The Halo effect experiment by Solomon Asch

This experiment is a classic study in the psychology of interpersonal perception, these series of experiments were titled Forming Impressions of Personality by Solomon Asch, the principle of this research is that perceptions of a person are by the traits they posses, these perceptions are the most important factor that help our mind establish an impression on that person. The halo effect experiments conducted by Solomon Asch were many, he did various experiments but generally following the same outline, the only changing variable were the order of the words dictated to the series of participants, serie A and serie B, he used many words who were the same but they were put in the inverse order between serie a and b, in such as participants from serie A got the serie A description and serie B the B description, these descriptions were full of words who were the same in each set but put backwards, being the independent variable, then the experimentors procceded to ask the participants from series A and B for a sketch from the details provided, the sketch the participants drew is the dependent variable, since it is the one that is measured according to what the participant drew relating it to the words provided by the experimenter, the sketches showed what the experimentors were expecting to see, although the descriptions contained NO physical characteritics like "tall" only descrptions such as "intelligent", the participants responded with a positive sketch of the described person to the description with positive attributes at the beginning, and on the otherhand they responded with a negative sketch such as an ugly person to the description that contained bad attributes at the beginning, this showing how simple words that represent no physical description can make up an image about a person, and how the association of the human mind is so strong, vinculating people who are considered attractive with positive characteristics and vice versa, people not considered attractive with negative characteristics. The person described by the participants in serie A were always related to someone they knew, with a profession they had in their mind containing those characteristics, such as being "intelligent", related to a teacher, a scientist, etc. There were many parts to this experiment, alternating the words so the outcome was more precise, I would like to recreate the one where it gave the traits of "A. intelligent—skillful—industrious—determined— practical—cautious—evasive B. evasive—cautious—practical—determined—industrious—skillful—intelligent" 

Cultural Differences

The childhood amnesia between cultures such as Korean, New Zealander and American person differences in the age, such as Koreans at 4 years old, New Zealanders at 2.5, and Americans generally at 3.5 years old, researchers have found that in average age of first memories, it varies between the ages of two years between different cultures. This is due to the culture the child is raised in and the customs their parents have, since if the parents discuss it or don’t discuss the events in the child’s life the better or the worse the child will remember these events, and the societies vary in the way they talk about their children, making it easier or harder for the child to remember the events of his or her childhood. The more the independent the customs and the country the harder it will be for it to remember earlier childhood events and the more countries that focus on individual personal history have earlier childhood memories.

Sex Difference in Memory: Women better than Men at Remembering Everyday Events

The studies done by these people showed that there is a difference in the episodic memory between the two sexes, and these studies favored women. The studies showed that women excel in verbal episodic memory tasks, like remembering objects, pictures and words, and on the other hand men outperform the opposite sex when remembering things with symbolic meaning, non-linguistic information, and known as visuospatial processing.

Placebo

The Placebo effect is a measurable, observable or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered, in other words its an inert substance that produces the same or a similar effect as an actual medicine. H.K. evaluated 15 clinics and here he found that 35% of the 1082 treated patients were actually relieved and cured by a placebo, showing the inmense power of placebos. The problems this had were found by Kienle and Kiene and they found that in a reanalysis "no evidence of any placebo effect in any of the studies cited by him." The effect of placebos according to what I have read is really strong, and I believe that just because you want to get better and feel that something will make you feel better it will make you feel better and many of your illnesses are in your head and the fake idea that it is going to cure you makes your mind think that and therefore you get better, and placebos should be legalized since they would help really expensive medicine get cheaper and there will be less need of it since many of the diseases can be cured with a simple placebo but doctors give you very expensive medicines so they can get more money and they would have the same effect as a placebo, this is really sad and it probably wont be legalized since the bussiness is so big and it would not help the farmaceutical business and the corruption is so big and they have a huge influence on them.

The Halo Effect by Solomon Asch

Alzheimer disease

In this studies of Alzheimer’s we learned many things, starting that this disease is fatal, once it begins it does not stop, it keeps on growing and does not go back, there is only the chance of Alzheimer slowing down in its growth with certain pills but there is no way it stops . We also saw that there is no exact thought on how this begins and what causes Alzheimer although there are speculations relating it to a part of the brain. We also learned that this disease usually hits you when you are 60 and every 5 years that pass you develop higher chances of getting Alzheimer, it is really improbable that you get it at 40 and 50 although it is possible. There are symptoms when you might get it but these are really hard to distinguish from natural aging, since they are really alike, like forgetting small things like where something is or having trouble articulating words. We also learned that there is no specific time limit in how long the stages in Alzheimer last since there are people who get less severe Alzheimer and people who get really severe one. The fatality on Alzheimer is that your body forgets how to do things such as breathing and the victim suffocates to death. We also learn that this is a really sad disease to watch somebody grow into since it just gets worse and worse, making the victim less independent, forgetting even their own family, but this disease has more effect on the family since they are the ones who watch the victim forget their identity, even people really close to them such as their children and wife. Studying this disease makes me conclude that I would prefer to die rather than bring such pain into my family and losing my identity.

Analysis 3 experiments

New Understanding Of How We Remember Traumatic Events
1. Conducted by: Neuroscientists at The University of Queensland
How it was conducted and results: They studied the amygdala under a cellular mechanism looking at the formation of emotional memories. They concluded that noradrenaline affects the amygdala by controlling chemical and electrical pathways in the brain responsible for memory formation.
Research applied to real-life: This research explains how you remember things for a very long time by the emotional impact it shows you. This results may also help other scientists discover better treatments for traumatic events.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081028103111.htm

Some Short-Term Memories Die Suddenly, No Fading 2. Conducted by: Weiwei Zhang, Steve Luck and Brain
How it was conducted and results: They developed a pair of tests that measured wether the memory still existed and the accuracy of the short term memory, these tests were giving to 12 adults.
In the first test, three squares of different colors flashed for a tenth of a second on a computer screen. After an interval of one, four or 10 seconds a wheel showing the entire spectrum of colors appeared on the screen. The three squares also reappeared, only now they were colorless and one of them was highlighted. They were asked to recall the color of the highlighted square and click on the area of the wheel that most closely matched it. Each subject repeated this test 150 times for each of the three memory retention intervals.
When subjects retained a memory of the color, they clicked very close to it on the wheel — the distance between the click and the actual color indicating the accuracy of the memory. When color had disappeared from memory, however, subjects clicked at random on the wheel.The second test was similar to the first, but used shapes instead of colors. Published in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the study found that subjects “either had the memory or didn’t have the memory,” Luck said, “and the probability of having it decreased between four and ten seconds. The memories did not gradually fade away.” The finding provides insight into the underlying mechanisms behind memory formation and retention.
Research applied to real-life: The findings are being incorporated into a study of people with schizophrenia.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

The Memories You Want To Forget Are The Hardest Ones To Lose


3. Conducted by: Keith Payne & Elizabeth Corrigan
How it was conducted and results: The UNC recorded the reaction of 218 participants to photographs, here they understood the ways that emotion constrains mental control and to the question of whether intentional forgetting can be helpful in coping with painful or traumatic experiences.
Research applied to real-life: This applies that your emotions place limits on the ability to control the contents of the mind, meaning that perhaps you feel mad, so then you are less likely to remember something or control yourself.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070815105026.htm

the concept of memory.

1. Explain the concept of sensory memory.
Sensory memory is where you recieve information from your senses immediately and it goes into your brain. It is information retained by just a short period of time and then it is forgotten since it has no importance.

2. Give an example of sensory memory.
When you touch the table, when you stop touching it, you forget it.

3. What is the capacity of our sensory memory?
Being visual it lasts less than one second, and auditory it lasts less than four seconds.

4. Describe the concept of short-term memory.
Short term memory is the stage after sensory memory that happens after the selective attention which determines what pieces of information move on from sensory memory to short-term memory. Short term memory is often stored as images and sound, it provides a working space for short computations and then transfers it to other parts of the memory system or discards it.

5. What is the "magic number" as it relates to short-term memory and who conducted the experiment which established this measurement?
The conducter of the experiment was George Miller in 1956 and the magic number is +/- 2 applying it to 7, making it from the range of 5-9.

6. What is chunking?
Chunking is the configuring of large amounts of information into smaller amounts of information which are used as structured to accomodate memory and learning limitations.

7. What has been determined to be the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers?
Numers - 3-4
Letters - 3

8. Which mode of encoding does short-term memory mostly rely on, acoustic or visual?
acoustic
9. Explain the duration and capacity of long-term memory.
This type of memory can last from days to decades. Memories become long term with the proccess of rehearsal and meaningful association, this means that you see it quite often and you give it importance, therefore your brain remembers it for a longer period of time.
10. Explain in detail the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
This model states that there are 3 ways of memory stores, sensory memory, short term memory and finally long term memory. It categorizes them by the duration they last, sensory being to the maximum of 4 seconds, short term memory being about 18-20 minutes, and it stores things by chunks, and finally long term memory which lasts up to a lifetime.

11. Identify three criticisms or limitations of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
1. Not all of the rehearsal leads to the improvement of retention
2. STM is in terms of the number of units that can be processed an any one time, he gave 7 +/- 2, but recent researchers have developed 5 +/- 2
3. The sensory stores are sensory systems, not memory systems as most people think of the term "memory."

12.Explain the Levels of Processing Model of memory.
This model concretes in Long Term Meory and the processing that occurs there, it gives an alternative to the multi store model that suggests info is transfered by rehearsal. This model suggests that the depth or level at which we process information determines its place in LTM and also how well we recall that information, meaning the more we think about it, the longer it stays in our head.

13. What is maintenance rehearsal - give an example.
Continiously repeating the material to be remembered.
Repeating vocabulary words to learn them.

14. What is elaborative rehearsal - give an example.
This time of rehearsal involves comparing something new with something you already know that is stored in your Long term memory.
Relating someone new you meet named John and associating it with someone you  already know called John.

15. Who developed the Levels of Processing Model and the concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal?
Craik and Lockhart developed in the year of 1972 the levels of processing models and the concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal.

Memory

So far in my class of IB Psychology we have been learning about memory and how it acts and things that may affect it and the possible results of these things affecting it. We have learned a lot about how it works, stages it undergoes, how it is different within the age we have, how it eventually declines and sometimes even crashes when things such as alzheimers where one loses memory, to the point the individual cannot recognize people it has lived with for his entire life. We also learned how there are things that affect what gets stored and what does not, such as emotion. Events can be highly emotional, perhaps scarring us for life, or making our brain repress that event. We also learned how memory affects learning and many experiments and theories such as Piaget's who made various experiments on memory, and finally making a foundation for how we learn and the different stages we undergo, and how our capacity of remembering things increases within our age, maximizing at the age of 25, and eventually declining after this year. Also we learn that not all of these things are trustworthy, since memory can be altered very easily, and that there are always exceptions to the learning stages that Piaget created.

Stroop

The stroop effect was an effect that was made popular by its discoverer John Ridely Stroop, which is used in psychological examples  to introduce or explain certain things in the human brain due to the result of this test, being that the variation of colors with a word meaning a different color, slows your time more since you try to read the word not the color. The results of this is a slower time than the one of you saying the word with the correct color on it, showing the difficulty the brain encounters while doing this since it first tries to assort the problems it is encountering then you can finally think it and say the word since it has to process the word and the color, and which one does it want you to say. We did this experiment and class and there was an obvious difference in time between the time of the normal text with the normal color, and then changing the color with the different word, making it a perfect example of how it works. People who have not yet learned to read, have less problems doing this since their brain does not encounter the problem of processing the word and the color, making it faster for their brain, therefore the results will have an obvious difference between the one who can read and the person who cannot read. People get shocked when they do the test for the first time since they think an easy task like naming a colour will not take them much time, but they finish realizing the difficulty of this task.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-stroop-effect.htm

Pygmies

The Bambuti Pygmies were a tribe of Africa that was isolated from all civilization and had no contact with other people until Colin Turnbull, an anthropologist that was studying civilizations in Africa, encountered this tribe and realized something real interesting, publishing some books on these observations and his discoveries. He had a Phd and had a kind of rough childhood, he saw many things and swore to defend and help out people who were needed and were minorities, in his attempts to study little tribes in Africa he discovers something really crucial about perception and the human mind, such as that humans learn about all the tricks in perception, such as things appearing smaller when they are further away from the human eye, etc. Things such as how a buffalo looks further apart compared to how it looks really close,  the Bambuti Pygmies had not seen anything from long perspective since they were surrounded by trees and could not see things on a long perspective and when they saw things far away they got really scared, doing this Colin Turnbull learned that people learn that things further away are the same thing although they look smaller than what you are accustomed to see. This was a crutial and really important observation on the subject of perception and what it consist of, on how everybody see things on a different way. This further helps understand the human brain and what how we learn certain things, things that we think we have from birth, but in fact we have learned to see things in certain ways.

Change and Adaptation

He was a british anthropologist from the british upper class, he was openly gay and was famous in the 1960s-1970s for his critical and great observation on the Bambuti tribe in africa, in this he discovered something very crutial with perception. He graduated from the Magdalen College in Oxford, he later dies from AIDS and pneumonia. He studied in a prestigious school until he finished high school, a turning point in his early life was when he watched a friend get raped by other boys, and since then he swore to become successful and defend weak and unable people. Colin Turnbull participated in World War II serving in the British Navy. He is famous for two of his publications, The Forest People and The Mountain People. He was also famous for the music he recorded from the Mbuti pygmies, and when he published them they became widely known and really appreciated by the musicians.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Colin_Turnbull
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/01/obituaries/colin-m-turnbull-69-anthropologist-and-author.html

Perception

Some internal factors that affect your perception are the habits because habits die hard and you react and percieve something according to the habitat you are in. Then comes motivational factors, which are factos that make your sensitivity of percieving something differnet. After comes learning, that is considered one of the big internal factors, since people percieve according to their learning level. Then come the external factors that influence your perception, such as the intensity in which something happens it makes the stimuli more percievable. Size is a big external factor, since the bigger or smaller something is, the easier or harder it is to percieve it. When two objects are in contrast, there is an easier view of the object or stimulus so you can more easily percieve it. There are more internal factors such as repetition, situation, etc that influence your perception, but they all have the common ground that the easier it is to see the object, the easier it is to percieve it.
Like:
The hour of 2:30 makes me happy because school ends.
Time to eat (8 am, 12 pm, 6pm) because it makes me feel like I am going to eat and feel satisfied.
When it is real late but I do not have to wake up early the next day, I feel really rested and nice.
When I see the red light of the blackberry go on it gives me a sort of anxiety
Saturday nights make me feel happy because the next day at morning I get a good breakfast.
Dislike:
When the clock goes 7:30 I feel depressed, its time for school to start
Sunday night, since it is the last time before school and its barely the beginning of the week.
When it is real late on school days I feel sad since I will be really tierd the next day.
The first class every day gives me a sense of boredom because it lasts more then usual, sometimes its two,
Entering the spanish class since we always talk too much it gives me a sense of boredom and sleepy feeling.


http://www.universalteacherpublications.com/mba/ebooks/ob/ch2/page3.htm
http://www.universalteacherpublications.com/mba/ebooks/ob/ch2/page4.htm

Perception is Reality

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein

This a philosophical statement that says "Perception is Reality" meaning that the perception of every person and its unique thinking shapes that person's reality and how they see everything. This means that every person has a different reality, and comparing it with Albert Einstein's quote, it says that there is no real reality, because reality means that there is one thing, it is the same for everybody, and with the different perception that every person has because they do not see the same thing and they do not love something or are dedicated to the same thing as much as someone else is. In example, you may love a book, you read it over and over again and never get tierd of reading it although you already know the ending and how everything is structed, and when it happens, there is another person who hates the book, the perception in this book is different, and in some bigger scales, perhaps not a book, changes the reality in which you live in, like jobs you like or dislike, or perhaps what subjects you like and are willing to spend time in for the rest of your life, maybe someone hates that and shapes your realities different. In conclusion, the different Perception of every human being shapes their reality in a different way, never being two alike.

Why do I study Psychology?

I study Psychology because I am enrolled in an IB program and there was the option to be either in French, Art or Psychology. I was originally enrolled in IB Art but then after recieving a brief explanation by the teacher to the people applying to it I figured it was too much homework for me to handle, so I dropped IB Art and figured I'd go to IB Psychology since I liked the class from last year.