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Final Blog

       This class has really taught me a lot about psychology and has made me think way outside the box on different topics.   Over the course of this year, I wrote fifteen blogs about various topics.   The first blog that I wrote was about myself and how I feel about Hardin-Simons University and how I would compare myself to natural things.   The next blog I wrote was about my interest in psychology which is pretty self-explanatory, but if not, it was about my fear of dogs and the reason I am scared of them.   I really want to figure out why I am afraid and if it can be fixed.   The third blog that I did was about the brain and how your behavior is affected by different parts of the brain.   Your brain is an amazing organ which can do many, many things that are very impressive.   The next blog was about sensation and perception and how the brain and body perceive it.   Next on the list of blogs is the one about how music aff...

Active Listening

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                  The first person I had a close conversation with was Cole Jenschke from Angelo State.    I know him pretty well and we had a great conversation about college life.    We talked about everything, school work, sports, and how we are going to prepare for finals.    We first started talking about how I am running track and how that is going.    I am in the four by one and we are advancing to the finals before nationals and have broken the school record two times.    Then we talked about him and his friends winning the intermural basketball championship. He was saying how the other team was much bigger than them but did not play as a team like Cole and his friends.    I was really happy for him because there were a lot of people and teams that played in the same league.    He said that they were the underdogs and that no one thought they would even hav...

Interview

                I would like to start out this essay by saying that my two people that I interviewed would like to stay anonymous, so I will not be using names.   They insisted on remaining anonymous and I am going to respect their privacy, so I can share their story.   I did not know either of these two people very well, but I feel that I really understand what they went through now that I have talked to them.   I learned a lot indeed about mental illness and how it affects two different people in two different ways.   Here are their stories.                 Both of these people were and are affected by Post Dramatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.   Both have this same mental illness but suffered in different ways.   Person A was in the war in Iraq and was in many gun fights which has made him hard of hearin...

Multiculturalism

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        I grew up only speaking one language, Spanish.   It was the only language I was taught at a young age.   The only English that I was exposed to at the point in my life before public education was my two older cousins that had already begun school.   This is where I learned some basic words like water, run, play, food, candy, and soda.   When I was three I attended a head start program where I formally began to learn English.   This is where I had teachers to help me extend my English vocabulary.   It was very hard at first, but as little kids seem to do I picked it up very fast.   I would come home and show my parents what I had learned, and they would help me by speaking English as well.   This benefited me greatly and I soon became bilingual.            At the end of Head Start, before I could go to kindergarten, I had to take this test that would show that I was indeed bilingual and...

Behavior Modification Exercise

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        A 7-day challenge I proposed to myself was to work on not procrastinating so much on homework and getting things done, so basically studying for exams and doing homework.  The reason I chose this challenge was because after finishing with pledging, I have been wanting to get myself back on track with my daily school routines.  In order to get myself back on track, I will be tracking the time I spend on studying.  I will be creating a planner laying out how much time I have during the day and writing in when I should be studying and how much free time I may or may not have.         I have taken a few pictures to show an example of what I used to plan my week/days in order to achieve my goal.             Below I will screenshot my journal entries throughout this week.  I used the app Stickies on my laptop for my journal entries. Day 1: Day 2: Day 3: ...

Memory: Alzheimer's Disease

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Science Behind the Phenomenon:         Memory is defined as stored information. It is a complex and dynamic process that relies on series of factors. (Remembering and Forgetting) There are two types of memory, explicit memory, and implicit memory. There are also three major memory stages: sensory, short-term, and long-term, and finally three processes that are important to long-term memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Even though we have all these types, stages, and processes of how the memory works, unfortunately, we can also forget everything we learn.         I am mainly going to be focusing on a brain disorder called Alzheimer.  It is a progressive brain disorder that damages and eventually destroys brain cells, leading to memory loss and other brain functions. (Alzheimer's Association)  Alzheimer's is a brain disease that develops slowly and gets worse as brain function declines and brain cells eventually die.  This u...

Learning

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        Learning, in psychology, is defined a bit differently than educational learning. In chapter 6, the chapter starts off with the definition of learning - the process by which life experience causes a change in the behavior or thinking of an organism. (Week 7 - Chapter 6: Learning) There are three principal areas of learning: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning. In this blog post, I will be focusing on Classical Conditioning.         Classical Conditioning is a form of learning in which animals or people make a connection between two stimuli that have occurred together such that one predicts the other (Week 7 - Chapter 6: Learning). Essentially this type of conditioning occurs when one begins to associate an object, sight, or sound with a specific sensation. Ivan Pavlov, who was a medical researcher (a physiologist), committed his professional life to the study of the digestive system. He...