Author: Julia Silva

Social psychology is something that has always fascinated me, how our actions and behaviors are influenced by other individuals. How everything we do is either mirrored from others or influenced by them. Everything we do and things we have learned as a child are actions that we learned from others, either from lessons or by simply observing other people doing so and imitating them. Social psychology is even more complex, because our actions are determined by the presence of others, let them be real or implied. The presence of people can influence our behavior, thoughts, or feelings.

I remember when I was first learning how to drive. My dad taught me and it was the most stressful situation. Whenever I would do something wrong he would call me out on it raising his voice, not to be mean or anything, but because it was involuntary. I guess this influenced my in how I drive when there are other people in the car with me. When I drive by myself, listening to my own music and having no one to call me out when I do something wrong, I usually drive really well, there is no pressure for me to be good, so it just comes naturally to me. I barely make any mistakes and nothing significant happens. But whenever I drive with people I get kind of nervous and, unintentionally, end up doing something wrong. I either take a wrong turn or miss a stop sign. It is very frustrating to me because I know I am a good driver, but the presence of other tends to influence how I drive. Driving would be considered a social impairment for me, since it is a difficult task that worsens my performance when I am around others, even though I am good at when there is no one around.

Another example of social psychology is the Chameleon Effect. One that proves that behavior is contagious. It is when people mimic other’s expressions, postures, and voice tones. Me and my roommate wanted to see if this was accurate, so whenever I would Facetime my boyfriend, she would say “Hola,” to see if he would change the way he says hi into “Hola” as well. The first time we tried this he still said the usual “hi,” not changing that way she says it to “Hola.” The second time I called him and my roommate said it he also said “Hola,” but he did it jokingly, not really conforming to it. We tried it a few more times after this and we realized that after the third time he finally conformed to it and he now says “Hola” every time, not even thinking about, but just conforming to whenever she says it. This proves that we indeed follow the behavior of others to conform with the situation and context we are in. It is a conformity, in which we change our behavior to match other’s behavior.

Behavior is very complex but also really simple. We seek approval from others and conforming to what others do is a way by which people feel accepted in a group or an environment. The context in which we act and behave can also influence us, especially if we think we are being watched. The presence of other individual can definitely influence our behavior because behavior itself is contagious.

About 10 years ago my grandmother became depressed because she had some issues with my uncle, her oldest son, in which he refused to ever talk to her again. This event caused her to become extremely sad and depressed, this being a response to past loss – when my uncle cut all ties with her. She came to have a major depressive disorder and all of its symptoms. I was very little when this happened but I remember clearly my parents talking about how worried they were because she wouldn’t go anywhere or talk to anyone.

As it is known, depression slows people down and restrain risk-taking. And that happened exactly with my grandma. She stopped driving and going places she once enjoyed going to. She wouldn’t even want to leave her house to go grocery shopping. She had these symptoms and more. My grandma complained about being tired all the time, this being an excuse to stay at home. She did not have an interest in going anywhere, even if it was to see her family or friends. And whenever she did see someone and they asked how she was she would immediately say how insignificant and worthless she was feeling.

Now referring to the issues my grandmother had with her son, everyone knew that she was, in fact, the right one in this matter and that he was dramatizing something that should not have become so big. Either way, my grandma went through this stressful experience when they were fighting, and after that period and when they stopped talking to each other she started to blame herself for that outcome. She then entered into a depressed mood that lasted a long period of time and her behavior changed completely as I mentioned earlier. This cycle of depression kept going on for about a year or so.

After a while of much insistence from my family, my grandma finally decided to seek professional help. She went to various sessions, and still goes until today but not as much as before. She has gotten way better but she is still very sensitive about my uncle. All of us in our family avoid this topic as much as we can because we know that she can go back to the depressive cycle she was in.

When I was around 7 or 8 years old my uncle got into an accident. He was riding his motorcycle when a car, that made a wrongful turn, hit him. He got a few scratches and a cut on his pulse that was not too serious but he also hit his head pretty hard causing a concussion. He was brought to the hospital and the doctors said he was fine. The only bad thing was that my uncle could not remember the accident at all. His memory (persistence of learning over time, through active encoding, storage, and retrieval of information), which was perfect before the accident, was not working at all.

My uncle could remember very vividly moments before the car hit him but he could not remember the exact moment he actually got hit. He could not recall or retrive the information that happened to him. What happened was that his brain did not encode the event of the accident. It happened, but as soon as he hit his head, that memory got wiped away because he did not encode it. Therefore, he could not remember what he did not encode. The term encoding failure is used to describe this trauma.

A few months later he could remember some things from the accident, but could never fully explain those things or name them. This is called a retrieval failure. For example, my uncle wanted to talk about something from the accident but he could not describe what he wanted to say as if he almost knew what it was but he could explain what it was. He just could not say the specific word or phrase to describe what happened. This failure happens when people can say things about the word or phrase/sentence but cannot retrieve it to fully remember it.

His memory was slightly damaged for a while and his declarative memory, in which it stores things that happened to a person and events, was damaged as well. Therefore, his hippocampus was also damaged because it is a neural center in the limbic system that processes explicit (declarative) memories.

Hippocampus:

It might also have been some sort of retrograde amnesia. One that only happened during that one event on his life because of the concussion he suffered instants after the car hit his motorcycle. Retrograde amnesia is a loss of memory-access to events that occurred or information that was learned, before an injury. The severity will depend on the extent of damage and, for my uncle it was not as severe as it could have been since he only can’t remember that one event.

When I was 14, my grandfather had a stroke and right after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. With this disease, he had to stay in a nursing home because there he would have nurses who would know how to take care of him the right way and how to deal with all of the memory loss and the new way that his brain was functioning. Given that the brain completely modified after the stroke (brain plasticity). He stayed in this same situation for about two years until he passed away. It was a very difficult time period for everyone in our family, but especially to my mom because she would visit him more at the nursing home he stayed at. She experienced a lot of his memory loss and episodes where he wouldn’t know what to do with his body or mind in certain situations because his brain wouldn’t function as it used to.

The brain is one of the most important organs of our body, maybe possibly even the most important. Alzheimer’s is a disease that affects the brain and its various functions. Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease that causes a decline in cognitive functions, reducing work skills and social relationships and interfering with one’s behavior and personality. At first, the patient begins to lose his most recent memory. You may even remember events from years ago, but forget that you have just had a meal. My grandfather lost the complete notion of his automatic survival functions that he used to have before the stroke. His brainstem was damaged so badly that he couldn’t even go to the bathroom by himself, a daily and basic survival function.

The stroke that my grandfather had made it possible for his brain to get damaged and lose certain abilities (neuro-psychology). With the evolution of the condition, Alzheimer’s has a great impact on the person’s daily life and affects learning ability, attention, orientation, comprehension, and language. This disease affects both the left (specialized in language) and right (specialized in art, music, recognition of faces and shapes) hemispheres of the brain causing the person’s inability to do some easy day-to-day skills.

Alzheimer’s disease causes nerve cell death and tissue loss throughout the brain. Over time, the brain shrinks a lot, which affects almost all of its functions. This explains why a lot of the brain’s functions are drastically delayed with Alzheimer’s or even a minor stroke. My grandfather’s cerebellum was also mainly affected, where it helps coordinate voluntary movements and balance and it is also involved in learning skills. His limbic system, a part of our brains that is associated with emotions, was slightly damaged as well. Although he could feel fear and irritation, it was very stressful how at some point he couldn’t even express happiness. The function of the cortex was not as injured, but there were some complications involving the motor and sensory cortex area. The motor cortex controls voluntary movements. And the sensory cortex receives information from the skin surface and sense organs.

Even though the brain has various important functions and it controls most of our bodies it can also be easily damaged causing some of these functions to not work as they used to. Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s disease can affect the whole brain and therefore create complications to the whole system making it difficult to do simple daily actions changing out entire behavior.

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