Tag Archives: post

Studying The Beat

blog2

By Megan Butter

Music surrounds us all the time, and I can’t name one single person that doesn’t listen to it. It is  a part of our culture and everyone can relate to it some way or another. Recently studies have been conducted to see how exactly music effects our bodies.

Music stimulates our brain, and has a positive effect on our bodies. According to an article on CNN there was a study done with people who were about to undergo surgery, some were given a pill to calm their nerves, while others were told to listen to music. “The patients who listened to music had less anxiety and lower cortisol than people who took drugs,” (Landau, 2013). Music has a calming effect on the body and if some patients can be treated with music rather than drugs before surgery, then that is a great new cost effective way to help patients cope with the anxiety before surgery.

Also for some people music can give them chills. I know for me when I am in the zone and listening to a really good song by Eminem, I can feel chills, but I also feel that is because I can relate to the words that he is speaking in his rap.  According to Silvia and Nusbaum, “openness to experience was the strongest predictor of the typical experience of chills during music….Several markers of people’s experience and engagement with music in everyday life…did mediate openness’s effects,” (Silvia, Nusbaum, 2014). Hearing your life experiences in songs is incredible and can cause an overwhelming feeling to just come over you.

Finally, music can make miracles happen. There was an experiment conducted with stroke patients whose vision became impaired. The study happened in the UN and they used 16 stroke patients who had recently suffered their stroke (within a week). They had the patients either listen to classical music, white noise, or nothing. And surprise, surprise, the group with the highest score during the Behavioral InAttention Test were the patients who listened to classical music. The scientists concluded that, “listening to classical music may improve visual attention in stroke patients” (AJOT, 2013).  That is an amazing find! They want to do more studies to solidify their findings, but it is promising for all stroke patients, since majority of them suffer some sort of vision problems.

Music is universal and brings all different kinds of people together. It also has a huge influence on our health, and can change our mood in an instant. Next time you’re feeling blue you can either turn on a sad song and relate or you can turn on an upbeat jam to pump you up. Music is endless and is always changing and it will interesting to see what else scientists find it can do to our bodies and mind.

Sources:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/09/10-magical-effects-music-has-on-the-mind.php

http://ajot.aota.org/article.aspx?articleid=1851684

http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2/2/199

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/129/10/2528.full

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/129/10/2528.full

 

The Aftermath of Divorce on the Kids

By Megan Butter

blogWhen I was 4, my parents divorced. I don’t have any memories of them, my brother and me together as a family, but I do remember what was my “normal,” which was living with my brother and my mom and seeing my dad on the weekends. 89.4% of children live with primary live with their mother (Bowles III) My parents never talked about their divorce nor did they bad mouth each other in front of my brother and me, in fact they usually only talked about the good times with us. They would come together on Sundays for soccer games, and for holidays and some birthdays, but other than that my parents didn’t speak or see each other. I decided for this blog post to research the affects that divorce has on children, after watching the movie “A.C.O.D. Adult Children of Divorce”, starring Adam West Scott.

The divorce rate in America is 50%, and in many of those failed marriages, children are involved. First I want to take a look at Bowles III’s work because he had an interesting take on how children are affected by their parent’s divorce. For me when I see marriage, I see it as just a piece of paper. If you love somebody and are happy then who cares if you have a certificate saying that you’re mr. and mrs. so and so, that doesn’t matter, what does matter is how you feel about each and a piece of paper doesn’t determine that. Hell I could rip that piece of paper up easily and nothing would change, the feelings are still the same. Bowles III’s research seems to agree with my statement because he says that most children whose parents have divorced are a bit weary towards marriage themselves. Also according to Bowles III, we don’t fear of having successful relationship, we just fear about having successful marriages. We don’t want to follow in our parents’ footsteps. He says that we have gaps in our “relationship template” which is true since the only marriage we would be able to compare our own relationship too, would have been a failure, and who wants that. Children whose parents have divorced can also have trust issues, especially if one of the parents had completely vanished from the picture. I know from my own personal stand point that I have a closer relationship with my mother because she was the primary custodian of me and my brother. As I got older and got into relationships of my own, I noticed that I didn’t  have trust issues my with partner but I wouldn’t take him home and introduce him to the family. The only person to ever meet any one that I dated was my cousin and I feel I did that because I may not have felt secure in those relationships, as Bowles III has pointed out children of divorce parents don’t have a “relationship template.” A lot of the marriages in my family, expect my cousin’s have mainly ended in divorce. Which that could be why I only introduced my boyfriend at the time to my cousin because she has a successful relationship, one that  I can look up too and have an example of, one that I was lacking as child.  Bowles III goes on to say in his research that sons are more likely to resonate their absentee father and daughters are more likely to have “daddy issues.” Speaking from personal life, my brother does hold a grudge against our father for leaving and making promise that he couldn’t keep. I on the other hand did not hold a grudge over my father but I did do things that I knew he wouldn’t like to get a rise out of me. Children in divorced families tend to show more feelings than other kids and are more attached to their primary parent (Bowles III).  Now while all this research may seem daunting, it doesn’t mean that children of divorced parents are any less successful than those who come from intact families.Divorce mainly effects kids in the short term but in the long run they’ll be okay and can/will find someone were there not afraid they will become just another statistic with.

Source:

http://www.mckendree.edu/academics/scholars/issue6/bowles.htm