Author: sxn5283

Blog #3 | PSY 100

The importance of a psychotherapy.

I believe that life is simple. I believe that there is no reason to complicate things, but instead we should take them just the way they are.

Image result for meaning of life is just to be alive

Unfortunately, not everyone understands it. A lot of people set high expectations for themselves causing them to think that they don’t live the way they want to. For example, a lot of people struggle when they don’t find a perfect boyfriend or girlfriend, when they don’t get good grades in school or college, when they don’t receive the salary they aimed for, when they don’t have the skin that someone else has. This in turns leads to the anxiety and depression disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and dysthymia.

GAD is “a psychological disorder diagnosed in situations in which a person has been excessively worrying about money, health, work, family life, or relationships for at least 6 months, even though he or she knows that the concerns are exaggerated.” In plain English it means that if you are anxious for a long period of time and it hurts your life, it is a generalized anxiety disorder. Additionally, dysthymia is “a condition characterized by mild, but chronic, depressive symptoms that last for at least 2 years.” It is less severe than a major depressive disorder, but is still considered as a psychological disorder in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

I cannot stress enough the importance of recognizing an anxiety before it grows into something way more significant. The saddest part is that one of the most common results of anxiety disorder is a suicide.

I have been reading plenty of articles and research reports about the reasons and occasions of suicides and statistics are shocking. “The most commonly endorsed cause for the suicide attempt was experiencing a problem with parents (47.5%) followed by problems with significant other or friend (35.4%).” That was mentioned in the topic called “reasons for attempting suicide.”¹ It is horrible and sad to see that the highest number is problems with parents. Just think about it for a second. People are killing themselves because of misunderstandings with their own parents or loved ones.

The government needs to consider that everyone has their problems in lives and, by talking to professional therapists, these problems can be seen from a completely different perspective. In the “suicide prevention strategies“² article it was reported that “psychotherapy alone or in combination with some antidepressants can be an effective treatment for preventing suicide attempts.”

Psychotherapy is “the professional treatment for psychological disorder through techniques designed to encourage communication of conflicts and insight.” The reason why this method is really successful is because patients directly confront the disorder and work with a professional psychotherapists to get rid of it.

Finally, I believe that psychotherapy sessions can increase the students’ and workers’ productivity significantly. Students and employees wouldn’t have to worry about keeping all of their problems inside of them and overthinking about them throughout the day. For example, if a psychotherapist will help them to realize that they don’t have problems in their lives, people will get more time and motivation to work harder, study more and live better. Therefore, everyone will be better off.

¹Jacobson, C. , Batejan, K. , Kleinman, M. and Gould, M. (2013), Reasons for Attempting Suicide among a Community Sample of Adolescents. Suicide Life Threat Behav, 43: 646-662. doi:10.1111/sltb.12047

²Mann JJ, Apter A, Bertolote J, et al. Suicide Prevention Strategies: A Systematic Review. JAMA.2005;294(16):2064–2074. doi:10.1001/jama.294.16.2064

Blog #2 | PSY 100

How to raise a child and have some fun?

Childhood is one of the best times in our lives. Even if I can’t recall a lot of memories from back then, I am still sure that I was happy and I enjoyed every second of it, because I didn’t have any responsibilities in my life and I was a “free man”. Additionally, I think that childhood is a perfect period in our lives because this is the time when kids grow physically, develop different skills, mature, learn how to talk, walk, and manipulate their parents. While being the happiest period, it is also one of the saddest ones, because sometimes these changes occur too quickly and you don’t understand how this little cute alien became a real human with its own life, opinions, and manners.

But this doesn’t happen overnight. As we learned in class, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget realized that there are some patterns in kids’ behaviors. It was more of a pattern of what kids can and can’t do during certain ages. Therefore, Piaget came up to a conclusion that kids gain their cognitive ability in a developmental order, which basically means that kids at different ages think in fundamentally different ways. This led Piaget to create a Stage Model of Cognitive Development.

The first development stage in his model is the Sensorimotor Stage. It begins at birth and lasts until around the age of two. Kids at this stage explore the world by the direct physical interactions and through the fundamental senses of seeing, hearing, and tasting. That’s the reason why kids at this age are putting everything in their mouths. During this stage, kids’ use of their senses to explore the world is central, and that’s why whenever kids don’t directly see or feel objects, the objects don’t exist for them. You can use it to have a little fun – play peek-a-boo with a child. I don’t have to tell you what a peek-a-boo is, but now you know how it works. Simply, because a kid doesn’t see you behind your hands he thinks that you disappeared, and as soon as you reveal your face, you back again. If it’s not magic, then I don’t know what is!

Blog #1 | PSY 100

Importance of “attention” in our lives.

Hey guys, my name is Sultan, and this is my first blog for Psychology class. I’m currently a rising sophomore at Penn State, double majoring in Psychology and Finance (not the typical mix, I know). I’m currently involved in the Psychology 100 course. So far, it has been a great experience and I love how the topics we learn in class can actually affect our real day-to-day lives. Our professor, Dr. Wede, does an amazing job by giving us real examples and showing videos to help us understand that this course is not only theoretical but practical, as well. Today in class we learned about Psychophysics. This fancy word just describes our relationship with the outside world and how we react to physical events. Furthermore, we talked about the Sensory Adaptation and how we are getting used to different things even if we hate them at the beginning. This led us to one of the most interesting topics in this course, which is Attention. The easiest way to understand this is to realize that the world contains more information that we can fully interpret or process, and, therefore, we need to focus on something specific, something that we are interested in. That’s where attention comes into play. Attention is a powerful force. It can make you experience an “inattentional blindness”, which is when you are failing to detect visible objects when your attention directed somewhere else. All of you probably had this problem when you lost something like your phone, but it was actually right in front of you or even in your hands. “When you are busy doing something else, you can fail to observe even really significant things”. This is how Selective Attention works, and by learning it you can understand how people “look” but don’t “see”. This is why it is really dangerous to drive and text at the same time, and you might even forget that you are driving a car at some point. But sometimes this might be pretty handy for us. Whenever you need to process information that is really important, Selective Attention will help you with that. Most of you have this friend that can do work without hearing any noises around, like loud music or people screaming. These kind of people can’t get easily distracted and it helps them a lot in their professional/school life. While others get distracted by every little thing and can never finish their work, because there is always something else you can do. I’m more like a second type of guy (it can take me the whole day just to finish one task). But after attending today’s class, I realized that our attention and vision are really inefficient, because we can be tricked so easily and there are so many different kind of illusions out there (literally just google “visual illusions” and you will be shocked). So, I thought that if we can trick it then we can improve it. I was right. There are so many different methods to improve your attention span, such as meditating (my favorite one), exercising, staying hydrated, etc. After that, I was shocked how easy it is to concentrate your attention on something for a long period of time. It helps me everyday now in all kind of tasks and it’s all started because of the lecture in my Psychology class. That’s why I believe that PSY100 is the best class in college. Thank you.