloodbath. The regular posters tore into this poster saying all kinds of nasty things. Not really a typical response to a seemingly low key debate (if you could even call it that). I can only assume that without the arousal of the group attack and the anonymity of the internet that these women would never have responded in such a visious way. Surely they don’t act this way in real life, right? (Right!?!)

The irony is that a few hours later another regular started another post about how they were a young bride like the girl who got ridiculed earlier. At that point, many other people, including some who had been involved in the earlier post, explained that they had also married young. Now, if the subject of marrying young comes up there is a discussion, but no one ends up getting ripped apart. I guess it’s true that one individual can turn the tide.

The internet is a strange beast. Hiding behind an anonymous screename can be liberating. It lets you express yourself without fear of judgment by people you know. On the other hand, if you get caught up in the frenzy of a group attack, you might say things that are completely out of character for you and lose your sense of self in the process.

Push/Pull

I would just like to take this blog to explain my appreciation for human factors psychologists. These wonderful people are responsible for making sense of a world that engineers (AKA people who are smarter that me) try to complicate with their helpful (cough, cough) inventions. Thoughtful creator of my toothbrush-like dental floss holder with the disposable heads, I like your invention, I really do. If I can’t figure out how to put a new head on though, the convenience of your item is kind of overruled by its lack of cost-effectiveness. A human factors psychologist would step in at this point and explain that putting a different connector piece on the product would make more sense to people like me. This change in product would result in me keeping my dental floss  and my gums squealing with delight.

This issue arises more often than you would think. It’s very easy for inventors and engineers to get caught up in the amazement of how something works and forget about the ease of function. For example, there are push doors in the inside of the movie theater near my house. The doors are basically grouped in pairs. A door that opens by pushing on the right side has its pair to the right that opens when you push on its left side. ( I’d find a graphic and make sense of this, but I’m lazy and will assume you understand.) The exception to this rule is one random door at the end. It doesn’t have a pair and opens when you push on the left side. For some reason everyone assumes it opens when you push on the right side. I assume that everyone uses the context clues of the other doors to determine which side to push, and I have seen more people try to push that door open the wrong way than I can count. I guess people lack perceptual adaptation where I live. (a nice way to say we’re kind of slow) The installer probably thought that it made more sense for people to exit in the direction of the parking lot and not the wall next to the door, but we just don’t see it that way. (We’re a tough crowd to please I guess.) Thankfully, someone finally switched the door around, and people can now be spared the embarrassment of trying to shove a door open on the wrong side. Thank you human factors psychologists for making the world make sense to us regular folk. I really do appreciate it.

Placebo Effective?

Experiments require a control group and a variable group. In the case of drug studies, the control group is given a placebo instead of the experimental drug. In a way, it seems a little wrong to tell people that they’re getting treatment in a study when in fact they are part of the lucky bunch chosen to gobble up sugar pills to treat their [fill in debilitating disease here]. Here’s the trade-off though. If everyone was actually put on the experimental drug, then the placebo effect would make people sing the praises off a drug that might not necessarily work. That outcome pretty much defeats the entire point of a drug study.

Right now, the solution to this issue is to not tell anyone which participants are in each group, so they can study the actual effects of the drug without the influence of outside forces. (opinions about the drug, wanting to feel better, etc.) Call me crazy, but I don’t see how these precautions actually help the study. After all, as long as you think you could be on the pill you will succumb to the placebo effect. You want the drug to work, you want to feel better, so you do. Researchers looking at the end results will expect to see a greater effect for people who are actually on the drug. Should the drug be considered a failure if people on the drug and those who aren’t have approximately the same results?

I wonder about this. The mind is a powerful thing. Treatments such as cognitive therapy show us that we can change how we feel based on how we think about things. It may be difficult to see the positive results of a drug through this fog of all around good feelings, but in the end a drug that works should keep up these good feelings for a life-time while the placebo effect will fade. After all, if the brain alone can make a person’s major depression disappear for good then they probably didn’t need a drug to begin with.

The placebo effect is a tricky thing. You cannot really stop participants from getting swept up in the excitement of a new drug, and doing a drug study without a participants knowledge might be frowned upon by an ethics committee. On the other hand, as long as the subjects know about the drug your data will be affected. (tricky, tricky)

Paranoid? That’s just crazy ;)

I’d say this is as good of an example of schizophrenia as I have ever seen.  (“It should be noted that Hulu is the devil’s plaything,” grumbles my poor fiance who has been trying to get this video to work for over an hour. Your efforts will not be forgotten.) Let’s count the many symptoms of schizophrenia Christopher Walken exhibits in this video, shall we?

1) Delusions of persecution (paranoia)- This symptom is probably the most obvious. The man is afraid of plants for goodness sake! He thinks they are out to get him, and even goes as far as to say that if they attacked, he would would have expected it all along.

2) Disorganized Speech- More specifically, it seems like he makes illogical leaps in logic.  After all, saying that putting googly eyes on plants will help you know where you stand with them because you can look into their eyes, really doesn’t take into account the fact that plants don’t have a brain or feelings for that matter.

3) Hallucinations- This symptom may be kind of a stretch, but he does mention that one of the reasons grass is so untrustworthy is because it’s so quiet. I took this statement to mean that  he believes that the other plants might not be so…ummm… anti-social.

Seeing as this class has obviously given me the experience necessary to make a diagnosis (I kid, I kid), I think it’s pretty safe to say that this character suffers from schizophrenia. It makes me feel a bit bad for laughing, but I’m sure the writers didn’t have poking fun at mental illness in mind when they wrote the script.

Unfortunately, Schizophrenia is no laughing matter when it is diagnosed in real life. This mental disorder is a life-long problem more often than not. Behavior therapies and cognitive therapies would be unable to help with this disorder for the most part because of its strong ties to biological causes. If this character were real, the most helpful therapy for him would be continuous drug therapy. Who knows, maybe with the right medication he may even be able to garden without fear of imminent  strangulation by fern. (One can only hope)

No…really…You guys did a great job!

Mom and Dad, it’s time we had a conversation. (One you will never read, thank goodness) I read recently that parenting is a bit difficult (said with sarcasm and love) and that people give a lot of conflicting advice on the subject. Well, as hard as you two tried, my psychology book says that the parenting style you guys have felt pretty good about for approximately 23 years now is, well, wrong. Oops! In fact, your philosophy doesn’t even fall into any of the three identifiable parenting styles. Somehow you managed to combine authoritarian (Do it because I said so!) and permissive (Oh, you didn’t do it? Well…that’s okay.) parenting into some strange hybrid of fail. The book says that for me to be the well-adjusted person I am today you should have raised me authoritatively by setting rules, enforcing them, and explaining why. Something seems amiss here, because not only am I not currently a shut-in who robs banks on the side, I have good self-esteem and am easy to get along with.

So, where did you go right? Well, as this class has taught me, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a greater percentage of people with authoritative parents are well-adjusted doesn’t mean that parenting is reason why. They could also be balanced individuals because of their level of education and/ or life experiences. In addition, they might be a happy, healthy people, because they surround themselves with happy, healthy people. (Crazy, right?)  The point is, there are many reasons correlative data could have appeared, and they have nothing to do with parenting.

There you go Mom and Dad. Your unique brand of parenting couldn’t have harmed me if you tried. (Dedicated to my parents who really are awesome no matter what this post may imply)

Don’t worry Freud! I’ve got your back!

…Well, I kind of understand where you’re coming from anyway. I know Freud has lost a lot of credibility over the years with his whole making things up with no real way to test his philosophy.  True, deciding life operates in a certain way based on an untestable personal feeling may not be the most scientific approach. I have to say though, sometimes when people make stabs in the dark they actually hit something. Freud’s theory about the id, ego, and superego may be a bit iffy and his conclusion that our personality is fueled by sex and aggression gets the side-eye from me; however, I have to support Freud’s one glimmer of truth: repression.

I have to agree with Freud; repression as a defense mechanism is real. Sometimes things happen or we think things that are so terrible we even hide them from ourselves. I speak from personal experience in this matter, so even if repression doesn’t get a lot of support, I offer my support as a witness. (Maybe Freud and I can start a club or something. It may not have many members, but we’ll FEEL we are right. HaHa)

How can this be? How is it possible that Freud might have had a valid point? In class we discussed that stress can either help or hurt memory. In the short term, a stressful event can heighten your senses as the hormones pump through your brain and neurons communicate at an accelerated rate. Long-term stress or very stressful situations can result in the exact opposite result. The body’s overwhelming stress response can either narrow your focus or destroy connections in the brain. Narrowing focus could result in encoding failure as a person focuses on one thing instead of the whole scene. Destroying connections would lead to decay as it becomes increasingly difficult to find a connection that leads to retrieval.Your own nervous and endocrine system have effectively worked in tandem to hide damaging memories from you. There you have it. A biological explanation for repression.

I may not be a scientist, and my knowledge of the brain is approximately 4 weeks old, but I think this explanation might be possible. ( I can hear the scientific community collectively chuckling.) Oh well Freud, I tried.

This is just between us, right?

Recently in class we discussed that many people have a dirty first apartment, because they either did not learn to clean or learned and the behavior became extinct when reinforcement was discontinued. Well…welcome to my life readers. Oh no, I’m not the one with the problem. You see, it’s my fiance who is perfectly contented to live in filth. To sum up, if you tell him to clean he will, but he will never think of it on his own, and reminding him gets tiring.

How can we solve this battle of the sexes you ask? Operant Conditioning! Let me preface this by saying that I know it’s wrong to “train” your significant other. I do understand that… but desperate times people, desperate times… Anyway, the first thing I thought we should tackle was getting him to put his dishes in the dish washer. Now, I had two options, punishment or reinforcement. As much as I want to smack him upside the head with the spoon he forgot to put away (Just kidding), I am not his mother and, therefore, punishment didn’t feel like a good option. Reinforcement was the way to go.

I went back and forth between positive reinforcement (Yay! You put the dishes away! You get to choose where we go out to eat this week) and negative reinforcement (If you put your dishes in the dishwasher, you won’t have to help me unload the dishwasher later.) I kept these reinforcers continuous at first, and after about a week I switched to partial reinforcement. Considering I lack the obsessive nature to actually count how many times he puts dishes away, I’d say I’m probably using a variable interval reinforcement schedule. He gets rewarded about once a week now. (That last sentence really does make it sound like a lab experiment and not my life, but oh well, it works!)

Now I’m just hoping this behavior does not go extinct. I’ve got to get the idea that cleaning is a necessary thing stored in his long-term memory. Maybe adding a chore chart into the mix will give him at least one retrieval cue to help him remember. It’s a work in progress. (Oh, and a little generalization couldn’t hurt, right?)

Hello, My Name is (fill in blank), and…

I have a phobia. I guess that is not the biggest surprise in the world considering the prevalence rate(7-8% seeking treatment). Unfortunately, simply knowing that I’m in good company doesn’t really dull the fear at all. I guess it’s confession time… What’s my phobia, you ask? I’m afraid of voicing my personal thoughts and opinions in an academic setting in front of my classmates. I’m not sure why participating in class discussion is so scary for me. For some reason I think that if I speak up I will inevitably give the wrong answer and everyone will laugh at me in their heads. It’s a rather stupid fear, because I’m aware that most people wouldn’t remember my comments five seconds after I’ve said them much less think about them after class is over. So…irrational fear? Check!

This fear of class participation has definitely interfered with my life. I have lost large chunks of my grade in classes because of this phobia, and the nervous shaking, sweating, and heartburn that result from even thinking that I will have to speak up are rather unfortunate as well. Does my need to run to the store for tums after class count as interference? I guess I can check off “interferes with daily life” as well.

How did I develop such an intense phobia of class discussion? I have no idea. I assume classical conditioning played a role in its development, but I have no recollection of this. I don’t recall ever being made fun of because of something I’ve said in class or someone disliking me for a comment I’ve made. I can only assume that I had an experience so intensely embarrassing and horrible that I learned this phobia through one trial learning. I suppose I tried speaking out once and it was so horrible I never tried it again. Who knows? I am certainly not a psychologist (she says as she diagnoses herself with a phobia). Thankfully, my fear of class discussion is not generalized. I will speak up for myself in other situations, and actually enjoy debate/discussion with anyone as long as it’s in a friend or one-on-one situation.

Well, the best I can do is hope this phobia makes its way to extinction. Who knows? Maybe facing my fears with this blog is a step in the right direction.