waldentwo

As each year of school starts back up, I promise myself that I will no longer procrastinate on my work, I will study more often, and I will be organized through the entire semester. And at first, I do all of these things, but as the semester ends I find myself struggling to study for finals, and looking back remembering all the long nights of homework and writing papers because I was too busy watching T.V. and being unproductive during the day. I have realized and understood that procrastination is only a punishment, and that I constantly am putting off my work because I become overwhelmed by the assignment itself, that I fear even beginning it. What I did not realize, however, is that is it proven that a person will be more productive by doing a little bit of work each day instead of cramming the work into one, or a few, day(s). Boice studied work habits of professors, which showed that those who worked a little bit each week were more productive than those who wo...

Before taking this course, I would have told you that I greatly lack self-control and don’t have any willpower. If I crave a specific food, it won’t take very long for me to buy and eat it because I have no control getting rid of my craving or the willpower to ignore it. However, as stated in Chapter 10, willpower doesn’t give reason to why someone has self-control. It does not explain with action or reason how or why a person is able to crave a specific food, but not actually consume the food. Skinner discusses some controlling responses that provide the reasoning behind a person’s self-control. However, these few controlling responses that Skinner discussed all have a lot to do with self-control and without self-control, it is difficult to use these approaches. In order to leave the money at home, you need to want to do so; in order to successfully deprive yourself of something, you need to control yourself to continue with deprivation as long as necessary. Each of ...

The topic of self-awareness and differentiating oneself from others greatly intrigues me to learn about. In Developmental Psychology, this was a prominent topic along with object permanence for children. I am constantly around children, especially young babies and watching them grow and learn is fascinating to me, which is why I was most interested in this part of the Developmental Psychology course. While I have never personally done or seen a video of the mark and mirror task, my professor showed us multiple videos of her daughter performing object permanence tests at different ages, showing her growth of learning and understanding. The videos consisted of the child sitting on the floor with a toy lying on the ground in front of her. Then, the toy would be covered by a towel, with the child watching, however the child did not look under the towel for the toy and easily seemed to forget the toy was even there until a certain age at which she learned that the toy d...

Bedtime tantrums are a common occurrence faced by many parents who are training their children to go to bed at night. I was surprised to find that parents are actually reinforcing this behavior. Reinforcement happens when a child throws a tantrum and gets out of bed, the parents now have to pay attention to this child. My first thought would be to leave the child in their room, not paying any attention at all to their tantrum, and eventually they will fall asleep. This would be using the process of extinction. And research has shown that this is a highly effective procedure, "results revealed that children who underwent the extinction procedure experienced considerably greater improvement in their sleep patterns than the children in the other two conditions" (321). Extinction, however, suffers drawback because many parents find it impossible to ignore their children's pleas for attention. To help ease parents into this procedure, steps have been created. For example, wait...

"Reflexes are the most basic form of elicited behavior. A reflex is a relatively simple, automatic response to a stimulus" (96). I like to think my reflexes are up to par, especially my startle response! A startle response is a defensive reaction to a sudden, unexpected stimulus. I found this interesting because I am startled very easily. I was once taking out bread to make a sandwich, when I noticed mold started to appear on the bread. Just seeing the mold startled me, I guess because I was not expecting to see it! Reflexes are tied to survival, one example is food consumption. A chain of reflexes, including, salivation, peristalsis, and secretions of digestive juices, all take part in our consumption of food. Vomiting is an example of a protective reflex, helping to expel any potentially poisonous substances from our digestive system. The flexion response is also a protective reflex, in which we automatically move our hand away from a hot or sharp object that we may have co...

"Animal research has greatly contributed to our understanding and treatment of serious diseases and illnesses, as well as to our understanding of basic physiological processes" (84). The textbook discusses advantaged and disadvantages to why animals are used in research, when our ultimate goal is usually to discover principles that are applicable to humans. Two of the advantages the textbook uses is that by using animals for research the ability to control the genetic makeup of the animal, and the ability to control their learning history. One example is rats, they can be bred so that entire batches are genetically identical. Identical twins can provide the same identical makeup needed for research, but generally the number of people that can be obtained is quite limited. The animals can also have identical upbringings, and therefore their learning history is usually very limited and identical. The third advantage the book offers is that by using animals researchers are able ...

Communication for human beings is based largely in our unique use of language.  In the text is actually says the “language has often been used as the defining feature of human beings”   it is what “makes out species unique” (Powell, p.536).  Though language is how we think of communication the most basic definition of communication is “the process of sending and receiving signals of some sort” So in its most basic form communication can be looking at someone a certain way and them responding to that in a way they find appropriate. But as humans we rely on the complexity of language to convey the exact feeling and thoughts we are having to completely communicate with someone.   The amount of language we process on a day to day basis makes us not always realize how complex language as a form of communication really is.  When you stop to think about it although language is the way to exactly portray wants and emotion many people use it much more abstractly so i...