Author Archives: Amanda De Leon

Explanatory Styles

In life, it is impossible to avoid sad, depressing, or heartbreaking situations. We learned in class that your mood and mental state can depend heavily on the way in which we explain the events that have occurred. For example, when I was younger, I used to blame my low grades on myself. I used to think I did poorly on homework and tests because I was lazy and didn’t want to do the work to prepare for those things. I internalized my poor grades and told myself that I would always be that lazy. Because of this internal and stable explanatory style, I got to the point where I would not even get out of bed to face the day because I had convinced myself I was a lazy failure. However, in high school, I became involved in sports, which, of course, is not something a lazy person did. I stopped thinking of myself as lazy, and started doing better in school. I did well enough (obviously) to get into Penn State.

During my first semester of my freshmen year, I didn’t do as well as I would have hoped. My grades were low and my stress level was very high. I found myself starting to internalize and stabilize my poor school performance. Instead of letting it become a rampant issue, I remembered what I had done in high school, and became involved. I joined a few clubs and even the Penn State Boxing Team. While I’m no longer involved in those specific activities, I do not convince myself that I’ll always be lazy. Becoming involved changed my explanatory style and prevented me from spiraling into a low GPA and depression. Today I’m in my junior year with a great GPA and good job prospects. Even though I’m still a little lazy when it comes to chores and other household activities, it no longer takes a toll on my mental state.

Interference

As a child growing up in a Puerto Rican household, I quickly learned the nuances of speaking a different language. However, as I grew older and was required to pick a language to study in high school, I decided that taking Spanish would be too boring; I already knew Spanish! I went out on a limb and took up French. I found that I had an affinity for languages so picking up French wasn’t the most difficult task. As I continued with the language and began to speak French more and more, I found I had difficulty speaking Spanish. I noticed something was wrong when I would use improper nouns and adjectives that just didn’t exist in Spanish, but did in French. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, I know I was experiencing retroactive interference. My new knowledge of French was interfering with my prior knowledge of Spanish. Regardless of the fact that I knew the information was retained, I was unable to retrieve that information as readily as I could before I began learning French. Much to the chagrin of my Spanish-speaking relatives, my poor communication skills continued until I could barely speak any Spanish at all without becoming confused. I could only call the resulting vernacular a hybrid of French, Spanish, and English: Spranglish.

I’ve wondered what could have happened to my existing knowledge of the Spanish language. It couldn’t have just disappeared, could it? I believe what must have happened was that I was experiencing trace decay. This is a process in which memories are lost because I failed to use them. I was so busy forming new memories and rehearsing French, that my Spanish fell into disuse, and now I struggle with the language. Also, I’ve admittedly put in far less effort into re-learning Spanish than I have put into learning French. Now, however, as I no longer study French, I find that my speaking abilities there have decreased dramatically. Hopefully beginning to speak Spanish again will be easier now that I’ve forgotten more French. I understand now that I need to put in the effort to learn Spanish again so I can better communicate the language with my family as well as with my peers. Learning new languages is tough, hopefully re-learning a language isn’t as challenging!

Describing Data

Research and data, obviously, go hand in hand. One cannot expect to have a successful research experiment without the proper representation and description of data. Data can be represented in a number of manners, but not all methods are best suited for all data. For example, a scatter plot would be acceptable to present a correlation or to illustrate a regression. To represent a comparison, however, a box plot, where each measure of central tendency is easily displayed, should be used.  There are, of course, numerous other ways to display data, but for purposes of this blog post, I only highlight these two.

As noted in lecture, the way in which data is represented can alter the perceptions of your target audience. Strides to prevent this from happening have been made and include practices such as peer review. Because of this fact, it is very rare for someone to come across scholarship containing misleading representations of data. Regardless of this fact, instances of misreported results occur.  As an example, I will describe to you a very frustrating moment in my 11 year old life. I was sitting in the waiting room of my dentist, reading one of those generic dentist magazines. While I can’t recall the title of the magazine or study, the scatter plot was displaying the relationship between how often children flossed and how likely they were to require braces. (The study was limited to the Northern New Jersey area). On the “Y” axis, they numbered how many children flossed, and on the “X” axis, they counted how many teenagers required braces. Even in my untrained, 11 year old mind, I recognized immediately the flaws in this graph. First and foremost, I remember thinking that this study did a poor job of displaying their data. You couldn’t really see any sort of trend or obvious link by simply looking at the graph.

I remember thinking that if I had the chance to display their data, I would have chosen a bar graph where the results could be easily read. I was only 11 and I felt I could have done a better job at representing this study’s results. Therefore, the study no longer held any credibility; their flawed graph was the reason I stopped flossing. Had the graph been done better, maybe I wouldn’t have required braces when I was thirteen.