What is it about decision making that becomes so overwhelming to us? What is us decides to base our decisions off of logic and sometimes based on nothing but our pure and raw emotions? I personally have always had a problem with decision making, and often never make the most beneficial decision, why is it that I seem to choose wrongly and others may make all of the correct decisions?

I have had a problem for several years now with the concept of relationships. My boyfriend has a friend from Brazil (female) that visited recently, he payed more attention to her than he had to me in several months. In the beginning of this situation I had decided that I would completely ignore what I was feeling, I would not let it bother me because he hadn’t seen her in a while. As the week went on, it felt as if I was slowly losing control over how jealous I became, though I made the conscious decision to ignore it, I could not make my emotions subside. The issue I was and am having, is over the fact that I do not want to be bothered by lack of attention or jealousy over his attention being shared with someone else and yet my emotions did not agree with my desires.

I know that he loves me, adores me even, and yet, I get jealous whenever his attention is on another female, I logically understand that he would not do anything to hurt me in a million years but my emotions do not consider logic and are still hurt by even the smallest hint of neglect. Goldstein (2011)  says that emotions serve the purpose of letting us know what to do in a particular circumstance but at what point do we sacrifice our emotions for logic so that we do not interfere with the emotions of others?

On June 4th the Disney Pixar hit “Inside Out” was released. It is a movie based on a young 11 year old girl that ends  up having to move away from the town she has known her whole life and is forced into the strange unknown. She does not make this journey with just her parents though, she makes it with those that govern the inner most workings of her mind. There are five characters that control her reactions to her everyday experiences, these characters are manifested as Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness. Their main objective is to make memories for her and to assure that they are all Joy’s memories because that is how her happiness remains. Conflict arises and Joy, sadness, and the young girls core memories (her first hockey game, meeting her best friend, etc.) are no longer at “headquarters.”

Beyond headquarters with Joy, Sadness, and the core memories you visit Family Island, Honesty Island, Hockey Island, Friendship Island and Goofball Island, all of which are the result of her five core memories. Along the journey back to headquarters there are aisles of memories which you later find out are known as the archives for the young girl, Riley’s, long term memories. Along their adventure they come upon Riley’s old imaginary friend walking throughout long term as well. The three of them attempt to make their way back to headquarters to put an end to the destruction of Riley’s memories and emotions (due to the fact that Anger, Fear, And Disgust are the only one governing Riley’s actions and reactions). During their final realization of how to make it back, Joy (with the core memories) and the imaginary friend fall into the memories dump. The memory dump is where useless memories go to be forgotten over time (symbolizing short term memory).

I’m discussing this movie with all of you because for an animated children’s movie, it revealed a sundry amount of information about out emotions and also our memories. Long term memory is a system for permanently storing, managing, and retrieving information for later use. Items of information stored as long-term memory may be available for a lifetime and is illustrated exactly in the way within the movie. It also revealed that our “core memories” (i.e. wedding days, births, deaths, siblings) shift our personalities and share a greater connection than we realize. In reference to the memory dump, that is the physical manifestation of short term memory, which is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time, which explains why all memories in the dump eventually fade.

I highly suggest that everyone watch this movie, not only does it explain memory to children but it helps with the understanding of personalty and emotion. It ultimately tells us that it is if you aren’t always happy and even the sadder memories can be good ones.

I am a generally anxious person and am easily overwhelmed so, that being said, though LEARNING how to drive did not scare me, others OBSERVING my driving was a great feat to overcome. My greatest fear when it came to driving was what I had assumed was lack of depth perception. Ever since I was a kid, if I were walking alongside someone they would have to push me away from them or remind me that I had been veering off of our course. Lack of balance and lack of depth perception are often misconceived as the other, and for several years the doctors thought the problem was my hearing, thus making me off balance due to the lack of equilibrium, but they were never entirely sure nor able to solve the issue.

While reading Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience  by Goldstein, B. (2011), I became suspicious of the true natural of issue. When participating in the perception of the two quarters, I became greatly aware of how poorly I saw with my non-dominant eye. Though we are privileged enough to be able to perceive depth even with just a single healthy retina, there are other techniques we use subconsciously do determine depth and those techniques are depth perception cues. Of them all I have satisfactory visualization of liner perspective, interposition, shadows, texture gradient, and size constancy but what I lack is the ability to recognize motion parallax, which is the phenomena that occurs when in a vehicle and you focus on an outside stationary object, at first it appears to be approaching slowly but when it passes you it seems to have gone by in a flash. My perception is altered in such a way that I cannot recognize and adjust my speed in such a manor to avoid stationary objects, in my case a fire hydrant.

Due to Cognitive Psychology I can identify and work on the potentional issues I may cause for myself and others. I am glad that I have been made aware of the sense of perception and the effect they have on us in the physical world. I hope all of the information on the topic is brought to light in far more useful settings than my car and a fire hydrant.