Racial Profiling - link & response for last week

I thought the video we watched last Thursday was really interesting (despite the design and presentation flaws we discussed in class). It led me to think more about the depiction of certain problems in the media, and how psychologists can influence those issues.

In our book, we learned about the alleged racial differences in intelligence and how those research prospects still influence our thinking today. As mentioned in our book, the differences in race (not just in intelligence, but in any aspect of life) tend to be an "American obsesssion."

And as we saw with the Dateline, 20/20, or 60 minutes spot we watched in class, people still tend to "prefer" one race over another, and this leads me to believe that people still see differences between people of different races. Lots of people will claim, "I don't see color," but the research presented in the video we watched tells otherwise. Will this ever go away?

An every day scenario where racial prejudice might come into play is in the phenomenon of racial profiling by police. I found this Time feature article pretty relevant and the interesting part is that it gives multiple viewpoints on this issue. It's kind of long, but I think you'll also find it interesting. (Here also is the photo essay on this subject.)

CBT - link and response for last week

While talking about behaviorism, I was thinking about how it applies directly to our lives as psychology students. Beyond knowing about classical and operant conditioning (which helps us shape our professors to stand in corners), how can it directly help us if we decide to go into careers in psychology?

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a type of therapy that we've all heard about. It is a combination of studying behavior (what we do) and studying the cognition that causes our behavior (what we think). It's an interesting way that we can take Watson's idea of the "prediction and control" of behavior and apply it to a theraputic, clinical practice. I think it even helps to combine the psychology of the late 19th century (before behaviorism), the study of consciousness and its processes, with behaviorism.

Going beyond that, I was thinking about a discussion question I would have liked to ask in class last week. Do you agree or disagree with the "prediction" aspect of Watson's goal of psychology? How about the "control" aspect? I think it's interesting that he lumped the two together. In earlier psychology, we were interested in reaction time, for example, which would help us to predict aspects of human consciousness. However, when did control come into the picture? When did it become desirable to control humans through the study of their mind/consciousness/behavior? This is something that I think applied psychology really influenced. Without applied psychology, we never would have thought to control aspects of people, especially not their behavior. Yet with the research produced in the subfield of behaviorism, we learned that people can be predicted, controlled, and manipulated. This is such a far cry from any ideas that the earliest psychologists had, but they are some of the most pervasive ideas to this day.

Freud - link & response for this week

I am fascinated by Freud. In our readings for this week (and the movie we watched on Tuesday), we get the impression that Freud and his ideas were very controversial and disliked. In his time, he was sort of a rebel. He was bringing up ideas that seemed so bogus and unscientific. He attributed everything (it seems like) to sexuality. But he really did contribute a lot to the field and I think it's telling that pretty much anyone in the world would associate his name with the field of psychology.

What is it that made Freud's ideas so controversial? Was it that they were so different than the themes studied by his contemporaries? Or do we still consider them bogus? Do we still consider him a quack? We've discussed this before, but what ideas do we have right now in the field of psychology that in 50-100 years will seem absolutely ridiculous? Or what ideas do we have right now that will last for 50-100 years and only at that time will seem valuable to the field? It's interesting that Freud was sensationalized for his very controversial work in sexuality and psychoanalysis, but the man also studied a lot of other things that we still consider valuable to this day: free association, defense mechanisms, and the subconscious.

I found a link to the Sigmund Freud museum in Vienna, Austria, which is housed in his old apartment. I've visited this museum and found Freud to be a very interesting man with interesting ideas (most of the work housed at this museum is uncontroversial and it details more a history of his life in general and of his clinical practice). I tried to post pictures from my visit but apparently I am technologically illiterate.

Science as Art - link & response for last week

From last week's readings on the development of psychology in America (with a focus on functionalism v. structuralism)...

I found Titchener's "periodic table" of the sensational elements of psychology fascinating. I wonder what the over 44,000 distinct sensations could be. I searched far and wide (well, Google searched) for a list of the "periodic table" of the sensations, but I couldn't find it. Has anyone else been successful?

Anyway, I found this article instead. It really got me wondering about the type of thinking involved with inventive psychology. During the late 1800's, when psychology was just a baby, it took a lot of creative thinking to come up with some of these schools of thought. A couple weeks ago in class we had a discussion about James and his artistic background. The article I pulled up on Titchener made me believe that he, too, had an artistic mind. The language he uses is very visual, descriptive, and I think he's done his best in trying to impress specific sensations upon the reader. The imagination abilities involved with making great strides in science are great; it takes more than just a knowledge of the basic theories of science, it takes creativity.

However, the way Titchener has written this piece makes me want to find his list of sensations even more!!

Child Study Movement

I know this is kind of late...because this is dealing with last week's readings, but here it is!

I looked up more about the Child Study Movement and found an interesting article giving more details and a different overview of the movement than our book. It does include much of the information we already knew about Hall, but it also includes information about some of Hall's colleagues on the project. This article also goes past our time frame, which is nice to kind of put it in a broader context.

Mnemonic Devices

According to Young (1985) - our reading from last week regarding the consequences of Ebbinghaus' work - Ebbinghaus shied away from studying the use of mnemonic devices in his memory studies by creating words and syllables that were 1) said quickly and 2) nonsensical. I found the idea of mnemonic devices pretty fascinating and in my perusing of the Web, I found this site with mnemonic devices FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! It may not help our understanding of human learning in the way Ebbinghaus would want, but we may learn a lot of random trivia...?

Random Snippets of Psychology Knowledge

Browsing the internet, I found a very primitive psychology forum that seems to have a lot of interesting posts about the history and theory of psychology (hence the name). I didn't read through all of them but these posts could supplement our readings in class, our projects, etc. If you have time, I suggest exploring this site (from the 1990's?!). Of course, keep in mind how scholarly the site actually is...