PSYCH 424 blog

I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Starting from first grade until the end of high school, I have attended the same international school in Istanbul. Therefore, my classmates and I have a twelve year of shared history together. We grew up together and our families have built very strong friendship bonds. When we all graduated high school and scattered all over the world for college, some of our friends started to change and develop new and different habits. Some of them started drinking and some of them started smoking, while a fewer number of our friends started partying a little “harder”.

When we graduated college and moved back to Istanbul as adults, all but one of my friends were able to quit their newly developed bad habits, one way or another. One of my best friends, Dennis, could have easily been labeled as an addict when he moved back home. He was jobless, made new friends we have never met before, stopped working out and eating healthy completely. He slept all throughout the day while we were at work, and stayed up all night doing drugs. Sometimes he would not sleep for 2 or 3 days straight because of binge drug taking.

As we are a very close group of friends, we have tried many things to help him cope with his problem. We tried many interventions.We tried talking to his cousin. A group of 5 friends even went to a rehabilitation center with him for a week to understand him better. Nothing truly worked! As soon as he was left alone, he was craving drugs, saying he doesn’t like it when the reality sets in. Failing after a couple of tries, we have decided to try something new and more effective.

We rented apartments in the same complex, making sure at least one person was always present with Dennis. We helped him look for jobs and get ready for interviews, which resulted in him getting a job in a field he really wanted to work; sports entertainment. One of our friends was a chef, so she cooked us meals every night and breakfast on weekends, implicitly making Dennis start eating healthy. We played basketball games two nights a week, making sure we were keeping him active and that he was spending energy. After a couple of weeks, he started acting like one of us. He told me that he enjoys how I eat breakfast every morning before work, so we started eating together. He told one of our other friends that he likes how he dresses up for work, so they went shopping together. One day at a time, after being able to observe how his peers do ‘normal’, Dennis started to act like us and slowly quit his habit. Even today, after 5 years, he says that observing the same ritual over and over again made it easier to act upon.

I believe it is wrong to connect observational learning with just negative behaviors. It can also be used to influence positive behaviors. An important chunk of learning depends on us observing and modelling others; this observation and modelling starts when we are just infants. “Indeed, the research and scholarly work conducted by Bandura and colleagues set the occasion for the social cognitive perspective of learning (Bandura, 1986), which seemed to challenge the possibility that all behavior could be accounted for by respondent and operant processes alone (Fryling et al, 2011).” It is just astonishing how social psychology could be applied into our everyday lives so easily.

References

Fryling, M. J., Johnston, C., & Hayes, L. J. (2011). Understanding Observational Learning: An Interbehavioral Approach. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 27(1), 191–203.

Who doesn’t need a mental health tune-up from time to time? I know I sure do!

There is a history of depression in my family, so any time I start to feel a little “blue,” I have a counselor that I book a few appointments with. I have been doing this off and on for years with someone whom I trust and have an excellent rapport with. Two days ago, I walked into his office and before he could ask how I was doing, I blurted out, “Hopelessness Theory of Depression (HTD).” Of course, after a very quizzical look, I explained to him that I was studying Applied Social Psychology and this week’s lesson included HTD, so of course, I am now somewhat of an expert (insert sarcastic smile).

I had to reassure him that I was not suffering from any sort of syndrome where I randomly blurt out words, such as Tourette Syndrome, where symptoms include vocal tic(s) (Robertson, 2000). Once he was reassured, he humored my claim of academic knowledge in terms of HTD and we discussed how it applied to me.

Before I give my true to life story, I have a MAJOR spoiler alert: this is a pretty boring, and drama free therapy session. I’m a rather private person, so I will keep my exciting and drama filled sessions off of the public forum!

We decided to see if, with what I have learned this week, if I was at risk for HTD and started with the first element, “a vulnerable person (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012).” To label me as a vulnerable person, I would have to have a consistently negative outlook on events that have occurred in my life and their causes (sometimes called the pessimistic explanatory style or the depressogenic attribution style) (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012). Well, let’s look at what we discovered, shall we? What is my style? Is it stable, meaning do I think the cause of the negative things in my life will be forever unchanging (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012)? Of course, I had to decide what was the biggest stressor in my life at the moment and I came up with one rather quickly: being EXHAUSTED from raising my toddler and going to school full-time. An argument could be made that this condition is stable. The old, unshrunk (my own made up word for “before therapy”) me probably would have perceived it as a stable condition. “Unshrunk me” probably would have felt like there was no end in sight and that these two stressors would always be a constant (and hence stable) part of my life. Years of therapy and countless dollars (actually, the dollar amount I have spent can be counted, but that would require too much time and I have many other things that I should be doing) spent have helped me change my perspective on situations like this. I have learned to view these, not as stable conditions, but as stressors that will some day end, and when it comes to the years raising my son, will end all too soon (sometimes stressors can be an incredibly beautiful thing that you cannot imagine your life without).

We also needed to contemplate whether or not my perception of my level of exhaustion had global attributions, in other words, did this greatly influence a lot of the aspects of the rest of my life (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012)? My therapist and I made the case that my level of exhaustion was considered global; if anyone has been genuinely exhausted, they know that fatigue affects everything in your life. We decided that we had indeed made the case for global attribution.

The second key to HTD is “negative environmental circumstances (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012).” This is where everything fell apart. I really had to scrape to come up with what was the most negative thing in my life at the moment, and my goodness, I hate to even attach the word “negative” with the thought of raising my incredibly handsome (seriously, it’s scientifically proven, my child is probably the most adorable child that has ever lived; the “scientists” that made this claim are myself, his father, and his grandparents) son. Please don’t get me wrong, I have had incredibly traumatic experiences in my life and I’m sure I will have more in the future, no one gets off this planet unscathed.

With one eyebrow raised, my therapist asked me if, according to HTD, if I was at risk for hopelessness depression. The answer? No. No I am not. At other times and other circumstances, I may have been, but again, a lot of time and money has been spent in my pursuit to acquire the tools to live a (somewhat) mentally healthy life. I am incredibly thankful for that. I prepared to leave his office with the statement, “Life is what it is, but for me, it is not hopeless.” Of course, his reply?

“It makes me feel just fine!”

References

Robertson, M. M. (2000). Tourette syndrome, associated conditions and the complexities of treatment. Brain: A Journal of Neurology , 123, 425-462.

Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd Edition ed.). Thousand Oaks, California, United States of America: SAGE Publications, Inc.