Blog Post 8

In classical conditioning, you learn to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. Seeing leaves change colors and feeling the temperature become cooler has always been one of the first signs that summer is turning into fall. Therefore, every year when the leaves start to change we expect cool temperatures and a new season too. With operant conditioning you link a behavior with a consequence. Positive response to the behavior will strengthen the behavior. Getting a good night’s sleep and then doing well on a test suggests that sleeping more will help you do better in school, so you keep doing it in order to get the same result. I think classical and operant conditioning has been crucial for humans and animals alike. Conditioning is what has allowed us to adapt to our environments and learn about our surroundings. If I hadn’t been able to learn from operant conditioning I also would not have learned to distinguish between good and bad behaviors. That means I may have never learned that brushing my teeth and flossing every day was a good thing or that having my shoes tied would keep me from tripping over my feet.

In my example for operant conditioning I said behaviors are linked with a consequence, or more specifically positive or negative reinforcements. My FBLA state adviser wants everybody on the team to check their email and respond to emails quickly so every now and then an email will say “the first person to respond to this email and finish the assignments below will receive a surprise in the mail.” Sometimes the surprise is candy or an FBLA keychain. Even though I never know what the surprise might be or which email is going to be the email that has the surprise inside, I still check my email often, just in case. This proves that positive reinforcement strengthens behavior by providing a pleasant stimulus.

Negative reinforcement also strengthens behavior, instead by reducing or removing an undesirable stimulus. Negative reinforcement sounds like punishment but the two are actually quite different. Negative reinforcement removes a punishing event. If I don’t have my homework done on the weekends my parents won’t allow me to go out with my friends. The idea of not being able to see my friends reinforces my behavior of always finishing my homework as soon as possible so I can have fun. If I didn’t finish my homework, the punishment would be staying home.

Punishment decreases the behavior it follows, but it won’t necessarily stop the behavior. Honestly, I have a hard time recalling a time where I’ve been punished. I’m a bit of a goody-goody, but I remember when I was younger that my brother would swear a lot so my parents would spank him and wash his mouth out with soap to get him to stop. Doing this made my brother stop swearing in front of my parents but he still swore in front of other people. My parents were successful in decreasing his behavior of swearing, but they didn’t end the behavior entirely.

Learning about learning has been a bit of an eye opening experience. First of all I’d never really thought about what the definition of learning is. Any time I learn something new I have to link it with a previous experience or something else I have learned or I have to learn by watching somebody else. Now I know that those processes are associative and observational learning, respectively. It doesn’t necessarily change how I think of things, but now I know why I think and learn the way I do. And when I don’t understand something or when I want to change something about myself I can use what I’ve learned to teach myself new behaviors.

Blog Post #7

Sensation is what occurs when our sensory receptors and our nervous system receive stimulus energies from our surroundings. We can sense sights, sounds, taste, touch, and feeling. Perception is organizing and interpreting the sensory information into something more useful. You can sense the smell of flowers but you wouldn’t be able to recognize that you were smelling flowers without perception.

I found prosopagnosia (face blindness) to be one of the most interesting things in the chapter. I find it interesting that some people can not recognize faces – even the faces of their good friends and family. I used to feel bad when I couldn’t always put names and faces together of people I met at leadership conferences, but the thought of not being able recognize of my best friends would be so much worse. It’s one thing to forget someone you only met for a few minutes but to forget a face you’ve known for years is difficult to grasp. I definitely appreciate that I can sense and perceive faces, and I will definitely try harder to remember faces, but I won’t feel nearly as bad.

I also read “The Attentional Spotlight” on Psyblog. The main point of the article was that our eyes could focus on one thing, but our attention could be focusing on another. For example you could be gazing towards the teacher in class, but your attention could be focused on the peripherals of your vision. The blog also examined a study showing that attention moves faster than the eye. In other words, you could notice a detail before actually looking at it, just by using your peripheral perception. Our attention is spotlighted on what interests us instead of just what we point our eyes at. It makes a lot of sense to me. There are a lot of times when we can be looking at a person in the middle of a conversation, but we are more concerned about something else that’s going on around us. In everyday life we don’t always have control over what we’re paying attention to. And sometimes it may seem like everybody’s paying attention when really they’re distracted by something else.

Blog Post #6

One thing that I learned in the interview assignment is how different things are for teens today compared to teenagers years ago. The woman I interviewed is probably around 85 years old, and she said that back then money wasn’t as a big a deal – she had to make her own fun. Her friends would often walk, bike, or skate to get places and they would play softball or go ice-skating depending on the weather. Going out to movies was rare and was usually set aside for dates. Now a days we’re always driving ourselves around and could go to the movies as often as we want, as long as we have money. We also tend to date more too. Vi started dating a senior at the end of her sophomore year of high school and then married him a couple years later. Most people today have a few relationships in high school and in college before getting married, I think it’s really interesting to see how much things have changed, but I think I’d prefer to be a teenager in the present-day, just because we have a lot of exciting opportunities available to us.

I think the “Parenting and Adolescence” video made a lot of sense. When I was younger I would fight with my parents a lot, usually over small things, but now the same issues are not a big deal. I think my time as an adolescent was a little different than some, just because my dad has always had a lot of health issues and there has always been extra stress in the house because of that. I think that all of my experiences will in some way have an impact on who I am as an adult because some of them have showed me what’s truly important in life and have defined me as person.

In Chapter 4 I learned about gender schemas. I thought it was really interesting how young children learn behaviors that are typically characterized to their gender i.e. girls play should play with dolls and boys should play with trucks. I had never really given it a whole lot of thought before – I figured part of had to do with the toys their parents gave them to play with, but really its more about what the children observe that makes them think they need to act a certain way and play with kids of the same gender.

In chapter 5 I learned about how we develop cognitively from infants to adults. Toddlers and small children are constantly active in trying to reason and learn about the world around them, and they do this by making schemas or mental molds of their experiences. As we all get older we form countless schemas that allow us to reason better than younger children. I thought this was interesting to think about it, because again I’ve never really thought about why we develop the way we do, and this chapter has answered a lot of questions I never even realized I had.

Blog Post #5

In this chapter I learned the importance of nature and nurture. I thought that personality was something that was affected by the nurture aspect, but surprisingly I was wrong. Our parents can influence our manners and political and religious beliefs, but our personalities are one thing they cannot control.

The videos talked about evolutionary psychology and natural selection. Evolutionary psychology and natural selection explains why animals and humans mate the way they do. Males search for healthy, fertile-appearing partners while women search for men with resources to help support their offspring. This information wasn’t really surprising, but it does make a lot of sense and applies to real life for nearly all of us.

I also learned more about the differences between fraternal and identical twins. (I didn’t know that Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen weren’t identical). I thought it was interesting that even separated twins can end up with very similar personality traits, and that identical twins in general are usually more alike than fraternal twins. I thought it was creepy that the twin brothers in the book shared the same name, habits, health issues, and pet name. Of course not all cases are extreme as this one, but it’s still really interesting to think about!