Psychology

2009-09-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

Hello friends, I was going to keep posting these terms that I obtained mostly off of popular online sources, but I think what in someways at this point might be just as good for someone who wants to brush up on terminology like myself is to just buy the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology; which I already did so I had my ah ha moment and I even bet ah ha is already in that book; but I do hope you enjoy these definitions I got through already on my blog and I have to say the Penguin book is great, really comprehensive.

Psychology Study Notes: Review of Various Terminology:

"Accommodation-Changes in the thickness of the lens of the eye that focus images of near or distant objects on the retina. Also, the process by which existing schemata are modified or changed by new experiences".

"Activational Effect-The effect of a hormone on a physiological system that has already developed. If the effect involves the brain, it can influence behavior. An example is facilitation of sexual arousal and performance".

"Actor Observer Effect-The tendency to attribute one's own behavior to situational factors but others’ behavior to dispositional factors".

"Agrammatism-A language disturbance; difficulty in the production and comprehension of grammatical features, such as proper use of function words, word endings, and word order. Often seen in cases of Broca's aphasia".

"Algorithm-A procedure that consists of a series of steps that will solve a specific type of problem".

"Alleles-Alternative forms of the same gene".

"Anatomical Coding-A means of representing information by the nervous system; different features are coded by the activity of different neurons".

"Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome-An inherited condition caused by a lack of functioning androgen receptors. Because androgens cannot exert their effects, a person with XY sex chromosomes develops as a female, with female external genitalia".

"Androgens-The primary class of sex hormones in males. The most important androgen is testosterone".

"Animism-The belief that all animals and all moving objects possess spirits providing their motive force".

"Antigen-The unique proteins found on the surface of bacteria; these proteins are what enable the immune system to recognize the bacteria as foreign substances".

"Appeasement Gesture-A stereotyped gesture made by a submissive animal in response to a threat gesture by a dominant animal; tends to inhibit an attack".

"Archetypes-Universal thought forms and patterns that Jung believed resided in the collective unconscious".

"Artificial Selection-A procedure in which animals are deliberately mated to produce offspring that possess particularly desirable characteristics".

"Assimilation-The process by which new information about the world is modified to fit existing schemata".

"Basic level-The level of categorization that can be retrieved from memory most quickly and used most efficiently".

"Basilar membrane-A membrane in the cochlea that, when set into motion, stimulates hair cells that produce the neural effects of auditory stimulation".

"Between-subjects design-A research design in which different groups of participants are randomly assigned to experimental conditions or to control conditions".

"Biofeedback-A self-regulatory technique by which an individual acquires voluntary control over nonconscious biological processes".

"Biomedical therapies-Treatments for psychological disorders that alter brain functioning with chemical or physical interventions such as drug therapy, surgery, or electroconvulsive therapy".

"Blocking-A phenomenon in which an organism does not learn a new stimulus that signals an unconditioned stimulus, because the new stimulus is presented simultaneously with a stimulus that is already effective as a signal".

"Bottom-up processing-Perceptual analyses based on the sensory data available in the environment; results of analyses are passed upward toward more abstract representations".

"Brain stem-The brain structure that regulates the body's basic life processes".

"Broca's area-The region of the brain that translates thoughts into speech or sign."

"Cannon–Bard theory of emotion A theory stating that an “emotional stimulus produces two co-occurring reactions—arousal “and experience of emotion—that do not cause each other".

"Centration-A thought pattern common during the beginning of the preoperational stage of cognitive development; characterized by the child's inability to take more than one perceptual factor into account at the same time".

"Cerebral cortex-The outer surface of the cerebrum".

"Cerebral hemispheres-The two halves of the cerebrum, connected by the corpus callosum".

"Cerebrum-The region of the brain that regulates higher cognitive and emotional functions".

"Chronological age-The number of months or years since an individual's birth".

"Chunking-The process of taking single items of information and recoding them on the basis of similarity or some other organizing principle."

"Circadian rhythm-A consistent pattern of cyclical body activities, usually lasting 24 to 25 hours and determined by an internal biological clock".

"Dark adaptation-The gradual improvement of the eyes' sensitivity after a shift in illumination from light to near darkness".

"Declarative memory-Memory for information such as facts and events".

"Deductive reasoning-A form of thinking in which one draws a conclusion that is intended to follow logically from two or more statements or premises".

"Demand characteristics-Cues in an experimental setting that influence the participants' perception of what is expected of them and that systematically influence their behavior within that setting".

"Determinism-The doctrine that all events—physical, behavioral, and mental—are determined by specific causal factors that are potentially knowable".

"Diathesis stress hypothesis-A hypothesis about the cause of certain disorders, such as schizophrenia, that suggests that genetic factors predispose an individual to a certain disorder, but that environmental stress factors must impinge in order for the potential risk to manifest itself".

"Dichotic listening-An experimental technique in which a different auditory stimulus is simultaneously presented to each ear".

"Diffusion of responsibility-In emergency situations, the larger the number of bystanders, the less responsibility any one bystander feels to help".

"Discriminative stimuli-Stimuli that act as predictors of reinforcement, signaling when particular behaviors will result in positive reinforcement."

"Distal stimulus-In the processes of perception, the physical object in the world, as contrasted with the proximal stimulus, the optical image on the retina".

"Divergent thinking-An aspect of creativity characterized by an ability to produce unusual but appropriate responses to problems".

"Double blind control-An experimental technique in which biased expectations of experimenters are eliminated by keeping both participants and experimental assistants unaware of which participants have received which treatment".

"Echoic memory-Sensory memory that allows auditory information to be stored for brief durations".

"Ego-The aspect of personality involved in self-preservation activities and in directing instinctual drives and urges into appropriate channels".

"Elaboration likelihood model-A theory of persuasion that defines how likely it is that people will focus their cognitive processes to elaborate upon a message and therefore follow the central and peripheral routes to persuasion".

"Elaborative rehearsal-A technique for improving memory by enriching the encoding of information".

"Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)-The use of electroconvulsive shock as an effective treatment for severe depression".

Electroencephalogram (EEG) A recording of the electrical activity of the brain.

"Encoding-The process by which a mental representation is formed in memory".

"Encoding specificity-The principle that subsequent retrieval of information is enhanced if cues received at the time of recall are consistent with those present at the time of encoding".

"Endocrine system-The network of glands that manufacture and secrete hormones into the bloodstream".

"Engram-The physical memory trace for information in the brain".

"Episodic memories-Long-term memories for autobiographical events and the contexts in which they occurred".

"Equity theory -cognitive theory of work motivation that proposes that workers are motivated to maintain fair and equitable relationships with other relevant persons; also, a model that postulates that equitable relationships are those in which the participants' outcomes are proportional to their inputs".

"Estrogen-The female sex hormone, produced by the ovaries, that is responsible for the release of eggs from the ovaries as well as for the development and maintenance of female reproductive structures and secondary sex characteristics".

"Etiology-The causes of, or factors related to, the development of a disorder".

"Excitatory inputs-Information entering a neuron that signals it to fire".

"Extinction-In conditioning, the weakening of a conditioned association in the absence of a reinforcer or unconditioned stimulus".

"Figure Object-like regions of the visual field that are distinguished from background".

"Five-factor model-A comprehensive descriptive personality system that maps out the relationships among common traits, theoretical concepts, and personality scales; informally called the Big Five".

"Fixed-interval schedule-A schedule of reinforcement in which a reinforcer is delivered for the first response made after a fixed period of time".

"Fixed-ratio schedule-A schedule of reinforcement in which a reinforcer is delivered for the first response made after a fixed number of responses".

"Flooding-A therapy for phobias in which clients are exposed, with their permission, to the stimuli most frightening to them".

"Fluid intelligence-The aspect of intelligence that involves the ability to see complex relationships and solve problems".

"Foundational theories-Frameworks for initial understanding formulated by children to explain their experiences of the world".

"Fovea-Area of the retina that contains densely packed cones and forms the point of sharpest vision".

"Frame-A particular description of a choice; the perspective from which a choice is described or framed affects how a decision is made and which option is ultimately exercised".

"Frontal lobe-Region of the brain located above the lateral fissure and in front of the central sulcus; involved in motor control and cognitive activities".

"Functional fixedness-An inability to perceive a new use for an object previously associated with some other purpose; adversely affects problem solving and creativity".

"Functional MRI (fMRI)-A brain imaging technique that combines benefits of both MRI and PET scans by detecting magnetic changes in the flow of blood to cells in the brain".

2009-07-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

In this blog entry today I have decided today to look quite a bit into the extensive and influential life of John Bowlby; an interesting man who was influential even to Freud. Bowlby was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who became famous with research that was related to child development and because of his creation of an attachment theory. Bowlby studied psychology and pre-clinical sciences at Trinity College in Cambridge where he performed outstanding as a student. After Trinity Bowlby worked with maladjusted and delinquent children and enrolled at University College Hospital in London and at the age of 26 even had professional qualifications in medicine. While Bowlby was in med school he enrolled himself at the Institute for Psychoanalysis. After medical school Bowlby trained for adult psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital and in 1937 he was actually a qualified psychoanalyst. During World War 2 Bowlby was also a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps and after the war he became a Deputy Director of the Tavistock Clinic and then later a Mental Health Consultant to the World Health Organization. Bowlby was interested in the development of children and so he began working at the Child Guidance Clinic in London. Bowlby was interested from the start of his career in troubles related to the situation of separation and he also was interested in the wartime work of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, which means he was interested in their work on evacuees. Bowlby was also interested in the research by Rene Spitz on orphans. By the late 1950's Bowlby had gathered enough observational and theoretical work to indicate the essential importance for human development of attachment from birth. Bowlby was curious of finding out the actual patterns of family interaction that occurs in both healthy and pathological development. Bowlby examined how attachment difficulties were sent down from one generation to another. In Bowlby's development of attachment theory Bowlby talks of the idea that attachment behavior was essentially an evolutionary life strategy for protecting the infant from predators. Bowlby had some views that children were interestingly responding to real life events and not unconscious fantasies, but this perspective was not liked by the psychoanalyst community. Later on in Bowlby's career he expressed the perspective that his interest in real life experiences and situations was foreign to the Kleininan outlook founded by Melanie Klein. In 1949, Bowlby wrote the World Health Organizations report on the mental health of homeless children in post war, because of his related research experience in this area. Bowlby's overall analysis was that "the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with their mother (or permanent mother substitute in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment". Bowlby's World Health Report was helpful in causing widespread changes in the practices and prevalence of institutional aid for infants and children and also in the changing of ways related to parents visiting small children and infants in hospitals. However Bowlby's theoretical basis in his health report was controversial in a variety of ways. As Bowlby had came away from psychoanalytic theories that viewed an infant's internal life as being determined by fantasy instead of real life events. At a certain point the health report was actually used by some for political reasons to influence women in not working and leaving their children in daycare by governments that were interested in increasing employment for returning servicemen. In 1962, the World Health Organization published "Deprivation of Maternal care: A Reassessment of its Effects", to which Mary Ainsworth who was Bowlby's close colleague contributed on. This publication by Ainsworth and Bowlby was also written to look at the situation of the previous lack of evidence on the effects of paternal deprivation. In Bowlby's research it was apparent that he was dissatisfied with traditional theories and was looking for new understanding from such fields as evolutionary biology, ethology, developmental psychology, cognitive science and control systems theory and he drew from them to try and develop the innovative notion that the mechanisms that influence an infant emerge as an influence of evolutionary pressure. Bowlby felt a need to develop a new theory of motivation and behavior control based on up-to-date science rather then Freud's espoused older psychic energy model. From the 1950's Bowlby was in personal and scientific contact with European Scientists at the forefront of ethology, like Robert Hinde and Konrad Lorenz. From studying ethology Bowlby was really able to develop a new explanatory hypotheses for what is now known as human attachment behavior. Bowlby was able through the basis of ethological evidence to reject the dominate Cupboard Love Theory of Attachment that was existing in psychoanalysis and learning theory in the 1940's and 50's. "Bowlby also helped bring about the notions of environmentally stable or labile human behaviour allowing for the revolutionary combination of the idea of a species-specific genetic bias to become attached and the concept of individual differences in attachment security as environmentally labile strategies for adaptation to a specific childrearing niche". Interestingly to me also Bowlby's thinking about the nature and function of the caregiver-child relationship influenced ethological research and inspired students of animal behavior, like Harry Harlow. "Bowlby helped influence animal behavior researcher Hinde to start his important work on separation in primates and in general the emphasis of the importance of evolutionary thinking about human development that foreshadowed the new interdisciplinary approach known as evolutionary psychology". Before the publication of the trilogy in 1969, 1972 and 1980 the central principles of attachment theory building on concepts from ethology and development psychology were shown to the British Psychoanalytical in three different papers: "The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother" (1958), "Separation Anxiety" (1959), and "Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood" (1960). Bowlby denied psychoanalysts explanations for attachment and from this psychanalysts were not acceptant of Bowlby's theory. Bowlby's former colleague Mary Ainsworth completed thorough observational studies on the nature of infants attachments in Uganda as she kept Bowlby's Ethological perspectives in her own outlooks. This research of Ainsworth and others studies helped significantly to the subsequent evidence base of attachment theory as shown in 1969 through the first Volume of the "Attachment and Loss Trilogy". Attachment theory follows the belief that attachment in infants is essentially a process of proximity searching to a recognized attachment figure in circumstances of a perceived worry for the reason of survival. "Infants become attached to adults who are sensitive and responsive in social interactions with the infant, and who remain as regular caregivers for some months from around 6 months to two years of age". "Parental response influences the development of patterns of attachment, which then influence 'internal working models' which will shape and influence the individual's feelings, thoughts and expectations in later relationships". In Bowlby's notions of attachment, the human infant is thought to have a need for a secure relationship with adult caregivers, without that regular social and emotional progress will not take place. "As the toddler develops, it uses its attachment figure or figures as a secure beginning or base from which to explore". Interestingly to me Mary Ainsworth partly applies a feature called "stranger wariness" to help develop a research tool called the "Stranger Situation Procedure", so to develop and classify different attachment styles. "The attachment process is not specified to gender, as infants will develop attachments to any consistent caregiver who is sensitive and responsive in social interactions with the infant". "The quality of the social connection seems to be more significant than amount of time spent." Attachment theory has been talked of as the top approach to understanding early social development and to have helped rise a great influence of empirical research into the creation of children's close relationships. "As it is currently established and applied for research purposes, Bowlby's attachment theory emphasizes the following important principles": "1) children between 6 and about 30 months are very likely to form emotional attachments to familiar caregivers, especially if the adults are sensitive and responsive to child communications. 2) The emotional attachments of young children are shown behaviorally in their preferences for particular familiar people, their tendency to seek proximity to those people, especially in times of distress, and their ability to use the familiar adults as a secure base from which to explore the environment. 3) The formation of emotional attachments contributes to the foundation of later emotional and personality development, and the type of behavior toward familiar adults shown by toddlers has some continuity with the social behaviors they will show later in life. 4) Events that interfere with attachment, such as abrupt separation of the toddler from familiar people or the significant inability of carers to be sensitive, responsive or consistent in their interactions, have short-term and possible long-term negative impacts on the child's emotional and cognitive life". Well this had definitely been a long and interesting blog post for me as I don't recall ever yet researching a individual in the field of psychology who went so in depth into the important psychological factors of how attachment operates.

2009-07-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

Fritz Perls is an interesting figure in psychology to me. I came across his name when looking more into influences of Freud. Perls was a influential German born psychiatrist and psychotherapist of Jewish descent. Perls coined the term 'Gestalt Therapy', which is an approach to therapy that was created with the help of him and his wife Laura Perls. The approach Perls created is related to but not exactly the same as Gestalt Psychology and the Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy of Hans-Ju-rgen Walter. " The center of Gestalt Therapy is about the promotion of awareness and the awareness of the unity of all present feelings and behaviors and the contact among the self and the environment". Perls was widely brought out of the world of psychotherapy interestingly for a quotation of his often described as the "Gestalt Prayer", which goes as follows: "I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped". It is surely apparent to me that Perls definitely had an interesting life from his various research, like the research related text in the book "Ego, Hunger and Aggression" published in 1941 with the help of his wife Laura and from things like being an army psychiatrist in the South African Army during World War 2, where he served as the rank of captain. Perls also worked briefly with Karen Horney in New York and then later on with Wilhelm Reich after being in the South African Army. Around 1947, Perls asked author Paul Goodman to write up some handwritten notes, which also came with the help from Ralph Hefferline and these notes where published as Gestalt Therapy. And to add a couple more interesting facts about Perls life in 1960 Perls moved to California where he continued to provide workshops as a member of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur and then he later moved to Vancouver Island Canada and started a Gestalt Community at Lake Cowichan. So in summary here I have to say it is hard to imagine where the schools of thought of the Gestalt perspective would be without the fascinating works of Fritz Perls.

2009-07-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

Rollo May is an American existential psychologist who authored the influential book "Love and Will". May is often associated with humanistic psychology, but unlike other humanists like Maslow May differs because he constructed his principles around the notion of existentialist philosophy. May was also close friends with the theologian Paul Tillich. May was influenced by American humanism and had ambition to reconcile existential psychology with other approaches in psychology and in regards to this May was especially interested in Freud's approach. May had felt that Otto Rank helped influence the most important beginning of existential therapy. "May applied some traditional existential terms in a slightly different way then others and he liked to create new words for traditional existentialist concepts". May developed a type of system to help further understand development, which consists of some of the following:
"Innocence – the pre-egoic, pre-self-conscious stage of the infant. The innocent is only doing what he or she must do. However, an innocent does have a degree of will in the sense of a drive to fulfill needs.
"Rebellion – the rebellious person wants freedom, but has yet no full understanding of the responsibility that goes with it".
"Decision – The person is in a transition stage in their life where they need to break away from their parents and settle into the ordinary stage". In this stage they must decide what path their life will take, along with fulfilling rebellious needs from the rebellious stage".
"Ordinary – the normal adult ego learned responsibility, but finds it too demanding, and so seeks refuge in conformity and traditional values.
Creative – the authentic adult, the existential stage, beyond ego and self-actualizing. This is the person who, accepting destiny, faces anxiety with courage".
In his career May also looked at the sexual revolution of the 1960 and 70's and thought that the increase of sex and pornography in society was influencing people in believing that love and sex are no longer directly associated with each other. May also believed emotion had become disconnected from reason, making it socially acceptable to look for sexual relationships and to ignore the natural drive to relate to another individual and begin new life. So May thought the awakening of sexual freedoms can influence modern society to avoid awakenings at greater levels. May thought the only means of turning around cynical ideas that are part of our generation would be to rediscover the significance of caring for each other or also as May would refer to it, apathy. Mays first book, "The Meaning of Anxiety" was based on his doctoral dissertation which was also based on his understanding of philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. May's defining of anxiety would consist of the following: "the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a self" (1967, p. 72). In 1956, May edited the book "Existence" with the help of Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger and this book had helped to introduce existential psychology to the US. May was definitely an interesting man in my view and I am curious to learn more about existential psychology since studying psychology in school I have focused more on humanistic psychology and psychoanalysis.

2009-06-30T19:38:00.000-07:00

For this blog today I have decided to write some about an interesting man who goes by the name of Ernest Jones. Jones was a Welsh, neurologist, psychoanalyst and Freud's official biographer. Jones was the first English-language practitioner of psychoanalysis and the President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association in the 1920's and 30's. Through Jones connection with the surgeon Wilfred Trotter Jones recalled first coming across Freud's work since Jones and Trotter both worked together as surgeons at University College Hospital. Jones was upset at what he came to see of institutionalised treatment of the "insane" and so he started experimenting with hypnotic techniques in his clinical work. Upon attending a congress of neurologists in Amsterdam in 1907 Jones met Carl Jung and obtained a good look at an account of the work of Freud and his circle in Vienna. Jones went along with Jung by joining with him in Zurich to plan the inaugural Psychoanalytic Congress, which was was the place were Jones met Freud for the first time. Jones then Travelled to Vienna for more discussions with Freud and for the meeting of the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which helped to create a positive personal and professional relationship between Freud and Jones. Jones took up teaching duties in 1908, at the Department of Psychiatry of Toronto University. Jones also maintained a private psychoanalytic practice and worked as a pathologist for the Toronto Asylum and as Director of its psychiatric outpatient clinic. After further meetings with Freud in 1909 at Clark University, Massachusetts Jones went out and tried to establish strong working relationships with the American psychoanalytic movement by giving some 20 papers or speeches to American professional groups in places like Boston and Chicago. In 1910, Jones co-founded the American Psychopathological Association and the following year the American Psychoanalytic Association where he became the first secretary up until the time of 1913. Jones also found the time in his career eventually for a rigorous programme of writing and research, which helped create the first of what were to be many important gifts to psychoanalytic literature. A number of these writings were published in German in the big time periodicals published in Vienna and they helped to lock in Jones status in Freud's close circle. "As Jones became closer to Freud he initiated with him the creation of a Secret Committee of loyalists to safeguard the theoretical and institutional legacy of the psychoanalytic movement". In 1913, Jones went to London and set up a practice as a psychoanalyst and established the London Psychoanalytic Society as he also lectured and wrote about psychoanalytic theory. Some papers of Jones appeared as papers on Psychoanalysis and the first comprehensive account of psychoanalytic theory and practice published in English. By 1919, Jones established the British Psychoanalytical Society and held the post as President until 1944. Jones also created funding for and supervised the creation in London of a Clinic that offered subsidised fees and he also helped establish an Institute of Psychoanalysis for those in the field. Jones served two periods as President of the Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to 1924 and 1942 to 1949. In 1920, Jones also founded the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and worked as the editor until 1939. The following year Jones established the International Psychoanalytic Library, which in return helped published some 50 books under Jones editorship. Jones was a great influence on the British Medical Association decision of officially recognizing psychoanalysis in 1929. In return from this move by the Association the BBC decided to remove Jones from a list of speakers declared to be dangerous to public morality and in the 1930's Jones made a series of appearances on the radio speaking about psychoanalysis. While Hitler took control of Germany Jones aided many displaced and at risk Jewish analysts to resettle in England and other countries. After Anschuluss of March 1939, Jones flew to Vienna bravely to help negotiate and organise the emigration of Freud and his circle to London. After the war Jones slowly ceased the continuing of his posts, while continuing his psychoanalytic practice, writings and lecturing. Jones most major accomplishment of his final years of work was the publishing to widespread notoriety of three volumes about Freud's life and work. Jones was proud of his Welsh origins in his life and was a member of the Welsh Nationalist Party Plaid Cymru. Interestingly to me the successful Jones was also made a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1942 and Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1949 and an Honorary Doctor of Science at Swansea University in 1954. What I found most interesting about Jones from conducting this blog entry was how influential and prominent he was through all his establishments and how significant his relationship to Freud was in the field of psychology.

2009-06-21T15:57:00.000-07:00

Melanie Klein was a Austrian born British psychoanalyst who helped formulate new therapeutic techniques for children and she had a significant influence on child psychology and modern psychoanalysis. Klein had questioned some of the groundwork assumptions of Freud but Klein always thought of herself as a faithful follower to Freud's ideas. Klein was innovative with her work and interestingly she also was the first person in the field to apply traditional psychoanalysis upon young children. Klein was well opinionated and demanding of loyalty from those who followed her work and Klein was able to create quite the influential training program in psychoanalysis. Klein is also considered to be one of the co-founders of object relations theory. "Klein's theoretical work in time became more focused on speculative hypothesis and was eventually accepted by Freud, which actually stated that life may be a delicate occurrence, that is drawn to an inorganic state and therefore, in an unspecified sense, withholds a drive towards death". "Also put in another fashion of psychological wording Eros (properly, the life instinct) is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death instinct), which allegedly attempts to terminate and disintegrate life. "Klein and Freud both felt that biomental forces were the foundation of the mind". "Freud and Klein never went astray from terms of theirs or conceptualizations although there were protests and controversies by followers, especially now". Klein was innovative in working with children directly often at the age of only two years old and she saw children's play as the main mode of emotional communication as she attempted to interpret emotional meanings of play. Klein realised that parental figures had a important role in the child's phantasy life and she considered that the timing of Freud's Oedipus complex was not fully clear. In contrast to Freud, Klein concluded that the superego was around a much longer time before the Oedipal phase. "After looking into ultra-aggressive phantasises related to hate, envy and greed in young ill children Klein came up with a model of the human mind that connected significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore". "She named the state of the mind, when the sustaining principle of life is in power, the depressive position". "The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life she called the paranoid schizoid position". Klein's feelings on regarding aggression as a significant influence in its own right when evaluating children stirred up some conflict with Anna Freud, a big time child psychotherapist who was working in England at the time. At current times Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the big schools within psychoanalysis and Kleinian psychoanalysts are also members of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Kleinian psychoanalysis is claimed to be the most significant school of psychoanalysis in Britain, in much of Latin America, and with the possible exclusion of Lacanianism, in much of continental Europe. In the USA, the Psychoanalytic Center of California is the most key training center that follows the ideas of Melanie Klein's work. Kleinian psychoanalysis with adults consists of a very traditional method that applies using an analytic couch and meeting four to five times a week. Kleinian analysis focuses on the comprehension of very "deep" and primitive emotions and phantasies. So just from this blog entry I can see it is obvious that Melanie Klein was brillant and I found it interesting how much of what she did reminds me of the psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler.

2009-06-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

Today I have chosen to blog about Margaret Mahler a fairly familiar name to me especially when I hear of related talk to Sigmund Freud's research. Mahler was a Hungarian physician who later on became interested in psychiatry and she was a key figure on the topic of psychoanalysis. Mahler was mostly interested in normal child development and she spent much time with understanding children and how they arrive at the self. Through Mahler's studying she developed the Separation-Individuation theory of child development. Mahler worked as a psychoanalyst with young troubled children and in 1950 herself and Manuel Furer established the Masters Children's Centre in Manhattan. There Mahler developed the Tripartite Treatment Model, in which the mother was involved in the treatment of the child. Mahler helped bring about a more constructive exploration of serious troubles in childhood and emphasized the importance of the environment and it's influences on the child. Mahler especially was curious of the mother-infant duality and carefully recorded the influence of early separations of children from their mothers. This recording of separation-individuation was her most important aspect she offered to the development of psychoanalysis. Mahler helped to explain the normal and abnormal features of the developmental ego psychology. Mahler worked with psychotic children, while psychosis had not been involved in psychoanalytic treatment yet. Symbiotic child psychosis interested Mahler and her most important work is "The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant:Symbiosis and Individuation, written in 1975 with Fred Pine and Anni Bergman. Interestingly to me in Mahler's Separation-Individuation Theory of Child Development Mahler's theory of development takes place in phases and with several sub phases which consist of the following:
"Normal Autistic Phase - First few weeks of life. The infant is detached and self absorbed. Spends most of his/her time sleeping. Mahler later abandoned this phase, based on new findings from her infant research She believed it to be non-existent. The phase still appears in many books on her theories."
"Normal Symbiotic Phase - Lasts until about 5 months of age. The child is now aware of his/her mother but there is not a sense of individuality. The infant and the mother are one, and there is a barrier between them and the rest of the world."
"Separation-Individuation Phase - The arrival of this phase marks the end of the Normal Symbiotic Phase. Separation refers to the development of limits, the differentiation between the infant and the mother, whereas individuation refers to the development of the infant's ego, sense of identity, and cognitive abilities. Mahler explains how a child with the age of a few months breaks out of an “autistic shell” into the world with human connections. This process, labeled separation-individuation, is divided into subphases, each with its own onset, outcomes and risks. The following subphases proceed in this order but overlap considerably.
Hatching – first months. The infant ceases to be ignorant of the differentiation between him/her and the mother. "Rupture of the shell". Increased alertness and interest for the outside world. Using the mother as a point of orientation."
"Practicing – 9-about 16 months. Brought about by the infant's ability to crawl and then walk freely, the infant begins to explore actively and becomes more distant from the mother. The child experiences himself still as one with his mother."
"Rapproachement –15-24 months. In this subphase, the infant once again becomes close to the mother. The child realizes that his physical mobility demonstrates psychic separateness from his mother. The toddler may become tentative, wanting his mother to be in sight so that, through eye contact and action, he can explore his world. The risk is that the mother will misread this need and respond with impatience or unavailability. This can lead to an anxious fear of abandonment in the toddler. A basic ‘mood predisposition’ may be established at this point. Rapproachment is divided into a few sub phases:
Beginning - Motivated by a desire to share discoveries with the mother.
Crisis - Between staying with the mother, being emotionally close and being more independent and exploring.
Solution - Individual solutions are enabled by the development of language and the superego."
"Disruptions in the fundamental process of separation-individuation can result in a disturbance in the ability to maintain a reliable sense of individual identity in adulthood."
"And this is also Object Constancy the phase when the child understands that the mother has a separate identity and is truly a separate individual. This leads to the formation of Internalization, which the internal representation that the child has formed of the mother. This Internalization is what provides the child with an image that helps supply them with an unconscious level of guiding support and comfort from their mothers. Deficiencies in positive Internalization could possibly lead to a sense of insecurity and low self esteem issues in adulthood." So it is quite intersting to read more about and blog of another in depth researcher in psychology who studied the development of children and who has such a big impact on this topic like Jean Piaget or Eric Erikson.

2009-05-31T16:56:00.000-07:00

Today I have decided to blog about Alfred Adler a Austrian medical doctor, psychologist and founder of the school of individual psychology. Adler was part of the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and was a central member to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Adler was the initial major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to establish his own independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory after Freud said Adler's ideas were to contrary. Adler emphasized the importance of equality in halting different forms of psychopathology and he adopted into his work the development of social interest and democratic family structures as the ideal way for bringing up children. Adler's most well known theories are the inferiority complex, which is related to the matters of self-esteem and its negative compensations. Adler's emphasis on power dynamics stems from the philosphy of Nietzsche. "Adler argued for holism, viewing people as holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the overriding lens for viewing human psychology".The online definition of holism is-"the theory that the parts of any whole cannot exist and cannot be understood except in their relation to the whole". Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue for the side of feminism and Adler is considered to be one of the founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasized the unconscious and psychodynamics. For 25 years Adler traveled and lectured promoting his socially orientated approach. Adler wanted to create a movement that would compete with and even take place of others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War 1 when he served as a doctor in the Austrian Army. After the war Adler's influence increased much further and in the 1930's he formed a number of child guidance clinics. From 1921 and onwards, Adler was a common lecturer in Europe and the USA, becoming a visitor professor at Columbia University in 1927. For clinical treatment for adults Adler tried to bring to light the hidden purpose of symptoms by using therapeutic functions of insight and meaning. Adler was interested in the overcoming of the superiority/inferiority dynamic and was one of the first psychotherapists to do away with for himself in therapy the analytic couch in return for two chairs. "Clinically Adler's method was not only about treatment after-the-fact but it extended out also to prevention by preempting future problems in the child". "Prevention strategies of Adler included the following: "encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment)". "Adler's popularity was associated with the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of the ideas he came up with in psychology". Adler would often write for the lay public in comparison to others in the field like Freud who's writings tend to be more exclusively academic. As a prominent member in the field Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-orientated and these "life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship/ and love/sexuality and their success is reliant upon co-operation. Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger and the writing works of Dostoevsky. Alder developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the creation of his famous concept known as the inferiority complex. Adler was also influenced by the philosophy work of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts who was the person who coined the term "holism". "Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology", is both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology". "Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and he was big on the matter of training parents, teachers, social workers and so forth in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making while co-operating with others". Adler was a social idealist and known to be a socialist in Adler's early years with psychoanalysis. "Adler's following of Marxism dissipated over time however he retained Marxism social idealism but stayed further away from Marx's economic theories". "Adler was a practical person and he thought that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology and he sought to create a social movement united through principles of community feeling and social interest". "Adler was also a early proponent of feminism's in psychology and the social world believing feelings of superiority and inferiority were commonly gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine ways and according to Adler these ways could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to some mental health troubles". Interestingly I think, Adler had also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same matter in her book "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense". To give an overall view of Adlerian based scholarly, clinical and social practices the following is what Adler's studies had focused one: "Mental Health Prevention
Social Interest and Community Feeling
Holism and the Creative Self
Fictional Finalism, Teleology, and Goal constructs
Psychological and Social Encouragement
Inferiority, Superiority and Compensation
Life Style / Style of Life
Early Recollections (a projective technique)
Family Constellation and Birth Order
Life Tasks & Social Embeddedness
The Conscious and Unconscious realms
Private Logic & Common Sense (based in part on Kant's "sensus communis")
Symptoms and Neurosis
Safeguarding Behaviour
Guilt and Guilt Feelings
Socratic Questioning
Dream Interpretation
Child and Adolescent Psychology
Democratic approaches to Parenting and Families
Adlerian Approaches to Classroom Management
Leadership and Organisational Psychology."
Adler's book "The Neurotic Character" defines his earlier central ideas. Adler disputed that human personality could be explained teleologically, "separate strands dominated by the guiding purpose of the individuals unconscious self ideal to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness)". "The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical needs of a sort." "If the corrective factors were forgot about and the individual over-compensated, then an inferiority complex would stir about, fostering the danger of a person becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse". Regular therapeutic tools brought about by Adlder include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions. Adler believed that human psychology is psychodynamic by nature and is guided by goals and is motivated by a yet unknown creative force. "Adler's fictive goals are mainly unconscious and these goals have a "teleological" function". As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians dig up the past of a client/patient so to alter their future and increase integration into community in the 'here-and-now'. "The 'here-and-now' aspects are especially significant to those Adlerians who are big on humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches. Metaphysical Adlerians believe that spiritual holism is important". "The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities, the creation of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that help develop communities matter significantly when it comes to understanding a persons psychological make-up and functioning". "This aspect of Adlerian psychology maintains a high amount of synergy with the field of community psychology". "However, Adlerian psychology, is not similar to community psychology in the aspect that Adlerian psychology is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical help after-the-fact". "Adler founded a scheme of the so called personality types and these 'types' are to be looked at as provisional or heuristic since Adler did not, in essence, believe in personality types". "According to Adler the danger with typology is to lose sight of a persons uniqueness and to look reductively, acts that Adler opposed". "Adler also attempted to recognize patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under the altogether style of life". "Adler commonly emphasized one's birth order as having an impact on the Style of Life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up and Birth Order referred to the placement of siblings within the family". Adler had thought that the firstborn child would be loved and nurtured by the family until the procreation of a second child. This second child would influence the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention according to Adler. Adler believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to deal with neuroticism and substance addiction, which Adler reasoned was a way to make up for the feelings of excessive responsibility. "As a result, Adler also predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum and youngest children would tend to be overindulged, influencing poor social empathy". "Consequently, the middle child, who would go through neither dethronement or overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful person yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel left out in a way". Adler never actually created any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles. "Adlerians will spend time therapeutically looking into the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients". "The idiographic approach encompasses an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for the probable influence on the subject's Style of Life". Adler's ideas in relation to non-heterosexual sexuality and different social forms of deviance have been controversial for some time. As well as prostitution and criminality, Adler had also classified 'homosexuals' as being "failures of life". "In 1917, Adler started his writings on homosexuality with a 52-page brochure, and sporadically published more ideas throughout the remainder of his life". The Dutch psychiatrist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg examined how Alfred Adler came to his consensus and it was was then understood in 1917 that Adler believed he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender. Towards the end of Adler's life, in the mid 1930s, his view towards homosexuality began to shift about some. Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls being in supervision with Adler on a male client who was "living in sin" with another man in New York city. Adler had said to Elizabeth, "is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell then replied. Then Adler went on and stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."Adler emphasized treatment and prevention and a psychodynamic psychology and Adlerian's promote the foundational importance of childhood in developing personality and any tendency towards different forms of psychopathology. "The best route to aid against what are now called"personality disorders" (what Adler had called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.), is to teach a child to be and feel an equal part of the family". "This incorporates developing a democratic character and the ability to use power reasonably rather than through compensation". "The responsibility to the best development of the child is not limited to the Mother or Father but also to teachers and society as well". "So Adler also argued that teachers, nurses and so on need training in parent education to be able to complement the work of the family with the fostering of a democratic character". "According to Adler when a child does not feel equal and is abused by pampering or neglect they are more prone to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various accompanying compensation strategies". These strategies can create social issues by influencing greater divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, possible criminal habits and subjective suffering in the various ways of psychopathology and so Adlerian's have for a long time promoted parent education groups. Adler had argued his vision of society in writing which said the following: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution." Adler then follows this statement with a defense of metaphysics: "I see no reason to be afraid of metaphysics; it has had a great influence on human life and development. We are not blessed with the possession of absolute truth; on that account we are compelled to form theories for ourselves about our future, about the results of our actions, etc. Our idea of social feeling as the final form of humanity - of an imagined state in which all the problems of life are solved and all our relations to the external world rightly adjusted - is a regulative ideal, a goal that gives our direction. This goal of perfection must bear within it the goal of an ideal community, because all that we value in life, all that endures and continues to endure, is eternally the product of this social feeling." "This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, which is a community feeling in which one feels they belong with others and have developed an ecological link with nature and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatus". So clearly, Adler had little trouble with using a metaphysical and a spiritual point of view to support his theories. "However his overall theoretical yield provides ample room for the dialectical humanist (modernist) and separately the postmodernist to explain the importance of community and ecology through differing views "(even if Adlerians have not fully considered how deeply divisive and contradictory these three threads of metaphysics, modernism, and post modernism are)". Having studied psychology for years Adler has been a name that had become familiar to me so I am glad I delved further into some of his many primary influences and there were certainly a lot to read about since this entry had taken me several days to complete at this point.

2009-05-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

Today I have decided to blog about Alfred Binet a French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test, which is the basis of today's IQ test. Binet's principal goal was to help recognize students who needed special help in dealing with school curriculum. Along with a collaborator of his called Theodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his intelligence scale in 1908 and 1911. And a further refinement of the Binet-Simon scale was published in 1916 by Lewis M. Terman from Stanford Unverisity. Terman incorporated William Stern's proposal that a person's intelligence level be measured as an IQ. Terman's test, was named by him as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Binet had published the first modern intelligence test known as the Binet-Simon intelligence scale in 1905. In 1894, Binet conducted one of the first psychological studies into the game of chess. Binet's studies investigated the cognitive qualities of chess masters. Binet hypothesized that chess is dependent upon the phenomenological qualities of visual memory and after studying the reports by master chess participants it came to Binet's attention that memory was only part of the chain of cognition that was involved in the chess game process. Binet's research was conducted by blindfolding chess players and he found that masters were able to play from memory and that intermediates found this to be an impossible task. It was also concluded that experience, imagination and memories of abstract and concret varieties were essential in grand master chess. The line of psychological chess research was followed up in the 1950's by Reuben Fine and a decade later by Adriaan de Groot. At a point in Binet's career he became engrossed with the ideas of John Stuart Mill and Mill believed that the operations of intelligence could be explained by the laws of associationism. Binet came to realize the limitation of Mills theory, however Mill's ideas continued to influence Binet's work. In 1883, years of independent study ended when Binet was introduced to Charles Fere, who introduced him to Jean Charcot, the director of a clinic called Las Salpetriere. Charcot became Binet's mentor and Binet accepted a job offer at the clinic. During Binet's seven years at the clinic all of Charcot's views were accepted unconditionally by Binet. In 1883, Binet began to work in Jean-Martins Charcot's neurological laboratory at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris and at the time of Binets tenure Charcot was experimenting with hypnotism. However after Binet's curiousity in hypnotism decreased he turned to the study of development, which was also an influenced move because of the birth of his two daughters. Upon a 21 period following a shift in career interests Binet went on to publish more then 200 books, articles and reviews in what now would be called experimental, developmental, educational, social and differential psychology. Binet's research with his daughters helped him to further improve his developing ideas on intelligence and especially the importance of attention span an suggestibility within intellectual growth. Binet and fellow researcher Fere discovered what they called transfer and they also recognized perceptual and emotional polarization, however after research done by many others Binet and Fere were forced to admit that they were wrong about their notions of transfer and polarization.
Since basically, their patients had known what was expected, what was supposed to occur, and so they just assented in the research studies. Binet had risked everything on this experiment and its results, and his lack of success was a obstacle that took a toll on him. In the year 1890, Binet quit his position from La Salpetriere and did not mention it or it's director again. Binets interests then turned in the direction of the development of his two daughters Madeleine and Alice. This research is similar to that accomplished by Jean Piaget not long after, which regards the development of cognition in children. A job came about for Binet in 1891 at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne. Binet worked for a year without compensation and by 1894, Binet became the director. This was a position as director that Binet held until his death, and it fortunately allowed him to puruse his studies on mental processes. As Binet was directing the Laboratory, Theodore Simon applied to do doctoral research under Binet's guidance. So this was the beginning of Binet and Simon's long, productive work together. During this time Binet also co-founded the French journal of psychology, L'Annee psychologique, and worked as the director and editor-in-chief. In the year 1899, Binet was given a request to be a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child and to this group to which Binet became a member hoped to initiate the studying of children in a scientific way. Binet as well as many other members of the society were appointed to the Commission for the Retarded. From there in Binet's life the question then became "What should be the test given to children thought to possibly have learning disabilities, that might place them in a special classroom?" Binet made a goal to establish the differences that separate the normal child from the abnormal, and to measure such differences. The book "Experimental Studies of Intelligence" was the book Binet used to describe his methods and it was published in 1903. The development of more tests and investigations where brought about with the help of the medical student Thedore Simon. Simon had nominated himself a couple of years before as Binet's research assistant and helped him work on the intelligence tests that Binet is known for, which also mutually share Simon's name. In 1905, a new test for measuring intelligence was established and it was just called the Binet–Simon scale. In the year 1908, they revised the scale, leaving out, modifying, and adding tests and also arranging them in accordance to age levels from three to thirteen. In 1904, a French professional group for child psychology, La Société Libre pour l'Etude Psychologique de l'Enfant, was asked by the French government to design a commission on the education of retarded children. The commission was asked to produce a mechanism for identifying students that could use the additional help through alternative education. Binet, was an active member of this group and he found a big need for the development of his mental scale here. Binet and Simon, in creating what historically is known as the Binet-Simon Scale, had created an assortment of tasks they thought were representative of typical children's abilities at different ages. This task-selection means was established from their many years of researching children in natural settings. They both decided to test their measurement on a sample of fifty children, ten children per five age groups. The children chosen for their study were recognized by their school teachers as being average for their age. The gist of this scale mentioned here of normal functioning, which would later be revised twice using more strict type of standards, was to compare children's mental abilities relative to those of their normal peers. Interestingly the scale was made up of thirty tasks of increasing difficulty. The less difficult of these could be completed by all children, even those who were severely retarded. For an essential use of determining educational placement, the results on the Binet-Simon scale would identify the child's mental age. Binet was upfront about the limitations of his scale. Binet emphasized the incredible diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative, and not quantitative, measures in his view. "Binet also emphasized that intellectual development progressed at variable rates and could be influenced by the environment; so intelligence was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be found in children with comparable backgrounds" (Siegler, 1992). H.H. Goddard, a influencer of the eugenics movement, brought the Binet-Simon Scale to the United States and translated it into English. Following Goddard in the U.S. mental testing movement was all about Lewis Terman who took the Simon-Binet Scale and standardized it using a large American sample. The new Standford-Binet scale was no longer used strictly for promoting education for all children, although that was Binet's objective. So "a new objective of intelligence testing was illustrated in the Stanford-Binet manual with testing ultimately resulting in "curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency (p.7)" Terman, L., Lyman, G., Ordahl, G., Ordahl, L., Galbreath, N., & Talbert, W. (1916). The Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Scale for Measuring Intelligence. Baltimore: Warwick & York.(White, 2000).
In the years between 1905 to 1908, Binet and Simon produced a test primarily for kids ages 3 to 15 that would compare their intellectual capabilities to other children of the same age. Binet conducted a lot of trial and error testing with students. Binet researched groups of “normal” children, in addition to children who were mentally challenged. Binet had to find out for himself which tasks each group of students was able to complete, and what would be considered standard in the groups. Binet had published the third version of the Binet-Simon scale right before he died in 1911. Still, the Binet-Simon scale was and is largely popular all over the world, mainly because it is easy to give and is rather brief.
Binet also studied sexual behavior, coining the term erotic fetishism to describe individuals whose sexual interests are in nonhuman objects, such as articles of clothing. And Binet also researched the abilities of Valentine Dencausse, the most famous fortune teller in Paris in those days. In writing this blog I think it is interesting to study someone as smart as Binet and who offered so much to education and psychology in his career studies of intelligence.

2009-05-27T10:48:00.001-07:00

Today I have decided to blog about Austrian-born American psychoanalyst, most known for his development of Self Psychology an influential school of thought that lies within the psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory. Kohut became an important member of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis when he settled in America after leaving Europe. Kohut was a big proponent of the traditional psychoanalysis view that was most popular in the U.S., which is why he jokingly called himself Mr. Psychoanalysis. Kohut at first tried to remain devoted to the traditional analytic viewpoint that he once became connected to, but Kohut later turned away from Freud's structural theory of the id, ego and superego and Kohut decided to develop his idea related to what he called the tripartite (three-part) self. Kohut believed that this three part self can only develop when the needs of one's "self states", including one's sense of worth and well-being, are met in relationships with others. With difference to traditional psychoanalysis that focuses around drives, internal conflicts, and fantasies, Self Psychology thus placed a great deal of emphasis on the vicissitudes of relationships. Kohut showed his interest in how we develop our "sense of self" using narcissism as a model. So Kohut believed if a individual is narcissistic it will allow him to suppress feelings of low self esteem and by talking highly of himself a person can eliminate his sense of worthlessness. Kohut widened his theory during the 1970's and 1980's, a time which aggressive individuality, overindulgence, greed and restlessness left may feeling empty, fragile and fragmented. Self Psychology is considered to be one of the "four psychologies" that modern therapists and theorists rely on and the others are drive theory, ego psychology and object relations. According to biographer Strozier, Kohuts book, "The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Analysis of the Treatment of the Narcissistic Personality Disorders" helped extend Freud's theory of narcissism where Kohut introduces self-object transference's' of mirroring and idealization; and in other words "children need to idealize and emotionally "sink into" and identify with the idealized competence of admired figures." "They also need to have their self-worth reflected back ("mirrored") by empathic and care giving others." These types of experiences enable them to thereby understand self-soothing and other skills that are vital for the development of a healthy (cohesive, vigorous) sense of self. An example of this process would be, " a therapist becomes the idealized parent and through transference the patient begins to get the things he has missed and the patient also has the opportunity to reflect on how early the troubling relationship led to personality problems." Kohut believed narcissism comes about from poor attachment at an early age and Freud also thought that narcissism hides low self esteem and that therapy will re-parent an individual through transference so to begin to get the things that were missed. Later Kohut added a third major self object theme called the alter-ego twinship, which is about being part of a larger human identification with others. Though dynamic theory tends to place emphasis on childhood development, Kohut believed that the need for such self-object relationships will not discontinue at childhood but be continuous throughout the states of a person's life. So it seems apparent to me Kohut was brilliant in the field of psychology and that his work helped influence a whole lot and the overall structure of some of Freud's theory.

2009-05-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

Today I have decided to blog about James McKeen Cattell who was an American psychologist and the first professor of psychology in the USA at the University of Pennsylvania. Cattell was also a long time editor and publisher of different scientific journals and publications. It is believed that perhaps more then any of Cattell's contemporaries that he most help establish psychology as a legitimate science that should be studied at the highest academic levels. Cattell is also remembered for an opposition against American involvement in World War 1 and this view led to his dismissal from the position he had at Columbia University, which was a move that had an influence in many universities establishing tenure as a way to protect unpopular beliefs. Cattell did not come upon his calling until arriving in Germany for graduate studies where he met Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. Cattell left Germany in 1882 to study at John Hopkins University but returned to Leipzig the following year as Wundt's assistant. Cattell and Wundt from there went on to establish the formal study of intelligence. While working under Wundt Cattell became the first American to publish a dissertation in the field of psychology called "Psychometric Investigation and this dissertation was accepted by the University of Leipzig in 1886. Upon completing his Ph.D. with Wundt in Germany in 1886 Cattell took up teaching at the University of Cambridge in England and became a 'Fellow Commoner' of St John's College, Cambridge. Cattell also made occasional visits to America and gave lectures at Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1889, Cattell returned to the United States and worked as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1891 he moved to Columbia University to become Department Head of Psychology, Anthropology and Philosophy. Cattell also became the President of the American Psychological Association in 1895. So from the start of his career Cattell had worked hard to establish psychology as a field worthy of study as much as physics or chemistry was as well. Interestingly Cattell believed himself that further studies would show that intellect itself could be parsed into standard units of measurements. Cattell also brought the methods of Wilhelm Wundt and Francis Galton to the USA by establishing mental testing efforts in America. Also money he won from his tenure lawsuit was used to create The Psychological Corporation, which is one of the largest mental testing firms in America. Cattell is well known for his involvement in creating and editing scientific journals helping to create the journal Psychological Review in 1894 along with James Mark Baldwin, he also acquired the journal Science and even made it to the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1904, Cattell founded Popular Science Monthly, which later went on to become Popular Science and in 1915 he edited and founded Scientific Monthly. Cattell certainly was an interesting person one way or the other in my view and I think it is amazing to think about perhaps where the field of psychology and understanding intelligence would be without all of his many influential career efforts.

2009-05-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

Today I have decided to blog about Karen Horney. Horney was a German psychoanalyst and psychologist. Horney has been often classified as a Neo-Freudian from questioning some traditional views of Freud. In 1920, Horney obtained a position at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Berlin, a place where she conducted lectures on psychoanalysis for several years. Years later in life Horney and her children immigrated to New York and eventually settled in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn Karen became friends with intellectuals like Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan. While living in Brooklyn Horney developed and advanced her composite theories related to neurosis and personality from her experiences of working in the field of psychotherapy. In 1937, Horney published the book "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time", which became wide in popularity. In the year of 1941, Horney was able to become Dean of the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, a institute she founded from becoming less at terms with the generally strict, orthodox nature of the psychoanalytic community. Horney's disagreements from Freudian psychology influenced her resigning from her post and shortly after she began a teaching job in the New York Medical College. Horney founded a journal called the American Journal of Psychoanalysis and she taught at the New York Medical College and continued her practice as a psychiatrist until she passed away in 1952. Horney looked at neurosis differently from other psychoanalysts of her time. Her deep interest in neurosis led her to compile a detailed theory of neurosis, with data she obtained from patients. Horney believed neurosis was an ongoing process, with neurosis commonly occurring sporadically through out an individuals lifetime. Horney placed a important emphasis on parental indifference towards the child, believing that a child's perception of events as opposed to the parents intentions is essential to understanding an individuals neurosis. In her research Horney named ten patterns of neurotic needs and they consist of the following:
"Moving Toward People
1. The need for affection and approval; pleasing others and being liked by them.
2. The need for a partner; one whom they can love and who will solve all problems.
Moving Against People
3. The need for power; the ability to bend wills and achieve control over others -- while most persons seek strength, the neurotic may be desperate for it.
4. The need to exploit others; to get the better of them. To become manipulative, fostering the belief that people are there simply to be used.
5. The need for social recognition; prestige and limelight.
6. The need for personal admiration; for both inner and outer qualities -- to be valued.
7. The need for personal achievement; though virtually all persons wish to make achievements, as with No. 3, the neurotic may be desperate for achievement.
Moving Away from People
8. The need for self sufficiency and independence; while most desire some autonomy, the neurotic may simply wish to discard other individuals entirely.
9. The need for perfection; while many are driven to perfect their lives in the form of well being, the neurotic may display a fear of being slightly flawed.
10. Lastly, the need to restrict life practices to within narrow borders; to live as inconspicuous a life as possible".
However Horney later decided to fit these ten needs into three broad categories: compliance-a process of moving towards people or self effacement , aggression also called the moving against people or the expansive solution and detachment which is also refereed to as the moving away from or resigning or a detached personality. Towards the end of her career Horney summarized her ideas in "Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization" which was her major work that was published in 1950, which is a summary of work with some additional views upon her theories as well. Interestingly I thought Horney with Alfred Adler came to form the Neo-Freudian discipline. Horney had strove to redesign in a way the Freudian perspective, presenting a holistic, humanistic view on individual psyche, which placed much emphasis on cultural and social differences everywhere. Horney was a proponent of Maslow's view that self actualization is the ultimate sum of human achievement. Through views on the individual psyche Horney came to believe that the self is at the core of ones own being and potential. Believing that if a person has a correct conception of them self, then a person is free to realize their potential and achieve their desires within reasonable boundaries. So Horney believed that self-actualization is the healthy persons way through life, as opposed to a neurotics clinging to a set of certain needs. Horney also believed that we have views of our self, known as the "real self"("who and what we actually are") and the "ideal self" (the type of person a person feels they should be and this is used as a model to assist in developing potential and achieving self actualization". Horney conducted additional research on the real and ideal self and how they interact with each other and influence different emotions. Horney also believed in a "tyranny of the shoulds and the neurotics hopeless "search for glory" which was related to fallacious "perfection" and a manifestation of self dislike; and she believed these ingrained traits of the psyche will halt a persons potential from being actualized unless the cycle of neurosis is somehow broken, through treatment or otherwise. Horney was also a pioneer of feminine psychiatry and was the first female to present a paper regarding feminine psychiatry. Horney believed examining female trends in behavior was a issue that needed more attention. In an essay called "The Problem of Feminine Masochism" Horney felt she showed that cultures and societies all over encouraged women to rely on men for their love, prestige, wealth, care and protection. Horney pointed out in society, that a will to please, satiate and overvalue men had come to exist in her view. Women were regarded as objects of charm and beauty, witch is at difference with all being's ultimate purpose of self-actualization according to Horney.
Horney believed women traditionally obtained value only through their children and the wider family. Horney went further on into this topic in her essay "The Distrust Between the Sexes" where she compares a husband-wife relationship to a parent-child relationship- and in her writing it is one to be of misunderstanding and one which influences negative neuroses.
Horney believed men and women have motives to be ingenious and productive. Women can satisfy this need by becoming pregnant and give birth according to Horney. Men fulfill this need only by the means of external ways; and Horney proposed that the important accomplishments of men in work or some other field can be viewed as a make up means for their inability to give birth to children. Horney had many interesting ideas that I think make a lot of sense to me and I think it is really interesting to see how she has been influenced and worked with other prominent developers of the field of psychology.

2009-05-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

Today I am dedicating a blog entry to a fellow I have wanted to for a while on this blog. This would be William James, a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. James wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism and the philosophy of pragmatism. James also founded the American Society for Psychical Research and he is known to be a champion with alternatives to healing. James challenged his colleagues to not allow a narrow mindset to prevent a honest review of the phenomena he covered upon some research. James spent his full academic career at Harvard University where he also had worked as a professor for different subjects and as chair at a certain point in time. James was one of the strongest proponents of the notion of Functionalism-("a general psychological approach that views mental life and behavior in terms of active adaptation to the person's environment"). James was also a big proponent of pragmatism in philosophy-( pragmatism is the philospshy of considering practical consequences and real effects to be vital components of meaning and truth"). James gained widespread attention with a 1,200 page book called Principles of Psychology: The Briefer Course. James interestingly had defined true beliefs as those that prove to be useful to the believer. James had a pragmatic theory of truth that was combined with a synthesis of correspondence of truth and coherence theory of truth with an additional dimension. James maintained a world view in balance with pragmatism that the value of any truth was dependent upon the use of it to the person who held it. Following the ideas of pragmatism James also believed that the world was a mosaic of a variety of experiences that can only fully be understood in a way through "radical empiricism"-("any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that"). James's description of the mind-world connection, was explained in terms of a "stream of consciousness"and had a direct and influential influence on avant-garde and modernist literature and art. James also supported an epistemological realism position-(a philosophical position, a subcategory of objectivism, holding that what you know about an object exists independently of your mind"). Upon many of James's important writings I thought it was interesting that in a lecture titled "The Will to Believe" James defended the right to violate principles of evidentalism so to justify hypothesis venturing. James also did a lot of important work in the philosophy of religion. In lectures at the University of Edinburgh he offered a broad ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience and he interpreted them according to his pragmatic learning's and some important points he makes in this regard are the following: "Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius. The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things. In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain "over beliefs" in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives." James is also one of the namesakes of the James Lange theory of emotion, which he developed independently of Carle Lange in the 1880's. The James Lange theory can be described as responses to experiences in the world and the influencing of the autonomic nervous system creating physiological events, such as muscular tension, rise in heart beat and so forth. So James thought within the James Lange theory emotions, then, are feelings which stir about as a result of these physiological changes, rather than being their cause. As far as the Philosophy of History goes James also had an interesting view that I think can be explained a little more by a following statement of his: "Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives." He continues, "The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it" and James felt that the great people of history manipulate the thoughts of society. James also conducted research on Spiritualism and published a book called Expériences d'un Psychiste, and it is a book that relates many experiments conducted with a lady named Leonora Piper. I find William James interesting and complex at times and I think clearly he has been highly influential and apparently I am not the only individual to think this James once being ranked in a research study by Haggbloom, as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century.

2009-05-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

Today I thought I would blog about a more new to me and interesting influential figure in psychology and this person would be Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan. Sullivan was born in New York in 1892 and he conducted work with psychoanalysis that was based on direct and verifiable evidence-(versus the more abstract conceptions of the unconscious mind more akin by Freud and his followers). Sullivan was a psychiatrist who was a helpful component of laying the groundwork for understanding a person based on the network of relationships in which he or she is involved in. Sullivan developed a theory of psychiatry based on interpersonal relationships where cultural influences are by and large the reason for mental illness. Interestingly what Sullivan said among his research was that loneliness was the most painful among human experiences. Sullivan extended Freud's psychoanalysis for the treatment of patients with severe mental disorders and most specifically schizophrenia. Sullivan was the first to talk about the significant other in psychological literature and he also developed the Self System. The Self System "is a configuration of the personality traits developed in childhood and reinforced by positive affirmation and the security operations developed in childhood to avoid anxiety and threats to self-esteem". Sullivan also called the Self System, a steering mechanism towards a serious of I-You interlocking behaviors; meaning what a person does is based upon eliciting a particular reaction and Sullivan referred to these behaviors as parataxic integrations. Also resulting miscalculations of a sort in judgement were known and termed by Sullivan as parataxic distortions when other people are perceived or examined based on the patterns of previous experience. Sullivan's research on interpersonal relationships became the foundation of interpersonal psychoanalysis, which is a branch of psychoanalytic theory and treatment that emphasizes the specific exploration of the types of different patient patterns of interacting among others. There is no doubt in my mind Sullivan was a brilliant psychiatrist, delving in and influencing psychoanalysis greatly in his prominent career.

2009-05-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

Today I thought it would be interesting to talk about a more contemporary researcher in psychology and his theories, since I recently blogged about more prominent figures in the past. So I thought I would talk about William Glasser and some information about his theory. Glasser is an American psychiatrist who developed Realty Therapy-("an approach to counseling and problem-solving which focuses on the here-and-now of the client and how to create a better future"). Glasser also developed Choice Therapy, which "posits that behavior is central to our existence and is driven by five genetically driven needs which are: survival, belonging/connecting/love, power/significance/competence, freedom/responsibility, and
Fun/learning, much like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs . Glasser also believed in what he called a "Quality World"-(things that are important to us like family or cultural values, etc.). The "Quality World" concept is part of choice theory and Glasser also talked about a "Comparing Place", which is where people compare together the real world we experience with the "Quality World". Glasser believed people try to achieve the best real world experience, consistent with the "Quality World". Glasser believed that total behavior is comprised of acting, thinking, feeling and physiology. The origins of a lot of unhappiness for people according to Glasser are from poor kinds of relationship with close people in our lives. Glasser felt that pleasure and happiness are related, but not wholly synonymous, for example sex could be considered pleasurable, but could possibly for some lead to less happiness, through a later divorce in a sexual relationship for instance. Choice Theory follows the belief that mental illness is the showing of unhappiness and that we are able to learn to choose from alternate behaviors that will be the influence of greater satisfaction and realty therapy helps one to learn and gain a wider perspective of these alternate decisions. I like where Glasser is coming from with his theory, which to me seems to make sense as a way to analyze where a problem might be coming from and focus on what in the future can change for the better. I will just leave this post off here with what is considered the Ten Axioms of Choice Theory:
("The Ten Axioms of Choice Theory
1. The only person whose behavior we can control is our own.2. All we can give another person is information.3. All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.4. The problem relationship is always part of our present life.5. What happened in the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.6. We can only satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World.7. All we do is behave.8. All behavior is Total Behavior and is made up of four components: acting, thinking, feeling and physiology9. All Total Behavior is chosen, but we only have direct control over the acting and thinking components. We can only control our feeling and physiology indirectly through how we choose to act and think.10. All Total Behavior is designated by verbs and named by the part that is the most recognizable").

2009-05-16T14:28:00.001-07:00

Today I have came upon some further reading of another interesting figure often studied in the field of psychology and this would be Mr. Edward Titchener, who I would like to talk about a little further. Titchener was an English man and a student of Wilhelm Wundt before he was a Professor of Psychology and before he created a psychology laboratory at Cornell University. Titchener was educated in Europe and interestingly he also liked to put a spin on Wilhelm Wundt's work about the psychology of consciousness once Titchener traveled to the United States. Titchener translated and brought into the English the concept of empathy, which had been created and coined in German by Robert Vischer. Titchener tried to classify the structures of the mind and this method became known as structuralism-("structuralism is about analyzing a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts"). And one last fact for now on this blog, a fun fact as well, was that Titchener's brain was contributed to the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell. I think Titcheners work makes a lot of sense to me and is it interesting how influential his work has been like coining in English the word Empathy.

2009-05-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

Today I have decided to blog again exclusively about another key player in the field of psychology. This person would be Carl Jung the founder of Analytical Psychology, which is also known as Jungian Psychology. Analytical psychology tries to incorporate and apprehend the deep forces and motivations underlying peoples behavior by the practice of an accumulative phenomenology around the significance of dreams, folklore and mythology. Jung has also been been influential to cross cultural movements all over the world and depth psychology-("a broad term that refers to any psychological approach examining the depth or the subtle or unconscious parts of human experience"). It seems obvious to me Jung has clearly had a incredibly interesting life with research travels around the globe, his close and interesting relationship with Freud, living through World War 2 and having his career impacted by evil Nazism and really just his big overall influence in the field of psychology that is even believed to have been an influence in the Alcohol Anonymous organization. Jung was considered to be the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is "by nature religious" and he thought it was important to understand this at length. Jung promoted understanding the psyche through dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy. Jung was a practicing physician and also a theoretical psychologist but what a lot of his work actually showed was a big interest in Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, the arts, sociology and literature. Interestingly Jung believed it was important to have balance and harmony and to really not fully rely on science and logic and he believed that it is important to incorporate spirituality and the appreciation of unconscious realms. Jung also thought the process of individuation was an important process for a person to become whole. Individuation was a major part of analytical psychology and is a process of a person incorporating the unconsciousness with the consciousness while still maintaining conscious independence. Jung was also importantly responsible or influential for: the concept of introversion and extroversion; the concept of the complex; the collective unconsciousness- ("part of the unconscious mind shared by a society, a people, or all humanity, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality"); archetypes-("models of a person, personality or behavior"); synchronicity-("the experience of two or more events which are casually unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner"); The Myers Brigg Type Indicator-("a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions"); Socionics-("a theory of information processing and personality type, distinguished by its informational model of the psyche"). So clearly just in this short research entry of mine it seems Jung is certainly right far up the totem pole of having a big influence and a robust career with all sorts of significant research that I bet could be read over days.

2009-05-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

I am dedicating this blog entry today on some important facts about Herman Ebbinghaus, since lately I have been trying to delve even more deeply into the history of psychology. Herman Ebbinghaus was born in Germany and was a pioneer with experimental memory research. He was known for his understanding of the forgetting curve-("the decline of memory retention in time") and the spacing effect-("humans more easily remember items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time rather than studied repeatedly in a short period time"). Ebbinghaus was also the first to describe the learning curve-("graphical representation of the "average" rate of learning for an activity or tool"). Ebbinghaus was serious about showing that higher mental processes were not hidden away but could be studied through experimentation. Ebbinghaus conducted research on memory interestingly through what he called different nonsense syllables like BOL which sounds like BALL. Ebbinghaus is also renowned for pioneering sentence completion exercises, establishing the Ebbinghaus Illusion, which is an illusion of relative size perception and drafting the first standard research report. So these are just some of the many important influences of the prominent research Herman Ebbinghaus, who was even referred to once by Williams James as someone who had conducted "heroic studies" that were "the single most brilliant investigation in the history of psychology".

2009-05-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

Although the study of psychology by philosophical means dates back to ancient times in China, India, Egypt and Greece I have recently been studying a bit more about the very important year of 1879. In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt founded one of the first formal laboratories for psychological research at the University of Leipzig. Wundt is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". Through the creation of this laboratory Wundt looked into matters like the nature of religious beliefs, identifying mental disorders and abnormal behavior and mapping damaged areas of the brain. Through this research in a laboratory setting Wundt helped establish psychology as a separate science from other topics. Interestingly Wundt also helped form the first journal for psychological research in 1881. Part of Wundt's research was influenced by a student name Edward Bradford Titchener who described Wundt's system as structuralism. I think it goes to show how Wundt was really highly influential in different ways as many of his students went onto become prominent influences in the field of psychology like James McKeen Cattell and G. Stanley Hall. And just to let you know why I am blogging particluarly about Wundt today is basically from finding some new interconnected research to Wundt that I came upon; and I then decided it would be necessary to talk more about on this blog somewhere about someone who had such a prominent and influential career like Mr. Wilhelm Wundt.

2008-04-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Of the various classes offered at Keene State I am glad that I stuck with clinical psychology because I believe clinical psychology is at the core of the field of psychology. Also because the Antioch College offers a good clinical psychology program which is also in Keene New Hampshire. Clinical psychology could be defined as the understanding, preventing and relieving of psychological distress and dysfunction and the positive influencing of well being and personal development. Clinical psychologists apply psychological assessment and psychotherapy as well as conduct research, teaching, forensic testimony, program development and consultation. As covered quite a bit in the History of Psychology text clinical psychology is thought to have originated from Lightner Witmer at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, when he opened the first clinical psychology laboratory. In the earlier part of the twentieth century clinical psychology mostly looked at assessment with little emphasis on treatment, but after world war 2 this reversed because of the need of more trained clinicians. Ever since the time of world war 2, two different education models were created the Ph.D. that focuses on research and the Psy.D. which focuses on practice. Clinical psychologists are known as experts in applying psychotherapy and are generally trained in the following areas Psychodynamic, Humanistic, Cognitive Behavioral, and Systems or Family Therapy. Sometimes clinical psychology can become confused with psychiatry that has similar ambitions as a field, but is also different because psychiatrists are medical practitioners and one of the biggest differences is that psychiatrists legally can prescribe medicines. Psychiatrist training offers the psychiatrist the ability to have a multidimensional biological, psychological, and social perspective of mental health problems. On another interesting note on psychologists in clinical studies and psychiatrists is that they often work together in multidisciplinary teams with other professionals such as occupational therapists and social workers to create a multimodal approach to help client conditions. But anyhow I think it is obvious that you need to be qualified to be a person that is a professional that studies the way peoples brains work. So far I am about halfway on the long road to becoming a psychologist and I have found specifically that there is a lot of interesting research specifically in clinical psychology that is part of the broad field of psychology.

2007-12-28T19:12:00.000-08:00

All done with the semester and attending Keene State College. I learned a lot of helpful information but there is a lot more to learn such as how to work with clients one on one, which I think they will do more at a master degree level. I enjoyed alot of different classes at Keene State like clinical and the history of psychology. There was a lot more to the history of psychology then I thought there would be, which I studied last semester. I came upon many theorists in the history class that had a lot of influence in defining the science of psychology; such as Herman Ebbinghaus who conducted a series of classic experiments on memory and he used nonsense syllables to understand more about retention and forgetting. Their was also Lightner Witmer who in 1896, was the first to open a clinic that orignally was for the treatment of children with learning disorders. Witmer also founded the first journal and training program in the field that would be known today as clinical psychology. Alfred Binet was talked a lot about in the psychological testing class and the history class and Binet created the first major intelligence test to examine the abilities of school children in Paris France. Binets test was later then revised and tranlated by Lewis Terman who also comes up in the history and testing class and he studied at Stanford University and Termans revised test is currently known as the Stanford Binet test. Margaret Floyd Washburn was the second female president of the American Psychological Association and she was helpful in the field of psychology by writing a book in 1908, called The Animal Mind in which she synthesizes animal research being studied. So their were many important names in the field of psychology and I am sure their are still some I am not completely familiar with. I think it is interesting that psychology and it's theories sometimes seem to deal with simple ideas that summarize the nature of human beings that we don't always think about and it can also deal with complicated research that has to be studied alot to grasp such as the synapses of brain cells. Anyhow I am glad that I was able to learn more about psychology at Keene State and it will be interesting to see what I will learn in a masters degree program.

2007-09-08T07:09:00.000-07:00

This semester at college I am taking 4 classes, History Psychology, Seminar of the Nature and Origins of Consciousness, Cognitive Psychology, and Research Methods. It will be interesting to see in the classes especially History Psychology what information is new to me. I think that the history of psychology will change a lot because aspects of psychology can change as the world changes in the future. Some of the researchers that are new to me are Ernest Weber (1795-1878), Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) and James Mill (1773-1836). Ernest Weber found the experimental determination of the accuracy of the two -point discrimination of the skin, which basically means two points on the skin are spanned and then an individual says that they feel two different sensations. This was done by an instrument that looks like a drawing compass which separates apart on an individual until someone reports saying they feel two different feelings. I don't think that this is a big finding for today standards but I imagine in the 1800's it was. Weber's research is considered the first example of a threshold which in psychology is known as the point at which a psychology effect begins to be created. On October 22, 1850, Gustav Theodor Fechner found the idea that a quantitative relationship between a mental sensation and material sensation existed in the relationship between mind and body. Fechner basically found that the sound of one bell along with another bell makes more of a sensation then adding one bell to another ten already ringing; which means the effects of stimulus intensities are not absolute but are relative to how much sensation already exists. So he found that the amount of sensation (the mental quality) relies on the amount of stimulation (the physical quality), and to measure the change in sensation the change in stimulation also has to be measured. Pretty complicated but I think that it is important research in some ways. James Mill believed that the mind was a machine and that it operated much like a clock because it has its own operations related to external and internal forces. This view follows the belief that the mind is a "completely passive entity" and is influenced by external stimuli. We respond to these stimuli automatically and we act without knowing it. Mill did not talk of free will in his theory and he thought that the mind should be studied by a method of analysis. Mill also believed that sensation and ideas are the only kind of mental factors that exist. I think that all of these theories consist of a lot of work and I imagine they must have been huge at the time and apparently are still pretty important. But I think there is a combination of a lot more theories that help explain psychology better and I don't completely believe humans are machines although I think sometimes our behaviors are automatic. Anyhow it will be interesting to read more about the elaborate theories that came about in the past history of psychology.

2007-06-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

I am currently done with college for the summer but will be taking research methods, cognitive psychology and history and systems of psychology next semester so I am bound to be learning something new soon. I came upon a lot of interesting information in my clinical psychology class last semester; such as hearing about marriage, family and child therapy because some other classes I took just covered general concepts of psychology from Freud, Rogers and so forth but not these exact therapies so much. Most forms of therapy have some version that can deal with children. In therapy children are different then adults because they rarely request psychotherapy and because they are still in a developmental process so it is more complicated for children the adults to rely on verbalization and self examination in therapy. Many child therapies use play rather then verbal activities that are more popular in adult therapy. Children can be treated for disorders such as phobias, anorexia, bulimia, schizophrenia, autism, depression, mental retardation, asthma, headaches, and the negative influences from child abuse or related traumas. Marital and couple therapists first assumption is that conflicts of the individuals in therapy come from the poor functioning of the people as a unit rather than just from emotions and personality issues within the individuals in couples therapy. This is why a lot of theorists view this type of therapy to be a subsystem of family therapy. Usually when a couple comes into therapy with issues each person feels threatened and in a defensive mode and sometimes will deal with this by blaming one another, mutual withdrawal and blaming themselves. This influences the situation where the couple is looking at the other person as the problem and not more willing to work together to solve issues. Couple therapists will try to first reduce threat, blame and defensiveness, create positive communication that helps the couple to work on mutual concerns and to start the process of actual problem solving. Couples therapy applies techniques to create effective communication to take the place of blame and fighting. And the couple therapist might focus on the exact nature of the conflict and the experience that comes along with it in therapy. One well known technique in couples therapy is known as mirroring between the couple where lets say the husband tells his story of an issue and the wife carefully listens, then the wife is asked to say exactly what she heard her husband say, then the husband is asked if he got what the wife said and if not he is asked to say it again, which can be a challenging task for some troubled couples. Most family therapies take the perspective of the family that it is a system. From this system perspective conflicts are looked at as reflections of poor functioning in the system as a whole. If a family system is having conflict the system may become closed to try to keep up with a type of static equilibrium in the family. For example if a issue comes up among a mom and dad a child may develop a physiological or psychological problem as a way to restore some balance in the family, which is done unconsciously by the child and is a response to pressures and strain occurring in the family. The child developing the issue may change the mom and dads attention from their problems which to some degree can positively restabilize the family system. Some family therapist think that families "need" their problems which means that to fix this circumstance through therapy the family needs to find a way to reorganize the whole family system in therapy so that the family does not feel like they "need" their problems for one reason or another. There are many different approaches that a therapist can use in family therapy and most of them are related to popular schools of therapy in up to date clinical psychology textbooks. I learned a lot in clinical psychology and I am hoping to learn more next semester in the classes I mentioned before about related topics to the specialization of clinical psychology.

2007-03-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

This semester at college I am taking the course known as brain & behavior in other words the study of the brain and how it effects the human body. Currently we are talking a lot about vision in relation to brain and behavior. We have talked about rods which are plentiful in the retina. The rods within the retina react to dull light and are less reactive to to bright day light which bleaches the retina. Cones are mostly in the fovea the central part of the eye. Cones are also less active in faint or dull light and are more active in bright light and are a key component in relation to color vision. Since there is a difference in the amounts of rods and cones people have better color vision in the fovea and less color vision in the periphery. Cones have a more easier route to the brain then do rods. In the fovea the receptors have their own lines to the brain unlike in the periphery were the receptors share with ten to a hundred of other lines together. The ratio of rods to cones differs among different living species such as the South American oilbird which have about 15,000 rods for every cone and their rods are far into the retina to help them to be aware of faint light in the nighttime. Rods and cones both have photopigment chemicals that let out energy when hit by light. Photopigments also contain 11-cis-retinal a derivative of vitamin A and proteins called opsins. The ospins can switch the photopigments sensitivity to various wavelengths of light. Unlike the rods and cones ospins seem to be about the same in abundance to other vertebrates and invertebrates. In this class we have also talked a lot about color vision and the significance of wavelengths. In the human system of vision the smallest visible wave-lengths are seen as violet and more longer wavelengths of color are seen as blue, green, yellow, orange and red. The visible wave-lengths are different among species depending upon the amount of the species receptors. There is a lot of information that I hope to learn about in this type of biology class because it can explain the different human and animal behaviors that occur all the time.

2007-01-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

This semester at school I am taking the class known as clinical psychology. It covers a lot of information about the essential practices of people in the field of psychology. In class we have talked a lot about the different views on counseling and psychology. From reading the first chapter I have learned a lot about the different functions of people in the field of psychology and counseling. Their are career counselors who deal with a comprehensive developmental approach to the career paths of individuals trying to start and change careers. Marriage and family counselors help people with issues of conflict with close relationships, which can encompasse communication difficulties, conflict resolution, issues of closeness as well as trust and child rearing techniques. Clinical neuropsychiatry deals with the basic research on the brain and it's influences on behavior and these specialists find jobs in hospitals, medical schools, universities and through private practice as well. Educational psychologists help by understanding more about research assessment and methods that relate to the educational system. They use the field of psychology by understanding more about assessment, learning and motivation, cognition, child development computers and other areas. School psychologists requirements and roles differ among the different states in the United States but usually school psychologists have teaching experience and hold a masters degree in school psychology, pupil personnel or other closely related areas. There is rehabilitation psychology, which is an older field, which is also thought by some people to be a prerequisite to neuropsychiatry. These psychologists try to help people overcome problems from personal and environmental life that negatively affect them in their community. Community psychology was very popular in the 1960's and it emphasizes preventing psychological disorders and views prevention to be the best route at the community level. The techniques of a community psychologist might include crisis intervention, client advocacy, improving and providing community services and support and political activism. Legal or forensic psychology involves psychological issues connected to the law and legal system. Their duties may include psychological assessment for court trials, they are also needed in the process of providing expert testimony, they may prepare information for the court that includes summarized psychological expertise on a certain topic, they may treat people under court jurisdiction, they may conduct research on issues that affect the legal system, such as issues related to jury selection and they do other important tasks as well that involve the legal process. There are also specialties related to physical health because research has found connections between the physical body and the brain, such as through eating disorders, smoking and others health conditions. There are also specialties that involve children dealing with issues related to the developmental stages and the different psychological issues that can affect children, such as sleep difficulties, temper tantrums and so forth. Pediatric psychologists use there expertise on subjects like child development, family functioning and therapy theories to help children deal with personal and environmental issues. After reading about the different tasks involved with psychology I can understand how there is a lot to know in this field and I look forward to understanding more in depth about the different functions of psychologists in society.

2006-09-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

This semester at Keene State College I am only taking one psychology course, which is the psychology of statistics. I think if I am to ever apply statistics in the field of psychology I probably will be dealing with psychometrics, learning theory, perception, abnormal psychology and human development. Psychometrics is the field of psychology that applies measurement to knowledge, abilities, attitudes and personality traits. Psychometrics focuses mostly on the difference between people or research participants. Learning theory tries to understand more about how people learn usually through behaviorism, constructivism and cognitivism. Perception in psychology is the process of using, interpreting, organizing and selecting sensory information. Human development in psychology deals with the progressive psychological changes that happen among people through out time. And finally abnormal psychology would be the scientific study of behavior in order to understand, predict, and alter abnormal differences or patterns in ones psychological functioning. These fields could require a lot of research that is evaluated mathematically so I can see how statistics could be a key element in understanding the many aspects and theories of psychology better.

2006-05-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

This was the final week of abnormal psychology classes at Keene State for the spring semester. I enjoyed abnormal psychology a lot because I got the opportunity to learn about this subject in a variety of ways, such as through in class presentations and activities, blogging, exams and a book report on The Curious Incident of the Dog at Nighttime, which was a book I really enjoyed reading. There were a lot of psychiatric disorders and definitions that were new to me before I covered them this semester, such as DID, somatoform disorders, the different forms of schizophrenia, cyclonic disorders, pervasive disorders and others. It also was interesting hearing about the different abnormal psychological conditions certain people had disclosed information about in the class, which helped for me to further understand these disorders by hearing more about what it is really like to have certain symptoms that could be linked to abnormal psychology. I am glad I got the opportunity to take this class because I think it covered a lot of important information that would be essential to know about if I want to work in the field of psychology.

2006-04-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

This week in abnormal psychology at Keene State I saw more presentations on subjects related to this field. I saw quite a few presentations on bipolar type disorders. One person did a presentation on multiple personality disorder, which I think is an interesting topic. Multiple personality disorder is also known as dissociative identity disorder or (DID). With this disorder a person could develop as many as 100 new identities that all simultaneously exist. In certain cases each identity has it's own behavior, tone of voice and physical gestures. But in most cases only certain characteristics of the disorder are noticeable because the identities are not completely separate from regular characteristics the person uses and this is why the disorder was changed in the DSM from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder. The in class presentations were interesting too listen to because I got the chance to hear about many different situations that are relevant to the field of abnormal psychology. And I also got to hear about different topics that are new and interesting to me.

2006-04-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

This week in abnormal psychology at Keene State College students did presentations. I saw presentations on ADHD, schizophrenia, social phobia, alcoholism, autism and other subject matter and so far the presentations were are all interesting. I myself decided to do my presentation on alcoholism because I found a lot of important information about this subject and other substance abuse disorders in the Durand and Barlow Abnormal textbook. Impulse control disorders would include intermittent explosive disorder, kleptomania, pathological gambling, and trichotillomania that are covered in chapter 10. Intermittent explosive disorder is a disorder that consists of aggressive impulses that result in assaults or the destruction of property and usually this condition is treated though cognitive behavioral treatments. Kleptomania is a condition where someone feels the need to take things that are not theirs and this disorder is usually treated through behavioral interventions or antidepresant medications. Pathological gambling is of course gambling increasing amounts of money because of the excitement that results from it and today treatment for this is done through gamblers anonymous. Trichotillomania is the urge to pull on ones own hair and is usually treated through cognitive behavioral interventions or tricyclic medication. Chapter 10 had lot of good information about substance related disorders and certain impulse control disorders that was in depth and interesting. I am also looking forward to hearing the rest of the abnormal psychology presentations next week.

2006-04-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

This week in abnormal psychology we talked and watched a video about schizophrenia. The video showed three people talking to a therapist and I think that in these particular interviews it was clear that these clients thought processes were not clear because it was hard to interpret different aspects of the conversation. Chapter 12 covers a lot of information about this subject and talks about the subtypes of schizophrenia as well. There are three different kinds of divisions of schizophrenia paranoid which would be symptoms of delusions of grandeur or persecution, disorganized or hebephrenic which would be symptoms of silly or immature emotionality and catatonic schizophrenia which according to Durand and Barlow consists of symptoms of alternate immobility and excited agitation. I think that in the video that we watched that I saw mostly symptoms of paranoid and disorganized schizophrenia among the three clients that were interviewed. Mental health workers usually use a classification system to make the process of identifying symptoms less complicated. The prevalence of schizophrenia is equal among men and women and it is estimated that about 0.2 to 1.5 percent of the population are schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is a biological condition that can have many different types of symptoms, which I think are important to learn more about in the field of psychology.

2006-04-09T20:13:00.000-07:00

This week in abnormal psychology I had my second exam, which covered a lot of different information about health psychology, anxiety, dissociation, somatoform disorders, mood disorders and personality disorders. I think the Essentials of Abnormal psychology textbook covered this information well. I started to look at chapter 9 for the next exam, which talks about various sexual and gender identity disorders and some aspects of these disorders I was not that familiar with. Chapter 9 talked about gender identity disorders which are also known as the psychological discontent of ones own biological sex. Gender identity disorders are the disturbance in ones own sense of sexual identity. A sexual dysfunction disorder would be a physical problem that somehow affects one's sex life. Paraphilia is a new term for sexual deviation and it stands for sexual arousal that is associated with inappropriate persons or objects. Philia stands for strong attraction and para means abnormal. For researchers to understand more about sexual practices they have to conduct surveys among the population. This topic can effect emotional and physical well being and is complex so I am sure understanding more about this topic could be relevant to the field of psychology.

2006-04-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

This week in abnormal psychology the professor talked about different people who appear to have the characteristics of being a psychopath. In the class people paired off and talked about different people they knew in their life that seem to demonstrate behaviors that would fit the criteria for being a psychopath and I heard some interesting responses. Psychopathology is also known as the scientific study of psychological disorders. The field of psychopathology consists of clinical and counseling psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, psychiatric social workers, marriage and family therapists and mental health counselors. Researchers have found that suppressing many different kinds of emotional responses, such as anger or fear can increase sympathetic nervous system activity which can influence psychopathology. So basic emotions of fear, anger, sadness, distress and excitement can influence as well as create different psychological disorders and psychopathology. I think that psychopathology is an interesting topic to cover because I think sometimes people don't realize just how common this disorder is in today's society.

2006-03-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

This week in abnormal psychology I started to look through chapter 13, which is all about developmental and cognitive disorders. One part of the chapter I found interesting was the section about pervasive disorders. People with pervasive developmental disorders deal with problems that affect language, socialization and cognition. The word pervasive means generally a serious long term problem that affects a person throughout their life and even before they are 18. Aspergers, autism, and retts are examples of pervasive disorders. To help people with a pervasive disorder there are psychosocial treatments, such as skill building and behavioral treatment of behavior problems. There are different pharmacological treatments that have been found to be effective in the treatment of different pervasive disorders. There has been a lot of research done just on treating various behaviors and the symptoms of these types of disorders through pharmacology. It was interesting reading about these different disorders because there is so much to know about understanding and identifying them. Also this week in class we did a fun activity and talked about whether or not we were people who tend to daydream and have fantasies a lot. And I said that I was kind of in between because sometimes my imagination can take over if I am watching a fictitious Hollywood movie but I think I can also be really focused if I am reading an interesting book. So I would say that I fall some where in between.

2006-03-18T23:37:00.000-08:00

This week at Keene State College it was spring break for college students, so I did not have any classes. But I got the opportunity to do some extra reading in The Essentials of Abnormal Psychology textbook so that I will be ready for the exam that will be coming up soon. Chapter eight covered a lot of information about sleep and eating disorders that I found to be interesting. People spend about one third of their lives sleeping, which would mean that in a one whole year people spend about 3,000 hours asleep. Research has found that about one out of seven people get less then 7 hours of sleep a night during the work week. Research has also found that even minor sleep deprivation over a couple of days can make people's thought processing abililities unclear. People who report having less sleep have been found also to have more health problems, which is probably because their immune system functioning is reduced with the loss of just even a few hours of sleep. Today sleep disorders are treated with long acting and short acting medicines, which are usually benzodiazepine or related type medicines. There are also different environmental treatments for sleep disorders, such as readjusting sleeping patterns and times. And finally there is also psychological treatment for sleeping disorders that can consist of relaxation techniques and stimulus control. Stimulus control means that people are instructed not to use their bedroom for any work or anxiety provoking activities. I think understanding more about sleeping patterns is important in the field of psychology because people have important and meaningful dreams and because without sleep daily functioning would be a serious problem. I think this chapter was interesting because it had important research facts about sleep and also because I find this topic interesting because Freud, Jung and other psychologists emphasized how important sleep was through their theories.

2006-03-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

This past week in abnormal psychology we covered various different things but the teacher talked alot about panic disorder and post traumatic stress disorder. Panic disorder is a serious situation because people with this disorder can suffer through episodes in which they feel like they are dying or losing control of what is going on around them. And since people who suffer from this condition do not know when a panic attack is going to occur they can also develop what is known as agoraphobia, which is a condition where a person feels trapped in a particular place or situation. Some of the typical places that are avoided by people with agoraphobia are shopping malls, cars, buses, trains, subways, wide streets, tunnels, restaurants, theaters, supermarkets, stores, planes, elevators and escalators. Today there is both psychological treatment and medicine that is used to treat people who suffer from the condition of panic attacks. Often the process of exposure to feared situations is used to help people overcome their panic disorder. This process is done by arranging situations in which a patient can gradually face there panic attacking situation and learn that there is not really a need to be in a state of such panic. Even though most patients rationally know there is not a real reason to be afraid of their panic it is helpful for them to be convinced of this emotionally. Sometimes therapists will accompany their patients when they are conducting their exposure exercises. Panic is an interesting component that can be studied in the field of psychology because naturally panic occurs for all people so they can gain an understanding of how dangerous a situation can be but as research shows panic can be escalated to an extreme level through PTSD or other factors, which can make it hard for certain people to function in everyday circumstance. And also because research seems to show that panic can be developed over a wide spectrum of circumstances that cause people to have extreme fear. It will be interesting to learn more about these serious conditions of anxiety and panic in the Essential of Abnormal Psychology textbook.

2006-03-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

This week in abnormal psychology I had my first exam that covered information from the chapters in the textbook and information covered in class. One thing that was covered on the exam that I believe is important in the field of psychology was information about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is necessary to have knowledge of in the process of clinical assessment. Clinical assessment is the evaluation and information gathering of psychological, social and biological factors in a person that might possibly have a psychological disorder. A diagnosis is the process of finding out if a particular problem an individual has meets the criteria of a specific disorder that could be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Three important factors that determine the value of assessment are reliability, validity and standardization. Reliability is important because it would prove that a diagnosis is truly accurate; validity is important in understanding how much a specific technique or test is designed to measure and standardization is the process of creating certain norms and requirements for a measurement technique or test to make sure of its accuracy in different situations. Clinical assessment consist of a clinical interview and manual status exams. I think that the exam covered a lot of important information such as understanding the Diagnostic and Statistical Assessment Manual and other psychology theories that I can further go over if I was not completely accurate about on the exam.

2006-02-26T13:51:00.000-08:00

This week I have an abnormal psychology exam so I have been looking over material that I have already covered. One thing I think that is going to be on the test and is interesting is the different historical perspectives of abnormal psychology. Around the period of 500 to 600 B.C. Greek philosophies were created with the thought of a "rational analysis" in the field of psychology. Plato believed that "human beings gained knowledge rationally" and Aristotle believed that human beings "analyzing perceived events can lead to an empirical view on particular events". So it is true that Plato was trying to find the ultimate truth" and Aristotle was trying to find "one's perception of the truth". Hipprocrates (B.C. 460-377) was the father of medicine and he believed that mental health was related to 4 biological problems or humors, which were the imbalance of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Galen (A.D. 129-198) was a Roman physician who helped to develop Hipprocrates humoral theory of disorders. The biological theory in psychology was treated with different levels of seriousness during the centuries after Hippocrates and Galen. Today in the 19th century it is taken seriously because of the further understanding of the nature and cause of syphilis and because of the influence of the knowledge of American psychiatrist John P. Grey. The Egyptians had discovered today what is known as a somatoform disorder. A somatoform disorder is a disorder where physical symptoms appear to be the result of an organic pathology in which no organic cause can be identified such as paralysis and certain kinds of blindness. I think it is amazing to think about how far back in time psychological research goes and how now some of these concepts from long ago can be relevant to what is understood about psychology in today's day and age.

2006-02-19T20:35:00.000-08:00

This week for Abnormal Psychology I started to look over some of the information in chapter 3 because I am pretty sure that there will be an exam coming up soon. I found the part in chapter 3 about neuropsychological testing to be especially interesting. I read about how today there are sophisticated tests that can locate a dysfunction that is occurring within someone's brain and these tests are available to all but can be expensive. Neuropsychological testing measures abillities in areas of reception, expressive language, attention and concentration, memory, motor skills, perceptional ablities, and learning and abstraction so that a profesional in the field of brain sciences can make a educated guess about a person's mental skills and possible dysfunction. One of the more popular tests of neuropsychology among children is the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, which is a test that is made up of cards that have different lines and shapes and then the child is asked to draw what is seen on the cards. This test has been found to be very useful for psychologists. The Luria-Nebraska Neurpsychological Battery and Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery are popular and advanced tests that are used today and can precisely determine dysfunctions within the brain by assessing many different skills. The Luria Nebraska test has been found to have eighty percent correctness statistically. Neuropsychological tests are used mostly as screening devices and usually go along with other forms of assessment that evaluate what the function of ones own mental health is. I found this to be interesting to read about because today there are many different types of tests that can evaluate a person's brain sometimes though a computer system like a positron emission tomography and there are other tests that are not computerized but are in the form of pictures, cards or other methods. And today it seems to be quite common that people are evaluated through these types of tests if you consider IQ tests or online personality tests and all of the many kinds of computerized tests.

2006-02-12T21:12:00.000-08:00

This week in Abnormal psychology we did a writing activity about eating disorders and watched a video about a person who struggled with depression. Two topics that seem to be common and can become very serious. It was an interesting video to watch because it was of a person sitting and talking with a counselor about the details of his experience with depression and taking medicine. I am glad that depression it a treatable issue because it is said that 23 million adults develop depression a year. I have also read that eighty percent of patients with depression show signs of better health within four to six weeks of beginning medication, therapy, going to support groups or a combination of these forms of help. But it is also said that two out of three people suffering from depression do not go out and find the proper treatment. It is also estimated that half of unsuccessful treatments are due to medical non-compliance. Some patients stop taking there medicine at the wrong time due to negative side effects, financial factors, fear of addiction and because of short term improvement which can influence the belief that that continuing treatment is not needed (DBSA,1999). Depression is a common thing and I think that most people understand what it is and because it is so common I think it is a good idea to be aware of the symptoms of depression. The in class video was interesting because the client was insightful into the symptoms of depression which for him were having social and physical problems from medicine.

2006-02-06T17:07:00.000-08:00

I recently read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. This book offers the reader an interesting perspective of the world through the eyes of 15 year old Christopher John Francis Boone who appears to be eccentric to the point of fitting the description of having an autistic or apserger disorder. Seven minutes after midnight Christoper finds that his neighbor Mrs. Shears pet poodle Wellington is laying dead on her own front lawn. Christopher liked Wellington so he makes it a mission of his own to find out who killed Wellington because the police cannot seem to figure it out. Christopher begins to write his own book about his job as being a detective and starts to investigate Wellington's death by questioning his neighbors and finds out an interesting revelation about his mother from neighbor Mrs. Alexander in the process. Christopher is trying to find a place where he will be happy and safe, which leads him on a adventure all around England. Christopher begins to realize that he may not be quite as safe around his father who is hiding a couple of things from him. The book was interesting though out because I was never quite sure what happened to Wellington, Christopher's mother and even what was going to happen to Christopher's pet rat Toby. Christopher is a smart boy who is doing honors level math with the help of Mrs. Gascoyne, his invigilator Reverend Peters and his teacher Siobhan. He also plans on doing honors level physics and he has special talents because he can name the capitals and countries in the world and all the prime numbers up to the number seven thousand and fifty seven. He is an intelligent character for sure but there are certain traits that Christopher has that could lead you to believe that he suffers from an autistic and asperger type disorder. Some of the autistic symptoms are the fact that he does not like people touching him even if it is a police officer or his parents; he also was known to scream when he became frustrated; he thought of Toby the rat to be as important as just about anyone in his life; he lacked a fear of danger because he risked his life for Toby; and he also did not understand various verbal cues or expressions, such as the phrase you are the apple of my eye. He had asperger symptoms because he had a more then average interest in astronomy and puzzles; he talked a lot about math and had great skills in memorization and math. Christopher most likely had an autistic or asperger disorder because he has several of the symptomatic traits that real life autistic and asperger people tend to have.
I though that the different characters in the book were quite realistic. It also seemed to me that just about all the characters in the book were involved in some sort of a conflict or had a potentially realistic type of problem; such as Mr. Shears and Christopher's mothers relationship and even Christopher and his own father having a misunderstanding about Wellington and Christopher's mother. Christopher's parents seem to be realistic because they cared about him like most parents I think would care about there son even though they were having parenting issues. His father was also trying to keep him out of trouble by telling him not to play a detective game. His father would try and make up for when he got frustrated with Christopher by taking him to the zoo, so he was quite sympathetic as well. The ending was good because Christopher had the ability to be around his parents in an enviroment he could deal with. The characters all seemed realistic and the only character who seems to be a bit odd really is Christopher himself.
I really enjoyed this book because it allowed me to have a look into the unique mind of Christopher Boone who sees things a little differently then I expected him too because of his disorder, such as the fact that he believes because the number and color of certain cars he sees will determine how his day is going to turn out. The book had realistic characters and a story that was adventurous, exciting, full of danger, and the lesson of what it is like for an autistic teenage boy and his family going through serious issues in life.

2006-01-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

This week in Abnormal Psychology the teacher gave a lecture about different theorists and about psychology in general. I found it interesting when Proffesor Welkowtiz talked about how he recently treated a patient by examing the physiological, psychological and social factors that were bothering his patient. Also this week in class we did different activites. On Thursday's class we did an activity were students in the class talked to each other about a problem in there life but the teacher had us try and look at the positive aspects of our own problems rather then the negative aspects. This was a good exercise to try because it seems to me that there is probably at least one posivitve factor that can come out of most problmatic situations. Chapter 2 of the Essentials of Abnormal Psychology contains a lot of information about the physiology of the human body such as genes, the central nervous system, the brain, the peripheral nervous system, and neurotransmitters, which I think should be a lot of interesting information to cover in the Abnormal Psychology textbook.

2006-01-18T19:51:00.000-08:00

This is my first week of classes at Keene State and today I had my first abnormal psychology class. The textbook the Essentials of Abnormal Psychology the fourth edition covers many serious issues in the field of psychology from eating and sleeping disorders to the legality and ethics of mental health services. The first chapter is interesting because it talks about the defintion of psychopathology and the historical conceptions of abnormal behavior. The three historical approaches of pyschopathology are the supernatural tradition, which would be forces outside of oneself or social envioroment; the biological tradition which is the belief that psychological disorders are influenced by disease or biochemical imbalances; and the psychological tradition which is the view that psychological disorders are influenced by poor psychological development and from social circumstances. From reading the first chapter of the textbook it looks like abnormal psychology will offer many interesting perspectives on very serious issues in the field of psychology.

2005-12-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

Today was the last official class of Personality Theories at Keene State for this semester. Next week is finals week, which means that I will have a cumulative exam on the many theories that have been covered in personality theories. I enjoyed the class today because the teacher talked a lot about psychopathology, which I found to be an interesting subject. Proffesor Welkowitz also read some stories that were directly related to psychopathology as well. Then to finish off the class he showed a video of different things that we did during the semester, such as blogging and listening to different podcasts. I am glad that I took Pesonality Theories because I enjoyed the textbook, lectures and learning about technological tools that Proffesor Welkowitz uses to teach students more about pyschology.

2005-11-30T09:10:00.000-08:00

This week our class was cancelled so the teacher had created an assignment were students go online and listen to a podcast about the psychobiology of anxiety, which is talked about in an interview between Proffesor Welkowitz and Lazslo Papp, who is the associate proffesor of psychiatry and director of the biological studies department at Columbia University. Proffesor Welkowitz asked about understanding the biological causes of panic disorders and Papp said that relatively little is known about the biology of panic disorders. Papp said that even though they had done a lot of research in the lab about panic and anxiety disorders little was known about the biological influences of these disorders. Proffesor Welkowitz asked what was in store for the future studies of psychobiology and Papp said that genetics with a combination of brain imaging will probably be the next frontier. Papp also went on to say that some scientific findings from around the United States are not really that specific, such as the various seratonin gene studies that he believed have been exaggerated. Proffesor Welkowitz also asked about the studies of another researcher he knew of and studies he conducted himself that have established the role of certain psychological factors in the origins of panic disorders; and Papp responded saying that those psychological factors are not discounted and that panic disorders consist of both biology and psychology. Papp also stated that everything is based on biology, which means that psychology was based on biology on some level if you look at various psychological phenomeneons. Proffesor Welkowitz's final question was drugs or cognitive behavior therapy a better treatment for people suffering from panic disorders and Papp responded saying that it depends because there are benefits from both treatments and when the two approaches of treatment are compared they are found to be equally succesfful. Proffesor Welkowtiz finished the interview with saying that we have a biological view and a balanced view from Papp's disucussion on the nature of panic disorders because he had come from both sides of different scientific views such as treatment and the importance of both psychology and biology. Papp also believes that it is going to be very important for people in the psychology field to work together in the process of discovering new psychological research.
I think that this was an intersting discussion to listen to because it is important to understand what progess has been being made with panic disorders research and to look at biological and psychological connections within the field of psychology.

2005-11-24T20:37:00.000-08:00

This week at Keene State College students had Thanksgiving break, so I only had one personality theories class for the whole week. The class was interesting because of the lecture and discussions and because of the in class writing assignment. The in class writing assigment was about whether I thought medicine or therapy was a more effective treatment for a depression or anxiety problem. Like most of the class I said that therapy would probably be the best route, but I also said that if therapy is ineffective then medicine can be an important alternative. I think also that if someone is being treated on a psychiatric medicine that it can be important they see a therapist, who can tell them about how they are doing overcoming there problem. I also began to read through some of chapter eleven, which looks like it will be the last chapter we will be covering this semester. The chapter talks about Raymond Catell's theory, known as the the Big Five Personality Trait Theory. Catell found that the personality contains five primary factors, which are neuroticism, extraversion, openess, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The Big Five Personality Trait theory was established through research on language, which allowed researchers to understand a descriptive model of personality characteristics. This personality theory was also developed through the studying of personality questionnaires, which then led to the development of the Five Factor Model that explains dispositonal inherrited biological traits. I think that like all the theories in the personality textbook this should be an important one because it was created through alot of extensive and interesting research.

2005-11-20T19:33:00.000-08:00

In this week's class we had are third exam, which I think went pretty well because the test review was very helpful. The exam covered information mostly about Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, George Kelly and Arnold Lazarus, who are theorist's who have specialized in humanistic, existential and cognitive theories. George Kelly was an interesting theorist to study because I had never heard of him before I took personality theories and once I started studying him I found that his theory makes a lot of sense and could be very important in the field of psychology. Kelly's theory is known as constructive alternativism, which in other words means that any particular event can be interpreted in many different ways and Kelly believed that the world does not automatically make sense to people. Kelly believed that people have to develop their own ways of understanding events that happen to them. Kelly said that " In effect, there is no reality outstide our interpretations of it". Kelly believed that no one construct or pattern is definite and is the best reflection of the world because there is always an alternative construct that might better acknowledge the facts that people perceive in life. I think this was an interesting theory because it seems simple and because I think that it can explain why people can sometimes interpret the same situations differently. I think the reading and class has been interesting and I am looking forward to finally finish reading the rest of the personality theories textbook.

2005-11-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

In this week's personality class a lot of information about Rollo May was covered. I know a little bit about Rollo May from a counseling theories class I once took. But it was interesting to hear more about him and to find out that there is a whole chapter in the text about him. I was unaware that May is considered to be the father of Amercian existential psychology, which focuses on the difference of the abstract truth and what is existentially real. I also found it pretty interesting that May believed the conciousness of self is a unique component of a human being. May believed that the self consicousness allows a person to differ from themselves and the rest of the world, to learn from our past, to plan for the future, to see oneself as others do, and to have feelings of empathy towards other people. May also believed that self conciousness is vulnerable to anxiety and inward crisis, which is why it becomes important to develop an indentity apart from our parent's and forebears (Engler, 2005). May believed that a person has to consciously choose to go through the process of self actualization and that selfhood originates in a social context and grows through interpersonal relations. May focused on the concept of the self because he believed it was essential when trying to understand the different experiences that people go through. I think May has an interesting theory about selfhood, which is an interesting concept to talk about because I think it can be interpreted in many ways by different people.

2005-11-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

On last Thursday's personality theories class we did a couple of exercises. One exercise I found interesting was when the teacher told the students to pair up in the class and listen to one another talk about how their day was going. To me it seemed like this exercise was an example of how Carl Rogers would conduct his own therapy, because Rogers is famous for person centered therapy. Rogers was influenced by phenomenology and he believed that people exist in the center of a phenomenal field. In the field of psychology the word phenomeon means the study of human awareness and perception. A psychologist who is a phenomenologist believes that it is important to understand how a person interprets a object or event. In psychology the term phenomenal field means the complete sum of experiences. Rogers believed that an individual person is the only one who can completely understand his or her own field of experiences. Rogers also believed that when one is trying to understand another person it is not always easy to undertand the internal feelings of that person; because when people are communicating emotions they are limited to a persons concious perception and communication of experiences. But in any case Rogers believed that an empathic understanding of ones experiences is important in understanding them and their personality processes. I found the in class exercise to be helpful, and I think that Rogerian therapy is key because Rogers understands how to communicate effectively and how to react to and interpret a client's situation in therapy.

2005-10-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

This week in personality theories we had are second exam, which I found required a little more studying then the first exam. I have began to read more of chapter thirteen in the personality theories textbook, which covers the work of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. I found Maslow's hierarchical theory to be especially interesting because I am unfamiliar with the theory itself. Maslow refered to people as "growing animals" because he thought that humans are always desiring something and that people are constantly looking for growth, happiness, and fufillment. Maslow acknowledged motivation and metamotivation within in his theory. Maslow refered to motivation as "reducing tension by satisfying deficit states or lacks". "Maslow believed that metamotivation refers too ones own growth tendency". Maslow also believed their was a d need or deficency need, which was directly related to survival or safety and a b need or being need, which was directly related to self actualization or inherent potential. As part of his hierarchical theory Maslow designed a hierarchy of needs, which consists of the following: physiological needs, safety needs, belonging and love needs, self esteem needs, and finally self actualization needs. Maslow believed that the final self actualization need can only be met if all of the other needs are also satisfied. I think that Maslow's theory is important because he has broken down the essential needs a healthy person should have and he understands that people need to find growth, happiness and satisfaction, which I think are very important to all people.

2005-10-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

I found last week's class to be interesting because we talked about how to further develop your own achievements. I thought that the diagram the teacher created was helpful because it demonstrated how to go about your achievements, by understanding current goals and then making a plan to achieve the current goal. I would say that I definitely agree with Adler's theory on goals. Adlers theory is that living things are motivated by goals and that we cannot think, feel, or act without understanding the concept of a goal. Adler also referred to his theory on goals as finalisms and he thought that many of are goals are also fictionalisms. Adler believed that certain fictional goals have the potential to be both positive and negative. Adler believed that a healthy individual will continuously examine their fictions and change their goals when they are no longer of use (Engler, 2005). I think that it is important in psychology to understand more about how people interpret what they want to achieve in life because it can show a lot about a person.

2005-10-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

This week's psychology course was interesting because we covered information about B.F. Skinner, who had developed his own theory on positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement takes place when a behavior is followed by a situation that increases the probability of that particular behavior occurring in the future (Engler, 2005). Negative reinforcement takes place when a behavior is followed by the termination of an unlikable situation increasing the probability of the behavior in similar circumstances (Engler, 2005). Punishment occurs when a behavior is followed by an unlikable situation that is intended to do away with the punished person's behavior. I think that B.F Skinner's theory is interesting because it is possible that some people's behavior are the result of different influences in their life. I also found it interesting in class that the teacher found similarities among different students who had influences of punishment and positive reinforcement in their childhood background. I also think that the theory of behaviorism can be the key to understanding the influences of many psychological conditions that people have in life.

2005-10-09T15:57:00.000-07:00

In chapter eight the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, both John Dollard and Neal Miller talk about the personality being composed of different habits; which fundamentally are learned associations between stimulus's and responses. Both Dollard and Miller believed that a person's habits are influenced by drives. A drive is a strong stimulation that creates uneasiness, such as hunger or sleepiness (Engler, 2005). Dollard and Miller also believed that there are primary drives. Primary drives are related to a person's own physiological survival; such as the drive for hunger, sleep, and thirst. The secondary drive is learned through the primary drive and a secondary drive is an expansion of a primary drive, such as a feeling or need to earn money to buy food (Engler, 2005). Dollard and Miller also believed in reinforcers, primary reinforcers, and secondary reinforcers. A reinforcer is an event that creates more probability of a certain response. We also all have reflex responses, which are automatic responses to particular stimuli. Dollard and Miller believe that there was a hierarchy of response, which shows what responses are most probable due to certain events. So to break this theory down in order you would start with a drive which impels a person's behavior, a cue a stimulus that tells someone when, where and how to react, a response which is the reaction to the cue, and reinforcement which refers to the effect the response has made. Both Miller and Dollard believed that all human beings can be understood through the learning process, which is the idea of habits and drives. I have found this section of chapter eight to be interesting because I am unfamiliar with the theory of Dollard's and Miller's learning process. It is complex, but by reading about each aspect of the theory it becomes more understandable. I also find Miller and Dollard's theory to be an interesting theory in the field of psychology because I think it is important to have a good understanding of how people interpret and learn things within their environment.

2005-10-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

In this weeks personality psychology course we had an exam on the first five chapters of the text book. I think that the test review was helpful because the exam covered a lot of information. On Tuesday's class we were asked to talk about some of the important things that we would want to do if our life spans were unfortunately shortened somehow. And for me If I had a shortened lifespan then expected somehow, I would try to spend most of my time with friends and family, so I would again be able to enjoy many of the memories that I have already had with them. Chapter six in the book looks very interesting it covers information about Erik Erickson and Anna Freud. I think that Anna Freud's research should be interesting to study seeing how important Sigmund Freud's work was in the field of psychology. Anna Freud worked closely with Sigmund Freud as a colleague, until she passed away and then she went on to become a psychoanalyst herself. She helped to further develop psychoanalysis by studying children and Freud's concept of the ego. Her studying of psychoanalysis and children helped to create better research in the field of pediatrics, child care, family law, and education. She observed all types of young children, some who were normal, others who had troubles and many more children who had terrible life circumstances, such as parentless homes, war and physical handicaps. I am sure her view on psychoanalysis is very interesting seeing the fact that she is related to and has worked with the father of psychiatry.

2005-09-25T18:17:00.000-07:00

In this weeks psychology class we talked about Erich From's theory of character orientation. Fromm found that peoples personalities are greatly influenced by a culture and the cultures objectives, which is why people of a certain culture have similar personality characteristics. Fromm found that there were five basic character orientations that are seen in western society: receptive, exploitative, hoarding, marketing, and productive. Fromm also believed that these five character orientations have negative and positive sides and that the positive sides of these character orientations are composed of humanistic ethics. Fromm believed that some people have a biophilous character quality, which would mean that person with the biophilous trait will be positive about life and try do well for him or herself. A necrophilous character would be a person who looks at things negatively and seeks to destroy life. I have found it very interesting reading about Fromm's theories of character orientation because it offers a better understanding of the different needs and perspectives of people that can come from an individual's culture. Also in class I enjoyed doing the writing activity because it was interesting listening to people talk about Fromm's theory of the being and having mode, which are the two modes that say whether a person is content or wanting more in life.

2005-09-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

In this weeks Personality Psychology class we covered information from chapter five of the Personality Theories textbook and I found it interesting because I am not that familiar with the work of Karen Horney. I have found that Karen Horney has an in depth and interesting theory on the idealized self. Horney found that the real self is what is actually true about ourselves and she believed that the idealized self is what we think we should be. The idealized self helps people to develop their abilities and the process of self actualization. In a normal person the ideal and real self are closeley related because the idealized self is created through ones own evaluation of capabilities and possibilities. But in some neurotic people the real and ideal self are separated because the neurotic person does not understand their ideal self and they only acknowledge their real self. Horney referred to this situation also known as isolation or the "devils pact" when a person in neurosis lets go of their real self to create a glorified self by only acknowledging their idealized self. Horney also refereed to certain neurotic people who create their own genuine needs or feelings as going through a process known as the "tyranny of the should". It is interesting to understand more about the idealized self because it is an essential concept in psychology that is a characteristic of all people. I think that Horney's idealized self is an interesting concept that helps to gain insight into how people perceive their realty.

2005-09-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

In last weeks psychology and theories class I found it interesting to hear about the various dreams people had talked about in the classroom. Dream work is known as the process of trying to understand the meaning or significance of a dream. Freud believed that dreams were the key to getting inside the unconsciousness. Freud believed that children tend to dream of the pleasure that could possibly come from an unsatisfied wish from an earlier time, because they do not have defenses that protect their motives. Adult dreams also reveal unsatisfied wishes, but often the adult self concept hides the meaning of dreams, because the self concept believes the dream is not tolerable. Because of these factors that effect dreams Freud developed the idea of the manifest and latin dream. The manifest dream is the dream as it recollected or remembered the following morning and it contains a certain story. The latent dream is the meaning or motive within the manifest dream. Freud believed it was important to understand the latent dream. I think that dreams are interesting to understand because when people are asleep they are relaxed and psychological resistance is "caught off guard" and wishes or desires are let loose. It often takes me a while to begin to put together in my head where some of dreams come from, but eventually I begin to realize what influenced or motivated most of my dreams.

2005-09-05T21:26:00.000-07:00

Freud's classification of ego defense mechanisms is very interesting, because he has classified 3 different kinds of anxiety known as realty, neurotic and moral anxiety. Freud found that these 3 forms of anxiety are often dealt with through many ego defenses that I have seen in many every day situations. Freud believed that defense mechanisms occur on an unconscious level and also that they deny or distort realty to make a situation less intimidating. Repression, denial, projection, reaction formation, regression, rationalization, identification, displacement and sublimation are the 9 ego defenses that Freud established. From studying these ego defense mechanisms I have realized that it is important to understand these defense mechanisms because they are associated with an individual's emotional and psychological growth.