Social

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

I have located three articles that explain peer pressure tips and what to do so that you don’t end up falling under peer pressure. Peer pressure is influence from members of one’s peer group and a feeling that one must do the same things as other people of one’s age and social group in order to be liked or respected by them. A peer is someone you look up to like a friend, someone in the community or even someone on TV. Peer pressure can be both a positive and negative influence and will challenge us do things whether they are right or wrong. Peer pressure can influence several areas in your life like; academic performance, who you choose for friends, it can influence who you mat choose for a boyfriend or girlfriend, it can influence decisions about sex, it may change your feelings about alcohol and drug use, and it can even determine your fashion choice. Though it’s different in many ways from high school, there is still pressure at college to “fit in” and to be liked by others. There is often peer pressure to do things you wouldn’t normally do “because this is college” and you are trying to meet new friends. For some people peer pressure may come from you directly, this may be because you are feeling different than everyone else even if they are not suggesting you join. Other times groups of friends can have certain activities and habits they do together. If you find that hanging out with people who tend to do things you wouldn’t normally do and you feel unaccepted unless you follow through, “get out” so you don’t fall into the pressure to “fit in.” There are many things you can do to get away from peer pressure. The first is simply to just say “no.” Other ways to handle not dealing with peer pressure would be: stick with what you believe is right, don’t judge others, try to find a new crowd, take action for others who are being pressured, and if all else fails, go to the college counseling center for support.

The first article that I have found talks about parents and how they should help their child resist peer pressure. The article has ten steps that help you inform your child of what to look for and how to handle peer pressure. The ten steps are: establish good communication, stay involved in your child’s daily life, maintain reasonable rules, help your child establish healthy friendships, encourage healthy activities and hobbies, talk to your child about smoking, alcohol, and drugs, teach your child to trust her instincts, help your child say no and mean it, establish a code phrase, and count on the support of good friends. With establishing good communication, having a close relationship with your child can make it easier for them to resist peer pressure. Having daily conversations with them, listening, offering support and advice and answering their questions can make it easier for them to come to you from everything. Staying involved and spending time with your child helps as well. Don’t be a helicopter mom but knowing where they are going and who they are going with can show them that you care and they will trust you. Having some boundaries can be beneficial as well as setting rules and having consequences if they are broken. Making sure that your child understands the expectations that you hold can connect a strong relationship between you both. Making sure your child stays with the friend group that helps he/she grow will be important. Making lasting friendships and packs to not do certain things together can build great relationships with others. As well as giving examples of good friends versus the bad ones. Being encouraging and supportive for you child’s favorite activities can help them with their self-esteem and developing healthy relationships. Making it known of what’s good and what’s bad can make it known as to what is important and what is not. Following what your gut says can be important on deciding who to listen to and what to say as an answer for whatever that person asked. I personally enjoy making a pros and cons list and doing that helps me way out what is good and what is not. Having a code word can make it easy for your child to say they need your help in front of someone without actually saying it. Having a good support system at home and at school can encourage your child to let his friends know that they have each others backs. I think all of these can be very helpful as long as you stick to it and make them all happen. It’s not good to start a support system and then have it broken. You have to be careful on who you trust and who you cont on as friends.

http://www.healthcommunities.com/healthy-living-guides/index.shtml/10-ways-to-help-your-child-resist-peer-pressure_102

The next article I chose relates to many ages including college students and parents and how to eliminate peer pressure as best as you can. Peer pressure can involve many things like stealing, drugs, sexual activity, dangerous behavior, and alcohol. The article starts with explaining peer pressure and how some people can get dragged into it. Then it talks about tips that can stop you or persuade you to resist peer pressure. Lots of people are dragged into peer pressure because they are afraid of being rejected by others or they don’t want to be made fun of. They can resist peer pressure by making eye contact, not making excuses, and sticking up for themselves. The article discusses the different types of peer pressure like spoken, unspoken, positive and negative. Spoken peer pressure is the most visible and easily understood form of peer pressure. Unspoken can happen through the power of a look or gesture. It can be sufficient enough to coerce someone into doing something that makes them uncomfortable. Positive peer pressure is the most beneficial influence that opens up new horizons and reinforces the decision to stay away from bad behavior while negative peer pressure encourages a person to do harmful or dangerous things. It can be more subtle and manipulative. The article then discusses tips for parents on how to encourage your student to do the right thing. It goes into how college brings new environments, situations, and expectations. A few tips towards the end that the article gives for kids of all ages are: spend time with those who resist peer pressure, learn how to be assertive, ask for help if necessary, get out of the situation, choose friends carefully, use the delay tactic, think ahead, provide your own positive pressure and go with your gut. I think this article is very, very well written. It gives a sense of peer pressure for everyone and not just one group of peers. I think that there isn’t much more to say because it covered a lot of ground with peer pressure.

https://www.accreditedschoolsonline.org/resources/peer-pressure/

Mental Health Treatment

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

For this week’s first impression post, I chose to do option 1 involving ranking the types of therapy according to how helpful they could be. The first type of therapy is psychodynamic therapy. Psychodynamic therapy derives from the psychoanalytic tradition, but it doesn’t involve the id, ego, and super ego. Instead psychodynamic therapists view individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and seeks to enhance self-insight. The second type of therapy is humanistic therapy. The humanistic perspective emphasizes people’s inherent potential for self-fulfillment. The third is behavior therapy and that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning are two of the techniques that go along with behavioral therapy. Lastly, cognitive therapy has to do with teaching people, new more adaptive ways of thinking and it’s based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions. I already go to therapy, but in my opinion, I would rank these therapies in the order of: humanistic, psychodynamic, cognitive, and behavioral. I like humanistic therapy because it believes in human potential and your capacity to grow and change in positive ways. Humanistic therapy also helps you recognize and develop your personal values, unique strengths, and your creativity. I also like how it aims to boost people’s self-fulfillment by helping them grow in self-awareness and self-acceptance and that the path to growth is taking immediate responsibility for one’s feeling and actions. I like psychodynamic approach because it focuses on relationships and how their childhood was. I like that it involves face to face interactions and that it gains perspective through exploring defended against thoughts and feelings. The one thing I do dislike about psychodynamic is that it doesn’t really rely on id, ego, and superego. I think partially that’s kinda crucial in some case when you need a good, bad, and neutral party opinion. I like cognitive therapy because it allows both the patient and the therapist to be creative, it emphasizes what is healthy in the patient, and it’s easily accessible. I think that this is good and bad that it tries to help people change their minds with more and new constructive ways of perceiving and interpreting events. I think that the example in the book is good and bad, the loss of the job leading to depression and not leading to depression. In some cases, it’s good to think that it’s worthless and hopeless and in others, it is better to say it wasn’t a good fit. I think it mostly relies on the situation.

Mental Illness

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

For this week’s first impression on chapter 14, I chose to do option 1, which is to watch a video on schizophrenia and share what we thought about it and then compare it to the media and schizophrenia. To start this all off, I don’t believe that I’ve seen anything having to do with schizo and out of the major films listed in the prompt, I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. So right off the bat, comparing this to the media, I haven’t seen anything having to do with schizo, so maybe that should be a good thing to be brought up in society. Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. After watching the video, I don’t really feel any different about schizophrenia. I don’t know much about it to make any assumptions or even form an opinion. I do think that it probably is one of the disorders that does go under looked and anything or anyone having to do with schizophrenia should be looked at. I think the video was portrayed well enough but there wasn’t much background to base anything off of.

Preventing Suicide Among College Students

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

After reading “Preventing Suicide Among College Students,” by Jane Brody, the article brought back a memory that stuck with me while I was at my first college, Susquehanna University. I was told that we get our mid term break because that was a time when some college students would get suicidal. Suicide is the act or an instance of taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally. A college student has to deal with a lot when going away to school; the adjustment from high school to college, the amount of work given by professors, being out on their own in a new environment, and not being surrounded by the people who care about them the most. It’s often times very hard for a college student to get used to it that quickly as well and it can have a physical, emotional, and social toll on how it affects them. Often times when a student goes away, they might not tell their parents or friends everything that they should know and because technically we are “adults” now and go by the law, the colleges can not say anything, especially if there is a lot of difficulties. The law that prevents colleges from alerting parents when their students are in trouble and having difficulties is the FERPA, or the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The article also includes a persona story of Brody, which explains how she helps someone avoid suicide. There are many places on campus that can help college students and be a nice resource when they need someone to talk to like the counseling centers. They can help students talk through things and even offer treatment for students. Most counseling centers can offer academic help as well as emotional help. Along with suicide, depression goes along with it and both have increased throughout the years. Some schools have made it a big priority to keep up with the demand so that students can continue to be happy and healthy. Many have added full-time counselors and employees to provide services for the students. There are also some websites like “Caring Community” that can help students with any health related issues that occur. Other websites like “Notice and Respond” can direct anyone who is concerned about a friend or peer by giving signs to look out for like risk taking and verbal or written threats and suggestions for how to handle a situation. While there are ways to handle situations like this on a college campus, there are ways to contact the parents, so they can assist as well. The students giving the school a grant so that they can talk to the parents is one way and the other is for a friend to contact the parents, if they have the information to do so. Being an active parent can help your student realize that you are only a phone call away and that they can always call whenever they need you.

After summarizing the article, I realize how difficult it is to get every fine and vivid detail into a summary without restating the entire article and copying all of the article. Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. I think that when people do summarize we tend to hit all the main points that we can but under a word limit, it gets more complicated because you have to focus on what the readers will understand and making it simple and to the point. The process alone is kind of hard to decide what a really good details to include and what would make the summary beneficial to those who read it. I didn’t leave anything important out because I feel like this whole article is important. It’s a very touchy subject and every thing that I included is significant. Even if I did leave something out, it’s only because I don’t know how to summarize it without taking it word for word. My perspective on journalists have changed a little bit but not a whole lot. Knowing people who write for the university paper makes a difference because I see how hard it is for them to write something. I would say that the only thing that makes it hard still is the fact that you don’t know what is true and what is false with articles. The whole project itself relies on whether or not you are a good summarizer so it depends on how you were taught to summarize.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/well/preventing-suicide-among-college-students.html

Memory (Spotlight Blog)

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

For this spotlight blog, we had the option of choosing from a memory prompt, stress prompt, and a drug prompt. I chose to do the memory prompt because I think that looking at different study skills could help me use them during school or any other place that I need help studying.

Memory is retaining learned information or past events, or taking what we learned and being able to use it in the future. There are three processes that are involved with memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding is putting information into a form the brain can understand and store. Encoding has many more aspects to it like failure and the different types of encoding. Storage is the process of storing memories in the brain and retrieval is receiving stored memories. Each of these processes can have failure if you didn’t learn something properly or if you didn’t have strong associations. Encoding failure means that you never really learned it in the first place and never got information into a form that the brain could understand. Storage failure is a biological disorder or some type of damage to the brain and retrieval failures have to have with the associations not being strong enough. Encoding allows transfer from working memory to long term memory. Working memory is what you are actively thinking about. You can typically hold 5-9 pieces of information and then we forget or it goes to long term memory. The best way to keep things in working memory is through rehearsal and repetition. There are multiple types of encoding like automatic and effortful. There is also phonological, visual, and semantic. With automatic encoding that means that you automatically remember something with no effort put towards it. Studying is done with effortful encoding where you have to work to memorize something. Phonological, visual, and semantic are more useful when it comes to studying I feel because some people are a visual learning, some are better at just listening, and for some it depends on what exactly you’re learning. When it comes to remembering your memory, you mentally search your brain for it and then if it’s located, it’s brought back to working memory. With retrieving memory, often you would look for retrieval cues or words and other stimuli that trigger the memory. Another thing you could look for is context effects. Typically, we tend to remember things better where we have first learned them, which is why in class, most students sit in the same seat so they can recall what they learned.

Effortful encoding is what we use mostly for studying. We have to work to memorize what is being taught to us. There are many ways to use effortful encoding and that is through organization, distributed practice, meaning, and elaboration. With organization, we remember things better if it’s organized while we learn the information, which is why a lot of teachers recommend the Cornell method of note taking. The Cornell method has notes but then a column for questions and organizing material by headings. It’s better to write notes the way they make sense to you and then review them later that day or the next day. Distributed practice has to do with not cramming things. Taking a lot of information in at once can confuse your memory and not all you to have connections. Studying a little bit of material over a long period of time is better and it’s easier to focus on newer material while just having to go back and refresh the old. You also can switch learning materials with other subjects. It gives you a break from one subject to focus on another. Meaning and elaboration kind of go hand in hand with each other. We remember better when we understand what we memorize and we elaborate more on the meaning and make the information personally relevant.

The first article I found has to do with studying skills for college students. It lists seven tips and how to go about doing those seven tips. Good habits when studying can make or break your GPA and doing these tips can help with how you study. The tips include: good notes= good grades, stay organized, unplug and reconnect, don’t cram, don’t over-study, find your zone, and take a break. Taking good notes isn’t something that everyone is good at but it is a good way to get the key points from a lecture and a textbook. Writing too many things can be strenuous and time consuming. Staying organized by having a planner or a calendar is a really good way to keep your commitments in order. Organizing your class materials is important as well. It’s easier to memorize if notes are in order and if they stand out with color or different fonts. Not having your phone can also be helpful because then you aren’t distracted and can focus in more with what you need to get done. Not cramming and over-studying is also a good way to keep sane and make sure that your study habits are the best they can be. Time management is a very good essential to make sure that you can get through what you need to. Everyone has their perfect place to study and it might not be the right one at first but it will be if you try many places out. Lastly, taking a break can be beneficial to you and it can help you continue to be energized through studying. I think that all of these are good study tips to stay off with if you are going into college. They explain where to study, to not cram (which is something a lot of people do), ways to stay organized and to always take a break and relax. I don’t think this article includes anything having to do with bad advice but having more to say the notes and organization would have been good to see. College students often get distracted by many things and once that happens sometimes they can’t get back on track.

https://www.campusexplorer.com/college-advice-tips/2DF9E34D/7-Best-Study-Tips-for-College-Students/

The second article I found was focused more on studying for high schoolers. There are many study tips that high schoolers don’t necessarily follow because they just think about lunch or leaving school and hanging with their friends. The article includes ten tips to help high schoolers with studying and being prepared for school. The tips include: be engaged, take notes, and listen, keep up to date with your homework, have an organizational system in place, have a routine, have daily and weekly objectives in place, don’t procrastinate, have an ideal study station, unplug, log off, mute, and power down, manage high school stress, and lastly, take advantage of technology available. Being engaged in class can help you focus more on what you need to do to get a good grade. Taking notes, asking questions, and engaging in discussions can help with these. This article discusses using the Cornell method of note taking, which for some it can help and others it can just be confusing and make taking notes even worse. Keeping up to date with homework can help you with studying as well. Using a planner can keep you on top of things that are due and help you plan what to do each night if you have a big assignment. Have an organizational system can help tremendously. It helps things stay in order and you don’t lose anything. My personal organizational system is color coordination. I have a purple folder and a purple spiral, sticky notes, notecards etc. Having a routine can keep you in line and make sure that you keep to it or you will be unorganized. This one I feel is super important because all throughout high school people don’t want to do work. They would rather go to the football games and hang with tier friends but getting your work done or even starting it can go a long way. This one is also important. Studying in a loud place isn’t going to help you memorize anything and having a disorganized spot can make you stressed and not focused especially if you just have to clean and straighten it all the time. You want it to be comfortable but not too comfortable so studying in bed probably isn’t the best. I think this article was helpful and didn’t have any bad advice, but I do think some of the tips are more important than others. All these tips were explained in depth and makes it easier to go along through high school. Even if it doesn’t have to necessarily do with studying right away, it’s still helpful because all these things lead to studying well. All of these tips play a key role in effectively studying and focusing on what you have to do.

http://student-tutor.com/blog/top-10-high-school-study-tips/

For studying skills, there are also many ways to help you memorize something so that you don’t have to go back and relearn. Repetition is the best way to memorize something. Just re-reading your notes isn’t sufficient enough but you can create questions with your notes and also rewrite them. Studying in situations that are similar to the exam are good as well, doing 15 minutes of one class and then 15 minutes of another class. Flashcards are also a very effective way on studying, only if you use them correctly. Going through note cards both ways can help with definitions and vocabulary. Shuffling them and going through the ones you don’t really know are also a really good way to frequently practice the ones you don’t know. I don’t prefer this study method but sometimes studying in groups can be effective as well. It works when there is plan to get done and it’s in action. When studying with a group, you should know the material first and not learn it with everyone but get everyone to help you understand things you don’t know.

The last article I found was advice for parents who have studying teens in high school or college. This article has a few tips for parents to help their children succeed. Some tips that it has for parents who have teens that need to study are: to learn effective study strategies, create weekly and daily plans and build rewards for a task that is accomplished. To help reduce a child’s stress and improve their grades, having a calendar that keeps track of assignments is beneficial, having a weekly planner to show a study plan and keep time of how much time is spent on one assignment and a checklist that shows what needs to be done that day and in what order they should be done can help. Along with those tips, location can be distracting if it’s not quiet or comfy, not having materials that you need can distract you because then you have to stop and look for the thing you need, and rewards. I think that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a snack or something but it could also be computer or phone time. This last tip is interesting because I’ve never thought about it. Keeping a worry pad so that teens who are distracted by their thoughts can write them down and worry about them later. I think that this is a good article and it doesn’t point out any bad advice. I think that this is a good start to getting a child on track with studying but there are more articles that may have a better sense of what to do and when. I also think that this article is very similar to the ones about college and high school students and it doesn’t say anything else that it very eye catching of a parent.

https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/learning-at-home/homework-study-skills/how-to-help-your-teen-develop-good-study-habits

Personality

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

For this week’s first impression post, we were supposed to take the four different personality test to find out our personality type. Personality is a set of habitual behaviors, cognitions and emotional patterns that evolve from biological and environmental factors. The first two personality tests that I took said that my personality type was ESFJ. This means that I am an extravert rather than an introvert, I prefer sensing, I would rather trust feelings rather than thinking, and that I am more judging. ESFJ’s are the “popular” ones. We are very good role models, we take care of what we have the power to take care of and we enjoy being appreciated. ESFJs have strong practical skills, a strong sense of duty, are very loyal, are sensitive and warm, and we are good at connecting with others. We are social creatures, and thrive to stay up to date with what their friends are doing. They also are more concerned with fashion and their appearance, their social status, and the standings of other people. ESFJs are altruists, and they take seriously their responsibility to help and to do the right thing. ESFJs also love to be of service, enjoying any role that allows them to participate in a meaningful way, so long as they know that they are valued and appreciated. ESFJs are also supportive and outgoing, they find time to laugh and chat with everyone. We truly enjoy hearing about their friends’ relationships and activities, remembering little details and always standing ready to talk things out with warmth and sensitivity. If things aren’t going right, ESFJs try to fix it and make everything okay again. All of these personality traits happened but there are also some weaknesses with being an ESFJs. Our feelings can be hurt if our ideas are rejected or not interested. We are weak with being too needy, too selfless, vulnerable to criticism and reluctant to improvise. I would say that these tests were the most credible compared to the other two. I got the same results for those two personality tests as well as I also deal with these traits for the most part and I think they are very accurate.

For the last two personality tests, I didn’t think it was credible. The scoring for the Big Five Factor Marker test was confusing and it didn’t really explain the Myers-Briggs way of giving you a 4 letter result. Also, I think it was just for colors and it didn’t ask about anything having to do with personality. Then again what will a 60 question survey tell you. Was it just a coincidence that I got the same results or is that really my personality? Also for the tests, I realized there was ways an uncertain or neutral button but some things I do both. My answers ended up being the middle because sometimes I’m feeling this way and sometimes I feel the other way. It wasn’t super clear and I feel like to be clear, there should be the uncertain button PLUS a “both” button. It could people be able to do it truthfully because then they could have an option rather than just hitting neutral answers. ESFJs, according to the Myers-Briggs chart, are friendly, outgoing, reliable, conscientious, organized and practical. They also seek to be helpful and please others and enjoy being active and productive.

Intelligence

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. I think that not only does this apply to where we get our intelligence from but who we learn it from. In a school setting, the teacher is above all in the classroom and typically is the one that the kids look up to for guidance, help, questions on the material, etc. Throughout my school career, I definitely have had some troubles with teachers but I’ve also had some really good things happen with teachers. I think personally, what makes a good teacher is the bond and connection they show with each of their students. Can they help in every way possible so that the student gets the best teaching? Do they show a good, positive attitude that makes the students want to come back for another day of school? This alone makes or breaks a classroom setting and even a school itself. I mean admit it, we all have schools that we “know” not to send our child there because they are rated low or you know the story behind the school. Not only does this effect one kid, but if you have multiple kids it could be even worse.

I’ve dealt with this a lot throughout school, even in elementary school. Middle school was okay, but I still had issues with a few teachers. A few teachers in particular were my homeroom teachers for 7th and 8th grade. I had homeroom teachers and then I would have them for class and in middle school, they made it a huge deal to NOT go to your lockers in-between classes and so you’d have to ask the teacher or do it when they weren’t looking. I remember a time where that happened and my homeroom teacher literally threw me away from my locker and said go to class. We also had a folder for reading, which is what my homeroom teacher taught, and god forbid if we didn’t take this folder to class, she would have a conniption fight. This folder had all our resources in it and she would have pop quizzes and it was worth like 15 points. Not every experience was good but the sooner I could leave 7th grade, I turned around and had the same issue in 8th grade, where my homeroom teacher was just so strict. I think not being around those teachers all the time helped. Then in high school, I really took over my education. I was the one that made decisions on what would happen and how I was going to make it through the 4 years. I specifically remember the science teachers being really bad, especially my physics and chemistry teachers. My physics teacher was not the most helpful teacher. He would constantly say “look back in your notes.” Well honestly, what if I can’t find it? He never really helped. Then my chemistry teacher was so bad to the point that I literally had to go to the principal’s office and talk to him about him not helping me. I would request to go to him for help and it was a whole bunch of things. I got my phone taken away in his class because I was texting my mother about how bad of a teacher he was. I also took it upon myself to leave class to “go to the bathroom” but instead I would go another teachers room and he would show me how to actually do the work.

Moral of the story is that just being an interactive teacher and really engaging in your students lives (not too much but just enough like just asking them how they are and what’s going down) is key to a good relationship in the classroom. I’ve had plenty of teachers who I absolutely love having classes with. It was to the point that I loved learning from them, that I would change my schedule around to actually be in their classes that I knew they were teaching. In high school, I love my math teacher, my history teacher, and my English teacher (academically) and then I loved my band teacher and my chorus teacher, for the most part (she got bad towards the end of the year). My academic teachers were phenomenal. I loved taking classes from them all the time. I even switched in the middle of a year and had to get caught up on a book for English. They were so excellent at teaching, I would make sure that I could see them the next year in a class or around school. It’s just their personality that also helped make school so nice. Good attitudes lead to good relationships in the classroom which lead to good experiences with learning. It motivates students to want to learn and that’s what makes for a good school system.

To improve students’ performance in the classroom, I think that school systems should have a school wide break, where like for example, some kids could go outside, some could just mingle, others could do crafts etc. I think that having a break throughout the school day would be beneficial so that we as students can have a break and still be able to make it through our days. It’s the same reason that pre-schoolers and kindergarteners get a nap time. It’s a mental break for them to relax and then go back into working again. I also think that schools should include more stress relieving things, mostly stress balls or little things that the students can hold in their hands to fidget with, without distracting someone else. I also have thought about teachers being evaluated on a weekly basis. Yes, I realize that principals and admin walk through the school walking into classrooms to check behavior and such from the kids and every once in a while checking the teachers aspects would be beneficial as well.

Stress

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

I would say that I normally am okay with dealing with stress but I am a very stressed person with this class, and my anxiety doesn’t exactly help. I like to have things planned, make lists, and in order. I do many things to attempt to reduce my stress levels. I like to exercise by doing yoga and taking walks, sleep, drink tea, color with the anti-stress books, spend time with my puppies, laugh and make jokes, cuddle, and listening to classical music and practicing my instruments. I also have a stress ball of some sort because I like to hold something in my hand when I’m taking notes just to hold or squeeze, not necessarily to use as a thing to reduce anger. I do a lot of these when I have a lot of things to do and I need a break in between everything. My current strategies are pretty okay. I would say that not all the time do I do something to relieve stress. Sometimes I just let it build up and then I end up crying it all out and having anxiety attacks or I go home. There were many times throughout the semester where all I wanted to do was go home. School really makes me stressed and sometimes makes it so bad, that I do leave and go somewhere to get off campus. I would say that my stress management strategies work when I use them. Like I said sometimes I just let it build up or I take it out on someone. One thing that I am doing this semester is I’m bringing my puppy back with me, Murphy. He’s my baby, my mini goldendoodle. I think that another stress management activity that I can do is taking care of Murphy. I have to find time in my day to go let Murphy out, play with him, feed him, etc. Having “a part of home” will definitely help especially since all I wanted to do when I was stressed was leave and go home. Hopefully Murphy helps!!

Emotion

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

For the first impression post for chapter 10, I chose to do prompt #2 which discussed people’s emotions. In the prompt, those who decided to do this had to complete an Emotion Intelligence Test, where the test showed 20 pictures of different people displaying different emotions. The test gave four choices to choose which emotion we thought it could be. After going through the test, I got 16/20 correct, which according to the test was a score that was above average. It also said that I was naturally well-attuned to others’ emotions–a vital skill for forming compassionate connections. I think my scores were good for what I thought I would do. I think that in general I can read people pretty easily, so I wasn’t surprised that I did above average.

I give myself a lot of credit being able to read other people’s emotions and being able to know how people are feeling based on their emotions and body language. When reading people’s emotions, I look for the small things and their body language; how they are standing, if their head is tilted, where are their hands. I think all of those combined can make it pretty easy to distinguish how someone is feeling. I observe people all the time with my job, my clientele at school, and my family. Most importantly my brother. I’ve mentioned this in a few other posts, but my brother has Autism. People with Autism, most of the time, had trouble reading facial expressions. When recognizing an emotion in a face, we depend on the eyes and the mouth. People with Autism often avoid looking into other people’s eyes, which can make it more difficult for them to detect emotions. After taking this test, I had my brother take it. I received a 16/20 and my brother received a 12/20. Now over the years his emotion reading has improved tremendously, but I thought that it would be interesting.

While I did complete the test and did pretty well, I don’t think it’s as credible as it seems. The pictures that it shows have answers that someone could read in another way and therefore, get the answer wrong. Everyone reads emotions differently and this test wouldn’t be an acceptable way to decide if someone can read emotions properly. I also think that the emotions in the pictures were based on what that specific person thought and how they thought it should’ve been portrayed. Rather than the actual emotion they feel, when experiencing that actual emotion. Lastly, as I was going through, I felt like some of the answers were the same and it was very hard to distinguish what the answer was.

Although I got only a few wrong, I did think the test was harder than it should’ve been and that I thought it would’ve been. The basic emotions like happy, sad, and angry were easy to chose. The more specific ones like love, politeness, contempt, and pain were a lot more difficult. I think some of the more difficult ones were also easier to tell apart because some had other things than just their eyes, eyebrows, and lips to base the emotion off of; some added a finger or sticking out a tongue.

Some ways that I could use this information is my daily life would be that each time I got an answer correct or incorrect, the picture then showed what to look for cue wise, when reading someone’s expressions. For example, muscle contacts to pull eyebrow up and in, lower eyelid contracts and upper eyelids raise slightly, lip corners pulled sideways, tightening and elongating the mouth, tighten and press together, etc. The cue that are used will definitely be helpful to look for when reading someone’s emotions and expressions in order to know more about how they are feeling.