Final Project Post

Like some of you at first I expected this class to be very much the same as the majority of my other psychology courses. However, while some of the material was already familiar to me, I discovered shortly into chapter 1 that the text had an array of topics I had never covered before. More specifically none of my other classes have ever covered Aristotle's theories and the laws of association which is mentioned as soon as page 6. While the debate mentioned between Aristotle and Plato eventually boils down to nature versus nurture, something we have all studied, I found the way in which the text approached the topic to be interesting and refreshing, which is something I experienced many times throughout reading the book.

The topic I found to be most interesting was the section of chapter 5 on understanding phobias. As I mentioned in a previous post both myself and my sister have had to deal with a phobia for a large part of our lives so it was great to see how these fears may have developed or how I could go about treating them. Until taking this course I never thought of any fear I had as something that could have been conditioned but I learned that the fear response that I felt was most likely caused by the association of a previously non-harmful or minimally harmful stimulus which can lead to irrational fear.

This video discusses phobias in children and how it may be treated or transferred from their parents. The treatment process described in the video is similar to that of systematic desensitization. If you are interested youtube has a ton of videos on phobias, both on how to cure them and just showing people's crazy reactions to their fear.

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