Blog Post #2 - Related to "Critically Thinking" Chapter

Research is important for many reasons. In psychology, basic research is necessary to provide general information. Applied research expands on basic research – instead of focusing on general knowledge, information is gathered on specific topics or areas of study within psychology. The research gathered allows psychologists, or scientists in general, to learn more about a problem so they can form hypotheses, conduct experiments, and form new conclusions from the resulting data.

While perusing the Psyblog website, the blog titled“18 Ways Attention Goes Wrong” jumped out at me. After reading through it I noticed that several of the items apply or have applied to my life at one point or another. The first one that I noticed was #4 – Pain. The post talks about how chronic pain can pull your attention away from a task and force you to constantly re-focus. Last year I had a headache for nearly two months. The pain was excruciating, and I remembered how hard it was for me to do my homework most nights. Sometimes I would end up re-reading the same passage over and over again without realizing it and without getting the main idea. I also found #7 – Errors of automaticity, and #9 – Ironic processes of control, to be quite interesting. Errors in automaticity occur when we become so set into a routine or behavior. Every morning I have the same routine of washing my face and brushing my teeth, and I know I’ve occasionally had moments where I’ve been distracted by other thoughts and have almost but soap on my toothbrush instead of toothpaste. Errors like these happen to a lot of people. In my final choice, ironic processes of control, I have learned that too much attention can be bad too. There have been times when I have been so focused about something, like shooting an arrow at a target that I’ve actually missed the target entirely.

In this class I have learned about the different perspectives of psychology. It never occurred to me that psychologists would study why we turn red in the face when we get angry (neuroscience). Some of the other perspectives I had heard of in some shape or form and others surprised me. However, they all answer specific questions related to psychology. No single area is more or less important because they all benefit the psychologists and researchers that study behaviors and mental processes. I also learned how misleading charts and graphs can be and that the wording of survey questions can make a difference in the results. Conducting research and representing data can be very tricky and has an impact on how we perceive and interpret information.