Sherika's Psych Blog 2019-06-28 16:37:49

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

In 1998, the Georgia Governor, Zell Miller, spent thousands of dollars of the states budget in order to purchase several hundred copies of classical music CDs to distribute to parents as he believed in the Mozart effect. Or the effect that classical music could be influential in increasing the intelligence of a young child or infant’s developmental stages.

I don’t agree with Governor Miller’s approach here, especially to spend such a significant amount of the state budget to purchase classical music CDs when such money could have been redistributed to an area of more significant need. Not too mention that there’s been plenty of research that’s been conducted on the Mozart theory to prove that there’s no negative or positive correlation between listening to classical music and intelligence. Instead, I felt that Miller was wasting taxpayer money on a theory that has been discredited with proof time and time again. Instead of trying to fund this theory, Miller should have put the funding towards improving Georgia’s school systems, curriculum, or provide these schools with more funding.

Leading a stressful life

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

College is a very stressful time period for many students lives, not only are they experiencing living in a singular place away from home, but the stress of academics, maintaining a social life and more contribute to stress as a whole. But what are some ways that stress like this can be managed?

For me personally, I’m a huge fan of music, art, and reading. Whenever I’m stressed out I simply either listen to music of different varieties, read a book, or watch a movie. On any given day they tend to work, since I’m confining myself to a degree of solitude and in that time I’m allowing myself to decompress from the stressful situation I found myself in.

To deal with stress more effectively, I suppose I could take up a less stressful hobby that allows me to be both productive, but relieve stress at the same time. So I suppose I could take up painting in order to supplement my stress relieving strategies.

When Eating Healthy Becomes a Threat to Your Own Health

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

Recently there’s been a proposed guideline for orthorexia nervosa, a condition proposed by many including eating disorder professionals to describe those that have an unhealthy fixation on healthy eating and exercising to the point that it becomes an obsession. Though some argue that with the proposed criteria it blurs the line between extreme examples and mindsets of healthy eating versus mental disorders.

The proposed criteria for orthorexia nervosa are proposed in two different sets of criteria. The first set of criteria is defined as an obsessive focus on healthy eating, that’s defined by dietary theory or set of beliefs. It’s categorized by exaggerated emotional distress in relationship to food choices that are perceived as unhealthy and may include weight loss that is subordinated to the idea of healthy eating. There may be the elimination of an entire food group as well as the introduction of severe cleanses or partial fasts.

The second criteria is compulsive behaviors and mental preoccupation that becomes clinically impairing due to malnutrition, severe weight loss, or other medical complications due to restricted diets. Distress due to social, academic, or work related functions becoming secondary to beliefs or behaviors concerning diets. Positive body image and mental health becomes dependent with healthy eating habits. There are a multitude of other traits that are also defined as being symptoms of orthorexia nervosa. However are these sets of criteria a healthy way to divide what seems to be a burgeoning disorder and healthy eating? Or does the governing body that decide these matters not have a true understanding about the complex health conscious ideals that are taking over the newer generations and instead misdiagnosing something that truly isn’t a problem?

I think that with growing complexities around eating healthy, including trends or fads like cleansers and “detox teas” that are meant to “rid the body of toxins and promote healthy living” that there’s a healthy dose of reality and studies that point to these extreme ideals as being truly unhealthy. As the second criteria mentioned above points out, there’s a unhealthy focus on health and dieting, something that is similar to the criteria for other eating disorders. But not only does this criteria negatively impact ones personal life, but their social and work life as well. I think that while there could be some argument that this is a slippery slope to use to diagnose orthorexia nervosa in an official capacity. I think it’s own criteria has enough of its own strengths to stand up to such a thing.

The Myth Regarding Sleep

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

A longstanding joke is that once you enter college, sleep is no longer an option that exists. For many college students, sleep is a luxury that gets tossed onto the back burner compared to the multitude of obligations that college students are under. Such as homework, projects, or even senior thesis’.

Currently my sleep habits/schedule aren’t what I would describe as healthy. I’m naturally a night owl. I tend to be more productive than I am during the day and have jokingly admitted to friends on several occasions that I can’t remember what the sun looks like. On any typically day I’ll wake up some time after noon or closer to 2 o’clock and go about my day, by doing work, catching up on the news, etc. I’ll stay up until maybe 3 or 4 in the morning, fall asleep and repeat the process all over again. I typically want change my sleep habit unless I have a planned engagement that calls for me to be awake at 7 or somewhere before noon.

While my sleep schedule/habits aren’t healthy. I feel that it works best for me since if I naturally get up before noon my mental capacity isn’t at it’s best until way later in the evening. Even if I eat breakfast and hydrate myself. However, according to several sleep studies over the years the most amount of sleep that one should get in order to live healthily is 8 hours in total. While I don’t sleep at a normal time, I feel that with my own sleep schedule I get 8 hours of more of sleep, regardless. So I don’t feel there needs to be much changes to my sleep schedule. The only thing I would do is maybe go to bed at a reasonable time so that I can get up earlier than noon.

Unforgotten Memories

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

There are moments, events in time in which an entire generation of people can collectively remember what they were doing at the time. Ask anyone what they were doing when Neil Armstrong’s walk upon the moon was being broadcasted to an entire nation. But what causes us to remember these types of events that had a bigger impact on us than say remembering what we ate for breakfast?

Well, my personally theory is that because certain events have a lasting impact on the world whether that be the development of technology or advancing the current sciences that we have these events have a profound impact. What about events that don’t impact society but are personal? Well, good or bad, those events leave a sort of mental hand print on memories. Whether it’s someone having their first child or more traumatic memories like witnessing combat in a war zone. These events must have been so influential in who we are as people that it stimulates activity or increases activity in our hippocampus. The part of our brain that deals with memories. A way to test this theory out is to run MRIs of a population within a study; have people re-jog their memories of an influential time they can remember and see if there’s an increased spike of activity in the hippocampus.

Violence in the Media

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

Cries of video games or other variations of media that depict extreme violence for decades have been pointed at as the source of many problems over the past several decades. From being blamed as a contributing factor to school shootings, mass shootings, and dozens of other largely devastating events, politicians and government leaders alike have pushed back against violence in the media and in some cases have argued for video game addiction to be listed as an actual psychiatric condition in the World Health Organization’s guidelines.

On an issue that is both hotly contested and argued about, my personal belief is that there’s no or very little correlation between violence in the media and an increase in aggressive behavior. According to a recent article by Forbes, the same conclusion is also met. According to the article, the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Oxford conducted a study in which a combination of subjective and objective data was used in order to determine the correlation between teen aggression and violence in video games. The study utilized data from not only teens, but their parents and caretakers to judge levels of aggression. Something previous studies, the article notes, had never been done. Furthermore, the level of violence in video games was determined by the current standard and classification of video game ratings that are used today instead of the subjects determination about what constituted “violence” in one.

While the sample of the subjects was mostly confined to British teens aged 14 to 15, along with their parental units or caretakers who totaled for 2,008 subjects in all. The study as researchers noted found no correlation between violence and video games, with researchers expanding upon their findings further with Professor Andrew Przybylski clarifying:

” The idea that violent video games drive real-world aggression is a popular one, but it hasn’t tested very well over time. Despite interest in the topic by parents and policy-makers, the research has not demonstrated that there is cause for concern. “

Calls to permanently ban video games from consumer consumption has always been merely a call to find a scapegoat to blame these horrible events that happen universally on a single monomer. Instead of confronting and researching the root causes behind why mass shootings occur, or the purveyor’s intent, instead, the easy cause is to blame something that people already are wary about. This has been done with not only video games, but metal music, as well as differing fashion subcultures as well. It’s easier to blame something that people lack an understanding of, rather than to blame something that people refuse to believe.

What Makes a Killer?

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

Jim Fallon, a notable neuroscientist from the University of California, discusses what contributes to the makings of a serial killer, whether it’s the old age argument of nature vs nurture or something more complex like a person’s genes. Choosing this topic as I found the title of it to be intriguing; Fallon explores how society ends up with news or cases of psychopathic killers. Fallon describes how his colleagues give him brains to analyze, however, it’s a blind experiment as he isn’t given information on which brain belongs to a killer and which one is a regular person. Overall, Fallon notes that he’s analyzed over 70 different brains and because of the analyzation has come up with a bunch of differing data.

The data goes over different variables, such as genetics, brain damage, interaction with the environment, with a study on how each variable impacts which section of the brain and how much. In his research, Fallon attempted to look for a connection between all 3 variables and how that relates to ending up with a psychopathic killer, which all depends on when as he puts it “the damage occurs.” Fallon points out that at all of the brains he looked at, those who were a serial killer had damage to their orbital cortex. Along with that a high risk gene known as MAOA, which is mostly transmitted from mother to son’s because it can be given via the X chromosome. The MAOA gene is typically shown to lead to severe aggressiveness and is commonly found in male’s, many of whom end up as killers. The MAOA gene develops due to too much serotonin in the brain during fetal development which makes the brain become sensitive to the presence of it later on in life.

Fallon then goes on to say that in order for the MAOA gene to be expressed, young boys have to be exposed to cases of extreme violence which can lead to disaster. And with these genes, they can tend to become concentrated in the population especially if the genes continue to be passed on. Fallon then slips into his own anecdotal story about his family, in which his mother after hearing he’d been giving talks about psychotic killers explores their family tree and how Fallon discovered his relation to Lizzie Borden and several other murders throughout history on his father’s side of the family.

What I found interesting about Fallon’s talk however is that even though he goes on constantly about how there are certain variables that can be found that are common among psychotic killers, these same variables can be found in people around the world who object to war or live morally good lives. People like Fallon’s own family as well. Overall this talk seemed to be fairly trustworthy as Fallon had his own extensive set of research, even going so far as to do scans of his own family’s brains to bolster the points he was making in his TED talk.

Based on the information presented in the TED talk, it would be interesting to have a research study that analyzes how brains in a comatose state function and what happens to the brain when a comatose person wakes up. In order to conduct such an experiment there would need to be a large sample pool of brain scans of people who were comatose, people who aren’t, and people who were comatose either due to medical intervention or other reasons but woke up.

Mythubusters: Madness Behind the Method

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

In one of the mythbusters most iconic episodes where they compare whether the usage of a cellphone while driving compares to the dangers of drunk driving. In order to test hypothesis, the team set up a controlled experiment where the subject was both sober and wasn’t using a cellphone in order to be used to the course they had set up for the experiment.

The second experiment featured the subject being distracted due to a cellphone call. For the last variation of the experiment, the subject drank some alcoholic beverages and had their blood alcohol level examined with a breathalyzer test before driving the course again.

While these three different experiments were set up, there were of course, smaller criteria that existed within the experiments as detailed in the first controlled experiment that the team established. Within that experiment, they had the subject accelerate to 30 miles per hour and stopping at a marked point. After that the subject had to parallel park and avoid accidents. On top of this the experiments were timed as well.

During the cell phone portion of the experiment the subject was given different mental tasks to complete while also operating the car. Whether it was answering factual questions or more mathematically challenging questions. For this portion of the experiment, giving subjects mentally challenging tasks during the simulation of distracted driving due to cellphone usage was a weakness. Distracting the subject with factual or mentally stimulating questions doesn’t accurately recreate drivers everyday who are distracted due to the usage of their cellphones. Whether that be because the driver themselves are using their phone while driving or are getting distracted due to a phone call.

Instead of distracting the driver with mentally stimulating questions, it would have been more accurate for the subject to be holding a phone conversation instead that simulates the phone conversations that everyone has every day.

Another critique to be noted as that the blood alcohol level of the subjects tested wasn’t ever mentioned in the experiment. So it’s hard to determine if any of the subjects had the same blood alcohol level when they engaged in the test. This seems like a weakness as the two subjects in the study, because of age, sex, and weight could consume the same number of alcoholic drinks yet have differing blood alcohol levels that affected them differently. Instead, there should have been some sort of effort in order to get both subjects to either consume the same number of drinks or have blood alcohol levels that were close to each other.

Even though at the end of the video the mythbusters hypothesis was proven true that driving drunk and driving with a cellphone had similar margins for accidents. Whereas they had a larger margin of error for driving with a cellphone. Another thing to critique is that there was never any point of the video in which the mythbusters themselves addressed the criteria they were using to determine whether driving drunk was dangerous than a using a cellphone, vice versa, or with both. Instead, these criteria should have been mapped out at the beginning as it’s hard for the viewer to accept such things at face value.

Introductions

--Original published at Sherika's Psych Blog

Hi! My name is Sherika Marshall. I’m majoring in Japanese with minors in English and Asian Studies. I currently live in Norristown, Pa with my mother and younger brother; it’s located 30 minutes away from both Philly and King of Prussia.

Why am I taking this course? Well, like any other college student would answer for the credits of course. But that wasn’t the only other motivation I had for taking this course. I’ve always had some interest in psychology, even extending back into my high school years when I always thought that I’d end up studying forensic science with some sort of focus on psychology. But surprisingly, I ended up majoring in a foreign language.

I have a somewhat limited background in psychology with the last psych course I’ve ever taken being sometime in my early high school education. I can easily say, however, that my favorite shows related to psychology in some capacity are “Mind Hunter” and “Hannibal.”

With this course I’m just hoping to learn as much as I can about psychology and everything it entails.