Author Archives: Lanjing Wang

Explanations of Anxiety Disorders

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Do you suffer from Anxiety Disorders? Probably most people will say no because “disorders” sounds like an illness. But when people are told that acrophobia, social phobia and even some fears of insects are types of anxiety disorders, they will be surprised to know how anxiety disorders are constantly bothering people in their daily life.

Why do anxiety disorders happen? According to the psychology text book, several psychological models explain disordered behavior as the result of various forms of emotional, behavioral, or thought-related malfunctioning (Ciccarelli& White, 2009). Three of the most widely-known models are psychodynamic view, behaviorism and cognitive perspective. These terms may sound abstract, but the examples are actually explicit.

The psychodynamic model, based on the work of Freud and his followers, explains disordered behavior as the result of repressing one’s threatening thoughts, memories, and concerns in the unconscious mind (Carducci, 1998). I remember one of my friends becomes nervous and scared every time we pass through a downhill path. She told me that when she was young, her brother once pushed her down the hill by accident when they were playing, and she had a serious pain. I guess this bad memory was just carved in her mind. Probably it doesn’t remind her of this accident every time she goes downhill; she just tries to avoid and to repress it in her unconscious mind.

Behaviorism is easier to explain because it is like learning normal behavior. For example, when parents show their fear towards any kind of thing, let’s say bugs, in front of their kids who know nothing about bugs, their kids are more likely to be afraid of bugs when they grow up according to the behaviorism theory. This probably can explain why most children are scared of the same thing as their parents are.

Cognitive psychologists study the way people think, remember and mentally organize information; they see abnormal behavior as resulting from illogical thinking patterns (Mora, 1985). I remember I did not have the extreme fear of riding a roller coaster till I was 15, when I heard the report that the roller coaster in one amusement park had a safety problem that one person fell and died. So when I go to the roller coaster I will have the ridiculous thought that something terrible will happen. This kind of particular thinking pattern puts people at a higher risk of depression risk of depression and anxiety than those of a person who thinks more logically (Ciccarelli& White, 2009).

The above examples of anxiety disorders may seem common and normal. But anxiety disorders can be so serious that cause difficulties and have a negative impact on people’s life. Since the number of people who suffer from disorders is increasing rapidly, cases of patients are getting more and more complex. To explain the complicated behaviors of people, scientists may need more advanced models and theories.

 

References

Ciccarelli, Saundra K., and J. Noland. White. “Chapter 1.” Psychology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. 16-18. Print.

Carducci, B. The psychology of personality.Pacific Grove, CA: Books/Cole Publishing Co. 1998.

Mora, G. History of psychiatry. In H.I. Kaplan & B. J. Sadock (Eds.), Comprehensive textbook of psychiatry (pp. 2034- 2054). Baltimore: Williams & Wikins.

Can We Trust Our Memory?

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In terms of memory, most of us tend to think that if something has happened before, we will definitely remember it the way exactly how it happened. However, to our surprise, according to our textbook “in fact, memories are revised, edited, and altered on an almost continuous basis.”  (Ciccarelli& White, 2009). Our memories are actually never accurate, and as time goes by we remember things less clearly.

One of the most interesting phenomena I found related to our inaccurate memory is the false-memory syndrome, which refers to the creation of inaccurate or false memories through the suggestion of others, often while the person is under hypnosis (Hochman, 1994). It is true that people sometimes can claim something that has never happened before to be real without even realizing it. This reminds me of the story of my friend.

One day my friend lost her room key but she did not know how that happened. I told her to try to recall the tasks she had done in that period of time to get some clue. Then she told me she was getting the trash out before she realized that her key was missing. So I asked her unintentionally that if she accidently put her key in the trash bin with the garbage. After hearing my guess, she started to panic. And then she actually believed that she threw her room key away by accident when she was taking out the trash. But several days later, she found the key in the drawer of her room. My friend was really surprised and she laughed at herself that she actually persuaded herself to think that she threw away the key while taking out the trash.

This story may sound funny, but in fact things like this are happening all the time to us. Other examples are like remembering different things happened in childhood from your siblings do, and condemning the wrong person for doing the crime. As we can see, our memories make mistakes all the time. However, it is good to know that most of our memories are reliable. Otherwise our world will be a mess.

 

References

Ciccarelli, S.K. and White J. N. (2009).  “Chapter 1.” Psychology. Upper Saddle

           River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall,  16-18. Print.

Hochman, J. (1994). Buried memories challenge the law. National Law Journal, 1, 17-18

The Accuracy of Psychological Research

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When talking about psychology, people usually think of conducting researches to study human thoughts and behaviors. In order to achieve their goals with minimum bias, researchers tend to use the scientific method, a system for reducing bias and error in the measurement of data. There are number of different ways to investigate the answers to research questions, for example, under the category of descriptive methods, there are naturalistic observation, laboratory observation, case studies and survey. As discussed in the lecture, there are advantages and disadvantages of each method, which reminds me of some of my experiences.

I remember back in high school, we had open lectures when parents could come and listen to the class in the back of the classroom. The teachers did not have to make any change about their teaching and there was no need to do that, however, I still could feel that every time when someone else was listening, there was something different about the teachers’ teaching style or language. Even the answers of my classmates, some were more expressive while some other students became surprisingly quiet and disciplined. As we can see, even though under such a natural condition rather than an evaluative competition or research, people’s behaviors were still influenced because they knew that they were watched by some other audience. It is the same with naturalistic observation. As long as the participants, no matter they are humans or animals, realize they are observed; they perhaps behave differently more or less even subconsciously.

In addition, I believe most people have answered various surveys before. When you compared the answers to your true feelings, were they perfectly matched? Probably not. For example, when I answer some questions from the survey, I often try to think about what is the “right” answer rather than write down how I really feel.  Other situations can be people misremember things, distort the truth, and may lie outright. Even it is an anonymous questionnaire, participants are likely to make themselves sound desirable or socially appropriate. Some other times, the wording of the survey can be ambiguous so that participants can only pick the option that is similar to their situations, which is not precise for the psychology study at all.

It is inevitable to have errors existing in our science studies. Psychology is one of the examples. Since it is hard to keep the information collected from the researches completely accurate, we should pay more attention to selecting samples and try to make sure that each member has an equal chance to be selected and is representative to the population.

 

Sources – Psychology Text Book

Ciccarelli, Saundra K., and J. Noland. White. “Chapter 1.” Psychology. Upper Saddle

               River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. 16-18. Print.