Chapter 11

Well, Chapter 11 is called "Stress and Health."

The question is: What are some ways in which people cope with stress?

Everyone deals with stress differently but there are some common methods. One type of coping is to work on eliminating or changing the stressor (whatever is causing the stress) itself. This is known as problem-focused coping. For example, a student might have a problem understanding what a certain professor is teaching. To solve this through problem-focused coping, that student could talk to the professor after class, ask fellow students, get a tutor, etc.


Problem-focused coping is just one method, another is called emotion-focused coping. This can be used simultaneously with problem-focused coping to better deal with controllable stress events. Emotion-focused coping involves changing the way someone feels toward a certain stressor. This is effective because it reduces the emotional impact of something, thus making it easier to deal with. Relating back to that professor example, someone could solve it through emotion-focused coping by talking about it with a friend, become more calm/confident/etc., and then handle it in a more direct manner.  One advantage to emotion-focused coping is that in can be utilized during uncontrollable stressor as well. For example, someone using this method could view a stressor as challenge rather than a threat. This changes their emotional view on the stressor and makes dealing with it easier.

Along with the focused coping methods, people also use mediation, or a series of mental exercises that result in  refocused attention along with a "trance-like state of consciousness." There are two types of mediation. One is called concentration mediation. This is the most widely known of the two. The goal of this type is to focus the mind on something unchanging, like a heart beat, so that the mind can forget daily hassles and so the body can relax. The second type, receptive mediation, involves "becoming aware of everything in immediate conscious experience." In other words, it's the experience people have when they are overawed at an ocean's edge, a starry night, etc. It doesn't specifically have to be in a natural setting such as those but those moments are examples of attention being focused outward, which is what receptive mediation tries to achieve.

Chapter 10

The title of our next chapter is "Sexuality and Gender."

So the question is "How do men and women differ in thinking, behavior, and personality?"

Research has shown that women score higher on tests that involve verbal abilities, and men score higher on tests about mathematical and spatial skills. A different study also showed that, when listening, women use both hemisphere of the brain while men only use the left hemisphere. This suggests that women pay attention to the tone and emotion of statements as well as the general content. Early explanations of these differences involved physical reasoning that basically said the different sexes have different brains, but more recent research strongly suggests that psychological and social issues are more responsible for these differences. To be more specific, the supposed differences in mathematical abilities are believed to be caused by a lack of effort or a lack of confidence on the women's part. Fortunately, now that society views the two genders as equal, these various differences are starting to diminish.


The differences that are normally thought of between men/women interacting with others are the result of stereotyped thinking. So this makes it difficult to show differences that aren't stressed in the social environments that all men/women grow up in. Generally, men are taught to hold in their emotions, be strong, be manly, don't cry, etc, while women are encouraged to be open with feelings, and whatever other stereotypes you can think of. Anyway, the point is, society makes it hard to point out real differences.

According to research, men tend to talk to each other about current events, sports, and other events. This has been called a "report" style of communication that involves switching topics frequently with attempts to dominate the conversation by certain members of a group. Women tend to use a "relate" style of communication, which involves revealing information about themselves and showing concern/sympathy. Women also tend to interrupt each other less and allow everyone to participate in conversation.

Chapter 9

This chapter is called "Motivation and Emotion."

The question is: What are Maslow's Hierarchy of needs?

Maslow was one of the early humanistic psychologists and he rejected the dominant theories of psychoanalysis and behaviorism (branches in psychology) because he was looking for a more positive view of human behavior. He proposed that there are several levels of needs that a person tries to meet before they can achieve the highest level of personality fulfillment, which is self-actualization, the point where people have satisfied lower needs and "achieved their full human potential." These needs vary and range from fundamental deficiency needs (such as food/water) to growth needs (such as the desire to have friends). In order for people to achieve the highest level (self actualization), the other fundamental levels must be accomplished first.

The lowest level consists of physiological needs such as food, water, and rest. Once those needs are met, safety and its associates are the next level. The level above safety consists of belongingness and love needs. Above that are esteem needs; feelings that involve feeling accomplished or earning the esteem of others. Above esteem needs are cognitive needs. This consists of learning only for the sake of gathering knowledge and the natural curiosity that all people (to some extent) have. Above those needs are the aesthetic needs, which include the need for order and beauty, so basically the artistic aspect of people. Above those are the self-actualization needs which are considered the highest for self accomplishment. And once all of those needs are met, and someone has accomplished as much as possible for themselves, the transcendence needs come in. These consist of helping other people reach self-actualization.
When it comes to the levels of needs, according to Maslow, people can move up and down all the time. Also, peak experiences are defined as moments in which self-actualization is reached, even if it is only temporarily.
Here is a more visual demonstration of the hierarchy:

Chapter 8

This chapter is called "Development Across the Life Span" so basically, human development. And after looking at most of the chapter, it mainly focuses on the creation of life, which at this point in our schooling, has been taught multiple times so instead of focusing on that, I'll talk about something else in the chapter that seemed interesting.

The question is: What are the stages of language development?

There are multiple theories on language development but the more modern theory focuses on environmental influences on language such as "child-directed speech." Child-directed speech is defined as the way adults and older children talk to infants and younger children with a higher pitch, sing-song like speech; basically, the way you generally expect an adult to "talk" to a month old baby. Also, when it comes to understanding and producing language, infants have a receptive-productive lag which means they are much better at understanding compared to producing.  

There are 5 stages of language development that every child (regardless of language or geographic location) experiences. The first is called "Cooing" and occurs after 2 months of being born, and is summarized by vowel-like sounds. After 6 months, "Babbling" occurs and this is when consonant sounds are added to the already used vowel sounds. Also, this is around when deaf children start to increase hand signs/gestures and decrease babbling. Then, just before the age of 1 or around 1, children acquire one word speech but generally, children mean more than just the one word that the say. For example "Juice!" could mean "I want juice!" or "I drank my juice!" After about a year and a half,children develop telegraphic speech or very simple sentences such as "Daddy go bye-bye." After this period, children slowly learn more words and proper grammar, and by the age of 6, they become nearly as fluent as an adult, although the vocabulary levels obviously aren't the same.
 

Chapter 6

So the next chapter we're reading revolves around memory, which means this blog will probably have a bunch of boring factual information on memory. The question is:

What are the main steps or processes involved with memory and how does memory work?

There are 3 steps in memory.
The first process in memory is to get sensory information into another form that the brain can use. This is also known as encoding. An example of encoding could be any sound someone hears. When someone hears a sound, the ears turn the vibrations in the air to neural messages (from the auditory nerve) and from that, the brain can interpret the sound and classify it as a sound that is known or a sound that has been heard before.
The second step is to hold on to the given information for some period of time in a process that is known as storage. The period of time always varies and depends on the system of memory being used. Some information is held just long enough so it can be worked with, generally somewhere around 20 seconds. In a different system of memory, people hold onto it longer, such as knowledge in Psychology or Chemistry that needs to be known for the next test.
The third and final step is generally the most problematic phase in terms of memory, which is getting useful information out of storage for use, also known as retrieval.


There are 3 theories, or models, that suggest a basic explanation for how memory works.
One is called the information-processing model and this model is generally the most comprehensive according to researchers. It assumes that the processing of information for memory is similar to the way a computer processes (encodes, stores, and retrieves) memory and information.
The parallel distributed processing model suggests memory processes take place at the same time over a large network of neural connections.
The last model is called the levels-of-processing model. This suggests information is more "deeply processed"  or basically processed by its importance.