Chapter One: Culture shapes our behavior. Culture is enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. My family has many different "cultures" that have been passed down from family to family. One thing we've all grown accustomed to is going there every Sunday to have a get together; we either have a cook out, or we have pizza. With the weather being cold out, we have pizza, and sit on the couch and watch TV and talk. Everyone eats and eats until they can't fit anything more into them. This has become a tradition in our family. Another thing that's part of my boyfriend's culture is hugging his family every time he sees them. Since they don't see each other a lot, that's their way of showing affection and making sure that the others know they care about them.
Chapter Two: The amygdala is neural clusters in the limbic system that are linked to emotion. Over my spring break I went wedding dress shopping with my dad's fiance Jen. As she tried on dress after dress, she felt many different emotions. I swear she tried on at least 50 dresses, and she found two that she absolutely loved. They were from different places, so as the second "loved" dress was tried on, she had to decide which one she wanted more. As she walked in it, and moved around, seeing how it looked on her, she began to smile. Her body was showing that she was happy; she was excited and joyful. She had found the dress she wanted. When we left, she gave a sigh of relief, as she realized the most important part was over with.
Chapter Three: Selective attention happens to all of us; focusing on one thing, and not realizing anything else going on around us. The cocktail party effect came into play when Mark and I went to a birthday party for his niece and nephew. We went rollerblading, and as everyone was gathering and talking; catching up, I heard people talking about us. Mark's brother in law was talking to him about our relationship, and as I heard my name being mentioned, my focus from the little girl I was helping, went to the conversation they were having. This showed my selective attention being broken because my name was mentioned.
Chapter Four: There were many studies done on aggression, and studies have shown that guys are more aggressive than girls. Aggression is physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. I experienced this at the birthday party as well. Mark and some other guys were rollerblading, trying to knock each other down. After awhile they made it into a game, where it was 3 on 1 guy. The guy that was being chased had to make it around the rink 3 times before being checked or he lost. I couldn't understand why anybody would want to do this. As the day when on, I noticed that no girls were participating in their crazy games of checking each other, and making each other fall. This proved the studies of aggression in men is more than in women.
Chapter Five: In Erikson's stages there is an Elementary Stage dealing with kids ages 6 years to puberty. In this stage kids are dealing with Industry vs. Inferiority. They either learn the pleasure of applying themselves to a task or feel inferior. When I was at the roller rink, I was watching the little kids skate around, and tried to help them learn. I would hold their hand, and go around the rink. One time I helped a little girl, and as we neared the end of going around once, I asked her if she wanted to go again, and she told me she wanted to try to do it by herself. When she came back I asked how she did, and she was so happy because she did it all on her own. The rest of the time she went by herself; she didn't become inferior to the task, and accomplished it by herself.
Chapter Six: Knowing that the color of an object doesn't change, even though you perceive that it changes is color constancy. Mark and I went to a movie Saturday night, and as he was bringing me back home I was looking at the houses that I've seen a million times. They looked so different to me in the dark, and I was just like everything looks so different at night, not even knowing that I was dealing with psychology. Only later when my dad gave me the blogging assignment did I realize that talking about that was a part of psychology.
Chapter Seven: Classical conditioning is a type of learning by linking two or more stimuli and anticipating an event. Being home with my dog this week I got to take him outside while my family was working. And I realized that every time I brought him back into the house he would sit at the closet door waiting for me to give him a treat. When I would leave, and have to get shoes out of the closet he would come sit there, thinking that he got a treat. He conditioned that every time someone was in the closet he would get a treat, because we would go in the closet to give him a treat when we came back inside.
Chapter Eight: Making facts go from short term to long term memory can be done in many different ways. Over spring break, I met some of Mark's family that I haven't met before, and some I just forgot their names. When I learned their names again, I said them over and over in my brain, as i was looking at them so I wouldn't forget again. Now next time I see them, I will remember their names with their faces because I recited the names over and over.
Chapter Nine: We hired new girls at work, and over break I worked a lot with them to help train them and get them ready to work by themselves. I thought that my job was easy, because I had been working there for 2 years, but as I trained them, and sold items, I realized that it's not as easy as it looks. There's a lot of language, and communication and thinking that goes on with selling products and explaining things to people. In order to do it, we first have to understand what we're talking about, and know about the different things our products bring to the people. We need to be able to read others and know how to say things to get them to buy. Semantics are a set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a give language; it's also the study of meaning. We have to use semantics for people who aren't as educated as us, to understand what we're talking about. We have to "dumb down" our vocabulary so that people aren't overwhelmed by what we're saying, and want to buy the products.
