Author: lkj5109

EC Post- The Chameleon Effect

After the experiments conducted by Chartrand and John Bargh in 1999, they discovered what is formally known today as the Chameleon effect. The Chameleon effect is a phenomenon describing the tendency of unintentionally imitating other’s expressions, postures, and voice tones in society. Most often, an individuals efforts to mimic someone else tends to make them more likable and strengthen interpersonal relationships. Normally we are unaware of these kinds of situations. but if you pay closer attention you begin to notice the patterns. Individuals often strive to behave the exact same way as their surrounding peers.

Through personal experience, I can prove this phenomenon is accurate. The example I want to share is school related and commonly occurs throughout society. The context is when you are asked to answer a question and raise your hand to determine which is the correct answer although you might be unsure which one is right. When I am unsure of the correct answer to the question, I will wait to raise my hand until I notice the point in time when half the class begins to raise their hand. Despite their answers being wrong, it is much less embarrassing when you are not the only person who got the answer wrong.

Instead of trying to determine the correct answer on my own, I will unintentionally conform with the rest of the class when they all begin to raise their hand. An individual feels more comfortable getting an answer wrong when others get it wrong. The key idea in this situation represents how the Chameleon effect works.  I am unintentionally mimicking the behavior of my fellow classmates. This is a habit that carries with me in school and probably one that other students follow as well.

 

 

Operant Conditioning- Negative Reinforcement

Operant Conditioning explains the concept of how humans form associations with the environment through the relationship of behavior’s and resulting events. Within this lecture, we learned about the two types of reinforcement, positive and negative. Reinforcement explains how a behavior increases as a result of a removed or added stimulus.  Negative reinforcement specifically describes a situation in which a behavior is increased as a result of removing a negative stimulus. It is most often going to incorporate an aversive stimulus. Negative reinforcement is often confused with negative punishment. Despite the removal of a stimulus in each situation, negative reinforcement works to increase a behavior whereas negative punishment works to decrease a certain behavior.  An example of negative reinforcement would be putting on an oven mitt to prevent burning your hand.

An example of negative reinforcement that happens in my life is having to turn off my alarm in the mornings to stop the loud sound from repeating. In this situation, the behavior would be forcing myself to get up and hit the stop button on my alarm, and the aversive stimulus would be the removal of the loud alarm sound. I continue the same routine everyday to stop the sound of the alarm from repeating itself constantly. I am increasing a specific behavior in order to remove the negative stimulus.We experience so many examples of negative reinforcement during our lives that we do not tend to pick up on. An action as small as turning off an alarm clock is basic example of negative reinforcement. I am taking away something negative in order to increase a certain response. The likelihood of this behavior occurring again in the future is very high, as I continue to remove the stimulus.

 

 

Blog Post 2- Mood Congruent Memory

Mood congruent memory is a concept that describes how the emotions an individual feels tend to generate specific memories that link with the certain emotion. Emotions and moods are contributing factors that that help to shape all of  our memories. In  psychological terms, they act as retrieval cues for human memories. When a memory is stored inside our brain, not only is the actual event stored, but the specific emotion or mood one was feeling during that experience is also stored. If someone is in a good mood, a memory in which they felt excited or happy will be triggered. However if someone is in a bad mood, a memory in which they felt angry or sad will potentially be triggered. A person can remember events more easily when they are currently in the same state of mind as they were in the memory that was stored.

An example of this that I had experienced in my own life was categorizing negative emotions with negative memories. I had been really upset one day about a certain grade on an assignment and the only memory that happened to cross my mind was thinking back to the last day of camp.  In this situation,  I felt even more upset than I did at the current moment. The last day of camp is extremely depressing and represents many unhappy thoughts. It means that summer is ending, school is about to start, and you have to say goodbye to the people you have been spending the entire summer with. I eventually reached that same level of sadness after the flashback had crossed my mind.

Retrieval cues are important in breaking down the true meaning of having memories. I always find myself recalling previous memories that had occurred in my life. I may have written about a negative mood, however there are plenty of times in which I can write about being in a good mood and recalling a happy memory. Our memories would not appear so realistic without assistance from our emotions and moods. It would be difficult for someone to accurately retrieve an old memory. Different states of mind affect the process of how our brain encodes, stores, and retrieves memories.

Sensation and Adaptation- Attention

I decided to write my blog post about the topics discussed in lecture six involving Sensation and Adaptation. One of the concepts that really jumped out at me was the in depth explanation of attention. Attention in psychological terms, is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a certain stimulus while trying to ignore the other perceivable stimuli. Attention is an extremely powerful force and it must understood that our environment contains too much information for someone’s brain to fully interpret all at once. We as humans try to take advantage of that and have developed our own ways of multitasking. Instead of focusing our attention on one thing, we choose to try and focus on multiple things at once. When people are busy doing something else, they often ignore the other significant things around them, and I have experienced something like this in my life.

A time that I can recall experiencing the effects of Attention occurred at my sleep away camp a few years ago. I was in deep conversation with my counselor, at the time while the activity instructor told me to come into the other room. There were two rooms connected to each other however they were separated by wooden barrier and to get to the other side you had to go through the door. I decided to multitask by walking backwards to find the door while still being able to talk to my counselor. I though I would find the door easily and successfully multitask however that was not the case. The door happened to be closed, so it was up to me to open it however since I was too busy talking I ended up walking straight into the door. I genuinely thought I would be able to perform these two actions at once, however my attempt was unsuccessful. All I ended up doing was hurting myself.

Attention is necessary to detect all of the stimulus changes around us.  We need to be more aware of what goes on around us and understand that Multitasking harms our attention span. When people are multitasking, it is more likely for them to make mistakes or perform their actions more slowly. I can prove this through my experience because while I was attempting to do two things at once I made a mistake and ended up hurting myself.