Author Archives: Michael Edward Farrell

Little Michael

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Watson proved that fears do not always have to be elicited from birth; people can be trained to be afraid of things. In his experiment called “Little Albert,” Watson used his son, Albert, to prove that fear is not always an innate reaction. For a couple of days, Watson would let Albert play with a white mouse, which Albert seemed to really enjoy, then recorded his results. After a certain amount of days, Watson would still let Albert play this white mouse, but he would then make a loud banging noise. Immediately after Albert heard this noise, he would start to cry. After more days had passed, Watson would simply show Albert the white mouse, and Albert would start crying. By conducting this experiment, Watson was able to determine that the banging noise was considered the unconditioned stimulus, the white mouse was the conditioned stimulus, and crying was both the unconditioned and conditioned stimulus.

When I was younger, I would always wait anxiously for my parents to come home. I would always be downstairs playing with my babysitter, and every time I heard the door open, my parents would be right there. With that being said, I would immediately run to the door to greet them. Keep in mind, this happened on weekdays, the days my parents worked, and on weekend when I would hear the door, I would still run to the door because I would think that it would be one of my parents coming home. I can relate to Watson’s experiment because I experienced these different stimuli and responses like Albert did. In my case, the unconditioned stimulus was the noise of the door opening, the conditioned stimulus was my parents actually walking through the door, and the unconditioned and conditioned responses were me being extremely enthralled every time I heard the door opening.

I remember it, so it must have happened, right?

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Memory can best be described as the persistence of learning over time through active encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. Memories are things we hold dear to us and are things we cannot possibly forget: the good, the bad, the crazy, etc. But can we truly recall all of our “memories?” The answer to this question is no; even the first memory we can think of may not actually be from our personal memory storage systems. Someone might have told us about it. These memories are called False Memories.

When I was younger, around the age of 5, my parents took me to Disney World for the first time. We rode all sorts of different rides at all the different parks, but my favorite ride was Splash Mountain in Magic Kingdom. The ride tells a tale of Brier Rabbit getting chased by Brier Fox and Brier Bear because Briar Rabbit decides to run away form home. Every time I go on that ride, the song “Zip-a-dee Doo-da” always gets stuck in my head. It’s a very catchy song. Anyway, the best part of that ride is the very high fall into the brier patch. There are always moments of suspense slowly riding up to the top. To this day, Splash Mountain is still my favorite ride in all of Disney World.

Even though I thought I was recalling this from my own personal memory storage system, I might also have been remembering my parents telling me about my experience at Splash Mountain back then. It is impossible to ever know for sure. Although my parents could be telling me the wrong thing, they are my parents, so I do not think they would do that. Whether I am recalling the actual memory or whether I am recalling my parents telling me about the experience, I am happy either way to know of this memory somehow.

Behavioral Psychology

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Hello, everybody! For my first PSYCH 100 post, I would like to focus on the aspect of Behaviorism, when mental events are triggered by external stimuli which leads to certain behaviors. Behaviorism and Behavioral Psychology studies have always been big things in my life. In my high school years, I was an active member of the Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science for five years. Which means, I was always conducting new experiments, testing my knowledge, and trying to prove my hypotheses. There is a wide variety of sections one can enter, but my favorite was always Behavioral Psychology. I have done multiple projects in this category, but my favorite was when I tested to see if nonsensical material made one more intelligent.

In order to test this, I had my two groups: the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group was given three nonsensical poems which really needed to be analyzed well to get somewhat understanding of them. The poems I used were “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” by E.E. Cummings, “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, and “The Eagle” by someone I do not remember of the top of my head. I had my test subjects read these three poems then answer a simple questionnaire to assure they actually read the poems. After the questionnaire, I gave each person a list of letter chains with certain patterns (ex: XXAHTY; or XAXYUJ; or HFJYXX; or YHWXOX). After two minutes of studying the list of 20 letter chains, I took away the list then gave them an alternate list of 50 letter chains then told them to circle or high light the 20 letter chains they remembered from the original list. The control group performed the same experiment except they did not receive any nonsensical poems.

After the experiment was complete, the results were more people correctly identified more letter chains after they read the nonsensical poems.

Relating this back to Behaviorism, the only thing I can think of why these results came out the way they did is when people were reading these very confusing poems, their brains must have been working extra hard in order to try to comprehend them; therefore, allowing the test subjects to remember more letter chains. In this case, the confusing poems were the “external stimuli” which lead to the test subjects being able to memorize more letter chain sequences.