--Original published at Site Title

It is important to gain a solid understanding of what Autism is and how it effects someone later in life. It is a developmental disorder that alters mainly behaviors as a child grows older. For high risk infants, MRI’s are done in order to see how efficient the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes are performing to give a proper diagnosis. But these tests are not always done in a timely fashion, so the diagnosis is prolonged and ultimately too late for some with severe symptoms at a young age.

But how early can Autism in children be detected? In a recent study at McGill University, 260 infants ranging in ages 6-12 months had MRI’s to test how efficient their brain regions were operating. This was tested in order to have an estimate of their overall network efficiency, or risk of Autism. The infants were a mix of high and low risk for developing Autism, even though it has not yet been proven that it is a completely inherited disorder. This supports the reasoning as to why studying the brain at a young age is necessary; to observe if Autism is inherited, or the environment plays into the development of Autism. In a previous study, children at two years old with Autism had a poor network efficiency, leading us to wonder how early these deficiencies can be detected.

The fact that the inefficiency in the brain gave us a better insight on the severity of the disorder makes it even more crucial to diagnose at an early age. Giving families a heads up on how the disorder may affect their future depending on the severity of it is positive information to have. It gives families more time to prepare and be proactive in raising a child with a disorder. The early diagnosis can further our knowledge into how infants are born with Autism, as well as what genetic and environmental factors play a role in this abnormality. The research that was done at McGill University holds up to the age at which Autism can be detected through how efficient the regions of the brain are connecting at six months.

Reflection:

I chose to leave out super scientific terms that were hard for me to understand while reading the article initially, this way my summary can be as concise as possible. It was also important that I left out information that was not relevant to the study, such as the lengths and strengths of the network connections in the brain and how these pathways work. This information was very anatomy based, and not necessary to know in order to grasp the goal of the study. My summary is different in the way I explain how the regions of the brain perform together as a unit in order to have levels of network efficiency. I break down how this network efficiency is a main deciding factor in how severe the Autism might be. It also clues scientists into how the disorder may progress over time, even from six months old. Overall, writing this summary held some challenges from the beginning, as I had to re-reads my sources in order to get a grip on the experiment again before writing. I also had a hard time making the summary condensed enough; I truly felt that every detail was important for the reader to know, even though this was not allowed in an abbreviated version of the article. It is hard to write about Psychology due to how one must use logical terms, but also scientific terms in order to successfully explain an experiment. This was another obstacle that I had to conquer while summarizing this article, but was something that the article critiques in the past have helped master. Writing about an experiment in Psychology is much harder than I originally thought, but has made me gain a greater appreciation for articles like this one.

--Original published at Ashley's Psyche

The use of emojis as a form of communicating emotions over text and social media is a growing trend among people of today’s society. As this trend grows, so does the number of new emojis describing “different” feelings, such as the recent additions of the “pondering face” or the “brain explosion” that have become so popular with today’s youth. But are all these additions really necessary? Do the basics of sad, happy, and angry no longer suffice? An experimental study from the University of California on emotions suggests that now, humans can experience a range of about 27 different emotional categories.

Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner, researchers in Berkley, California, set out to study and define the creation and organization of emotions in psychology. Before Cowen and Keltner did their experiment, there were many different viewpoints on emotion. One of the most commonly held viewpoints was that the brain activates six basic emotions during an emotional experience, and focuses on valence and arousal. In this viewpoint, the six basic emotions are considered to be anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise that are described through disconnected feelings and are organized in a limited number of clusters in the semantic space (Cowen).

In the study done by Cowen and Keltner, they came to the conclusion that emotions are subjective experiences linked to an interconnected array of points in the semantic space of the brain, in which there are both “discrete clusters” and “continuous gradients.” Cowen and Keltner came to this conclusion by performing an experiment on 853 English-speaking participants, 403 which were female and 450 of which were male. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three different groups based on the self-reporting style they would be using to respond to the videos (Cowen).

Out of the 2,185 five second video clips chosen for the study, the first self-reporting group was to create a free response to 30 different videos they were given, based off their interpretation of their emotional response to each video. The second group of self-reporting people also watched 30 video clips each, but was instead given a set of 34 emotions that they used to rate each video. Lastly, the third group only watched 12 videos, but placed each of the 12 videos along 14 scales of affective dimensions (Cowen).

In order to make sure the videos did not contain a bias towards any type of emotion, but did contain a broad range of emotional experiences, the 2,185 videos were chosen by searching 34 prominent emotional categories into different and random search engines and websites. This produced many different types of videos ranging from births and babies to explosions and modern warfare (Cowen).

After analyzing the self-reports of each of the three groups, Cowen and Keltner found that “75% of the videos elicited significant concordance for at least one category of emotion,” supporting the idea that the responses recorded to the videos were not purely due to chance, making the information reliable (Cowen 3). As well, by using a system called split-half canonical correlations analysis that Cowen and Keltner created, they determined that “between 24 and 26 statistically significant semantic dimensions of reported emotional experience” were found, leading them to discover the 27 different emotional patterns that are linearly connected (Cowen 3).

So, what does this mean for all you emoji-fanatics out there? Well, if the emoji you use gets across the message of admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathetic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, or surprise to the person you are sending it to, then it is clearly doing its job.

References:

Cowen, Alan S., and Dacher Keltner. “Self-Report Captures 27 Distinct Categories of Emotion Bridged by Continuous Gradients.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Edited by Joseph E. LeDoux, vol. 114, no. 38, 5 Sept. 2017, doi:10.1073/pnas.1702247114.

Original News Article

Scholarly Research Article

Reflection:

Overall, I did not find it very difficult to summarize the whole research article. The organization of how the research article was written made it easy to track the most important steps of the research study, the conclusion, and any mishaps that may have happened. What made it even easier to write the news article was that for the second part of the media project, we had to analyze and summarize what the research article was about; therefore I already had all of the pertinent information about the research study identified. As well, we assessed how many of the five critical questions for reading research were answered by the research article during the second set of the project, so I also had that to use as a reference. I did not really need to reference the pop culture news article at all.

However, there were certain aspects of the research article that I could not include in my news article, just like the pop culture article. Most of the information that I was forced to omit involved the mathematical processes behind the results and some of the details about the videos. I chose to leave these pieces of information out as I believe that going into detail about them would not only confuse the reader, but would take away from the overall focus of the article. This process helped me to relate to journalists on a certain level, as you have to not only keep the scientific integrity of the study in mind while writing an article, but you have to keep your audience and their extent of knowledge in mind as well. After this process, I can better understand why so many journalists tend to falsely advertise scientific studies to the public.

--Original published at Site Title

Mid-life crisis is a common term which is often used generically.  This expression is not as misused as it may seem. Studies show that lowered emotional states occur in most adults during middle age. Despite the existence of multiple factors, such as economic status and education, mid-life crisis effects nearly everyone. Regardless of ethnicity and location, middle age leads to spikes in stressors. Multiple data sets have confirmed a U-shaped pattern in emotional well-being. The dip in the pattern is caused by lowered emotional well-being during mid-life. Other patterns have been disproved over time. The correlation between emotional lows and age has been tested in various conditions.

Tests which involved age and emotional patterns were conducted in over fifty countries across the globe.  The results, though somewhat mixed, point to a drop in happiness once adulthood is reached. Emotional well-being decreases from approximately age 20 to age 50. A significant dip in happiness occurs at approximately age 30. Emotional states are high during childhood and rise again during old age. These patterns are the cause of the U-shape which describes happiness throughout life. Mid-life is the stereotyped period of crisis in human life. Increased stressors, such as unmet adolescent expectations and financial status, occur during this stage of life. Increased stress and worry cause large decreases in emotional well-being. The U-shape of happiness seems to label mid-life crisis as factual.

Mid-life crisis seems to affect adults worldwide. The inevitability of lowered emotional states during middle age may be the cause of a rational fear among adolescents. The resurrection of  happiness in elderly adults is little compensation for increased stress and decreased enjoyment of life. Middle age can truly be considered a time of crisis.

Blanchflower, David G. Andrew J. Oswald. “Do Humans Suffer a Psychological Low in Midlife? Two Approaches (With and Without Controls) in Seven Data Sets.” University of Warwick. Web. Accessed 23 Oct. 2017.

file:///C:/Users/sabpi/Downloads/For%20Steph.pdf

Soergel, Andrew. “Study: Happiness is a U and Middle Age is Depressing.” U.S. News & World Report. Web. Accessed 9 Sept. 2017.

https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2017-08-22/study-happiness-is-a-u-and-middle-age-is-depressing

Reflection

I omitted many small details found in the original article. I also simplified the information about the data sets. The original article is convoluted and difficult to understand. The language is extremely verbose. The critical research questions are not answered in a comprehensible manner in the original article. There is an excessive amount of detail in this article. The news article does not contain enough information about the mid-life tests which were conducted. This article omits much specific data. My summary combines the information found in both articles while remaining concise.

I am considering journalism as a full-time career. This project did not affect my views of journalists. I believe journalism is an outlet of self-expression and an excellent writing career. Journalists have the freedom to insert opinions into their writing while discussing specific real-world topics. Journalism is an optimal career choice for me.

--Original published at Site Title

For over a century, neuroscience has believed that memories are stored in the synapse of neurons. This thinking has driven efforts to treat mental illnesses like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Alzheimer’s. Findings from a recent study could potentially shake up all of this. Scientists at UCLA have found evidence suggesting that memories are not actually stored in the synapse and could possibly be located in the nucleus of the neuron.

The study, led by David Glanzman, focused on neural activity in a mollusk called Aplysia after it was given pulses in its tail. The Aplysia were put into groups and given the pulses. Then, after 24 hours, they were either given more pulses, nothing at all, or a blockade that should prevent the memory from coming back. In order to find out whether the Aplysia still had the memories of the pulses and how strong they were, the scientists looked at the varicosities in the neuron’s synapse. Varicosities are areas that react to the pulses. Glanzman’s team then ran two more experiments; one with another blockade and one with a blockade and more shocks to see if a memory could be “brought back”. The expectation was that the amount of varicosities would go up with the amount of pulses and that the varicosities that were made by the pulses would stay there.

Surprisingly, not all of the scientists’ expectations were met. The Aplysia that received two rounds of shocks had more varicosities. Ones that received either the blockade or nothing kept the same amount. This was expected but what the scientists did not see coming was the varicosities not staying in the same place. Some new ones formed and ones that were there for the first measurement disappeared. The second experiment followed the same pattern and the third experiment gave Glanzman’s team another perplexing result. Even when the Aplysia were given the blockade, memories of the previous pulses could be triggered by more pulses. None of these findings were consistent with the accepted theory that memories were stored in the synapse. This led the scientists to believe that 100 plus years of thinking could possibly be wrong. Memories may not be stored in the synapse.

Now while these findings could mean big changes in neuroscience, the experiment does not allow for causal claims. Before anything can be set in stone, more testing must be done and testing must be done on the human brain. To the scientists’ credit, this was acknowledged and they said there would be more experimentation to come.

There is a long way to go before it can be proven that memories are not in the synapse but imagine the implications if it is. Treatment for PTSD and Alzheimer’s is based off of the thinking that memories are stored in the synapse. This could change everything about how these illnesses are handled. New, more effective treatments will come out for those suffering. People will get their lives back, families will get their loved ones back. And on the negative side, people will have thrown away loads of money based off of false thinking. If Glanzman and his team are correct, their findings have the power to change science.

Reflection:

This project gave me a lot of insight into what being a journalist really is. There is so much more that goes into writing an article that I previously thought. Along with just summarizing something, there are deadlines and restrictions. All of that just adds stress. For me, the words restriction was the hardest to overcome. The article I found was a little over 550 words and it seemed like there would not be a problem at all. Then I started typing and came up on my restriction pretty quickly. I had to go back and really make my word use more efficient and that was really hard. In the end, I was able to get all of the information I wanted in but there were some details left out in the process. Most of the information that was left out had to do with the procedure of the experiment. There were a lot of steps taken in each procedure. I felt like I could leave them out because they were not very controversial steps and I thought I was able to give the reader a good understanding of what was happening even without those steps. What the findings of the experiment meant were the most important to me and leaving out the steps in the procedure gave me the space I wanted to talk about the findings. This project has not really changed how I see journalism but it does give me a new respect for it. The writing itself is not that difficult but what did it for me was the decision making. You need to think long and hard about what you need the reader to see and how you can do that given your restrictions. I can honestly say I was not prepared for that aspect but working through it was pretty eye-opening.

Links:

Original Article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/memories-may-not-live-in-neurons-synapses/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Scholarly Journal:

https://etown.instructure.com/courses/5871/files/996724?module_item_id=212156

--Original published at Site Title

New Study Shows Your Memory is Far from Foolproof

by Scott Kennedy

Memory is becoming a much less concrete concept with new discoveries in manipulating it. In a study led by Julia Shaw—a renowned psychologist who has studied memory in great detail—various mental exercises and carefully scripted interviews were used to convince college students they had committed a crime that never actually occurred.

While it may seem possible to remember specific details of an untrue event, we now know that the human mind can be tricked into doing so. In a recent study, Shaw’s team of researchers managed to effectively synthesize a false memory for nearly three-fourths of the participants. It is important to note that the study does not explore a natural phenomenon in human memory, but rather attempts to test if it will treat an invalid memory the same as one that is true. The experiment followed a similar outline to past studies on false memory, in which researchers managed to get participants to recall meeting celebrities and even vicious animal attacks that never actually happened.

When the participants of Shaw’s study were selected, their caregivers were asked to give information to the researchers about a deeply emotional event in the student’s life, specifically between ages 11-14. The students were then interviewed three times by Shaw’s team, who began by recounting the details of the emotional event, then asking about the false memory, the crime that they never committed. Beginning this way showed each participant that the information must be valid, as their own caregivers had reported it. When none of the participants recalled the false criminal event during the first interview, they were each asked to practice visualizing the event’s details every night. This mental exercise would help prime the memory retrieval process, ultimately starting formation of the memory by asking the student to repeatedly imagine it.

During the second and third interviews, the researchers gave several cues and details to the participants, all made to seem like they came from their file of actual life events. By the third interview, 70% of the students recalled committing the crime they were led to believe in. In a second group of students, 77% of students were able to remember a highly emotional event—instead of a crime—which also never happened.

Shaw’s study certainly raises the question that if a false memory can be formed in a three week study, could it happen over time in everyday life? We now know that memory is malleable, and it may be possible that some of our memories are false. While it’s unlikely that your friends will use the same communication tactics and mental exercises to get you to remember an event the same way they do, it’s still possible that with enough repetition, a memory can altered falsely or newly formed altogether.
Original news article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201605/three-reasons-not-trust-your-memory

Scholarly news article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IScvrTbyeUMhpjpOPt5bzE2bY5J_NTzr2K8hsm1n2f8/edit

Reflection

Successfully encapsulating the significance of a great study into a simple news article is most certainly a challenging task for any writer. In all of the three assignments, I began to see several strengths and weaknesses in the original news article and even the study it was based on. Though Shaw’s work was inspiring, thorough, and revolutionary, there were several questions I still had about the variables in the experiment. While completing the scholarly article critique, I found it difficult to only address the clearer points in the study that could be improved. Reading research provokes many different questions from the reader, and when your job is the regurgitate a highly detailed study and discuss those details, you have to careful and deliberate in which questions you include into consideration.

While completing the media production project, it was an even bigger challenge, as the time I spent critiquing the original news article also seemed necessary for my own work. I chose to completely avoid the main idea of the news article, which felt like a bold move, though necessary. The original new article based its overall message on the journalist’s interpretation, misrepresenting the findings of the actual study. In my own article, I chose to simply summarize the study in a concise way–not as concisely as the original article did, however–and discuss the significance of the findings. Rather than twisting the information into unlikely everyday-life applications, I made sure to emphasize that Shaw’s study does not give a reason to stop trusting your memory, but does show an interesting vulnerability in memory.

--Original published at Site Title

In this day and age where stress affects everyone, it is important that more research is done about stress biomarkers. Constant exposure to chronic stress can lead to serious mental illness such as anxiety and depression. Stress can affect individuals differently depending on their biological makeup. Some individuals might respond negatively to stress while other might respond positively and form resilience. According to Thomas Larrieu’s research, stress plays a significant role in a range of mental illnesses. Yet, stress does not disturb everyone equally; while some individuals become depressed when dealing with continual hardships, others acclimate and endure. Larrieu and his team set out to show the risk influencers and biomarkers for susceptibility to social status depression.

The findings from an experiment lead by Thomas Larrieu helps us understand why individuals have different responses to stress. The experiment primarily tested if social status effects susceptibility to stress in adolescent mice. In particular, the researchers exposed mice to chronic social defeat stress (CSDS). Before finding out the effects of social status on stress, the researchers had to distinguish the subordinate mice from the dominant mice. Within the mice population, to initiate social status, the young mice were placed into cages of four for seven weeks before exposure to any stress. After seven weeks they measured social ranking by performing several tests on the mice. One test, categorized as a social confrontation tube test; consisted of putting two mice from the same social environment in the middle of a tube. The mice were previously trained to get out of the tube by walking forward. For the test, the mouse that walked forward and essentially made the other mouse back out of the tube was considered the dominant mouse, the mouse that was forced to walk backward was the subordinate mouse. With this social test and several others, the researchers were able to determine the social ranking of the mice. They ranked the mice from 1 to 4, 1 and 2 being dominant and 3 and 4 being subordinate.

After the researchers established the social hierarchy of the mice, they started to expose the subjects to different scenarios that would induce stress. When dominant and subordinate mice were exposed to a very aggressive mouse from another species for ten days, the dominant mice showed social avoidance whereas subordinate mice were not significantly affected. Researchers then analyzed the effects on the brain when mice felt defeated and showed signs of depression. The researchers measured the concentration of metabolites in nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumben plays a role in motivation and reward that would affect whether an individual is resilient or not (Schlaepfer et al.). The more activity there is in the nucleus accumbens, the less likely the individual is susceptible to depression. The experiment showed that subordinate mice have more activity in their nucleus accumbens when exposed to stress than dominate mice do. From their findings, the researchers discovered the biomarkers for resilience to stress in mice. The resilience to stressful situations comes from the amount of activity in a nucleus accumbens.

After discovering the correlation between social status and susceptibility to stress, the researchers did recognize the fact that some mice could have been more susceptible to stress just from having trait anxiety, which could have affected the results. Nevertheless, they hope that their findings can help with the progress of researching vulnerability to stress. Now that stress biomarkers have been detected in mice, there is a greater possibility that scientists will find ways for humans to become more resilient to stressful situations.

I did not find it hard to summarize the research article. I found it harder to summarize the pop culture article. I thought the research article made more sense to me, so I was able to summarize it with no problems. The research article went into to detail about how the researchers came to their conclusions, whereas I was a little skeptical about the pop culture article because I don’t think there was enough information. I had to leave out other tests the researchers conducted to determine their social ranking. I also left out other procedures they did to induce stress on the mice. I left those components of the research out because I did not feel that was the crucial points that needed to go into the summary. I wanted the reader to have one example of how the researchers assigned social status and how they exposed the mice to chronic social defeat stress. While reading the pop culture article, I questioned what procedures the scientists conducted to figure out the mice social hierarchy. I also wondered how they were exposing the subjects to stress. It was important that I elaborated on some of the researcher’s procedures that lead them to their conclusions to reduce skepticism from the reader.

I did not think much about journalism before this assignment. I am more skeptical about reading pop culture articles. But now, if the author does leave out some vital information I will be a little sympathetic, knowing that they have a word count and not all the information can go into the article.

--Original published at Lynsey Wissler's Blog

When the idea of how we treat and handle pain is discussed we often do not think it can be related to how we contribute emotions to photographs. We also do not expect that a fake treatment would make us feel better when we are exposed to the pain. In a recent study, The University of Luxembourg has conducted a study regarding the placebo effects and the role of cognitive reappraisal which is how well they can interpret negative emotions. The concept of how emotions can be tracked through fMRI scanning was also analyzed. Particularly, this was done to show that a person’s ability to reinterpret negative events and to control feelings influences how strongly a placebo will work to reduce pain. Dr. Marian van der Meulen has discovered that when looking at a person’s brain, specific spots of the brain which interprets pain are less active when the placebo is in place.
To begin, the participants were selected through an advertisement, 13 males and 17 females participated. From there, the experimental procedure took place where these participants had two sessions, one of which was in a lab and the other was a questionnaire on emotional regulation. For the lab testing, the volunteers were asked to look at photographs and their emotions were tracked. The second part of the procedure was the PA section. In this portion of the examination, a pain stimulus was added to the lower forearm of the patient and the “unpleasantness” which they felt was recorded. After the pain stimulus, the patients received a cream which they were informed would relieve pain. This is where the placebo comes into the picture; the cream which they were told relieved pain was actually just a simple moisturizer. The fMRI was used to track the brain activity throughout the experiments and different tests.
After the cream was given, every participant reported less pain on their arm. This meant to the researchers that the placebo effect worked on the study. There also was a correlation which was discovered, when comparing the two tests. The participants who could control their negative feelings when looking at the photographs had the highest reaction to the cream in the brain when looking at the fMRI. Meaning, that your emotional regulation affects how placebos will impact you. Overall it was discovered that the placebo can, in fact, reduce pain and play a role in our brains.

Reflection

When doing this project, deciding the information to include in my news article was very challenging for me. I had trouble deciding what information was important for the reader to know in order to understand the study to the full extent. I also felt as though I needed to say everything which was in the study but I could not do that because of length limitations. I decided not to include numbers specifically, but to actually describe the results. I also thought that it was important to have the participation selection included which the original article did not have.  I think that the participants pay an important role when determining if the study is reliable and is necessary for the reader to know.  Overall, my perspective of journalism has changed over the course of the semester in several ways. First, I did not realize that every journal has an in-depth case study behind it. I found this interesting because I always just assumed that it was the original journal and that was it, not that there were several pages behind it. I also did not realize just how challenging it was for a journalist to select what is important for the readers understanding. This can be so tricky and this really put it into perspective for hard it can be to decide. In the beginning of the semester I did not have as much of an appreciation for this field and now I definitely do. Overall this set of projects helped me to understand and have more of an appreciation for journalism and how it is when working with scientific articles.

University of Luxembourg. “Pain, emotions and the placebo effect.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170829131224.htm.

--Original published at Site Title

Researchers studied a very controversial question: Can money buy happiness? It was hypothesized that money can be used to provide a buffer against the time famine and make individuals happier. Buying time-saving services was claimed to provide protection for people from the negative effects of time stress on life satisfaction. Researchers Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers, and Michael Norton put their claimed beliefs to the test conducting 9 studies on this topic.

            The first six studies of the experiment were correlation studies of an individual’s view of satisfaction with life in comparison to spending money on time saving services. Scientists operationalize their definition of time saving services to “encompass any way in which respondents could spend money to provide more time”. The definition of happiness or life satisfaction however was not defined in their study but left up to be determined by the participants. They used a broad large and diverse sample for their experiments.  Of the participants in the first six studies 366 were recruited Mechanical Turks from the United States, 1,260 U.S. were Americans found through the GfK Knowledge Networks Panel, 467 were adults from Denmark, and 326 were working adults from Vancouver, Canada that were discovered in public settings. The Dutch millionaire population was studied in the fifth and six studies found from an Elite Research database on public records. These first studies gave all participants a survey of the same questions that included answering basic question about their background information along with how much money they spent each month on time saving services and rating life satisfaction.  

Study 7 used Qualtrics a professional survey company to recruit 1,802 Americans over the age of 19.  The method of study was a survey as well asking similar questions to before along with questions on how much money spent on groceries, money spent on material purchase, experiences, and time saving purchases. Study 8 used 60 adults from Vancouver, Canada and looked at how the buying of time casually promoted happiness. Giving participants $40 on back to back weekends. One weekend was designated to spend money on time saving services, while the other was designated to buying a material item. The participants then reported back their feelings all at the same time the night of their purchase.  The final study conducted included giving 98 Canadian working adults a hypothetical $40 to spend on anything they wished. Participants were then asked what the money would be spent on and who it would go to.

The results across these diverse groups of all the studies showed that 28.2% used money to save them time resulting in a mean amount of $147.95 US dollars each month. A significant amount of people viewed spending money on time saving services as beneficial and increasing their life satisfaction. Studies also were shown not to be bias on income and that individuals from varying financial backgrounds showed similar results. Improvement on daily moods were reported higher in individuals who spent less money on material items and more on time saving purchases.  Surprisingly however when giving money to spent on whatever you would want more people choose material items then purchases that could save them time.

Reflection:

Throughout the process of writing the summary of the research article I tried to keep in mind the 5 critical questions we were taught in class to ask ourselves when reading research. Putting yourself in a journalist’s shoes can be very difficult often research papers are very long and its not so easy making a whole study fit into a page limit of an article.  Trying to pick out and touch on the most important pieces was hard for me to do because I wanted to include every aspect of the research.  I think the most important thing to remember and think about when writing it is if it was generalized back to the right population.  I wanted to make sure that my readers could understand the research and viewed it as accurate with no misleading details. I didn’t necessarily include all the p values of the experiment or quantitative results only because I believed it wasn’t essential for understanding the results. There were some variables I couldn’t include in my summary because it would have made my report too long like the percentages of each study. 

We previously critiqued journalists very harshly on their ability to incorporate materials we believed essentially but having to do it myself I can see how they left some pieces out.  Journalists also seem to make their articles more interesting and attention grabbing and add details that aren’t needed for the understanding of the article, but are needed to make an individual continue to read the article. Hearing “all people” versus the accurate depiction of the people studied makes a huge difference when interpreting research, however more individuals will probably be likely to read a paper that is directed to all people not just a certain group.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/28/545839192/need-a-happiness-boost-spend-your-money-to-buy-time-not-more-stuff

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/For%20Kaley.pdf

--Original published at Casey's Blog Site

Is the best way to learn really to make mistakes and move on? Investigators at Ohio State tested this and found that this really isn’t all that true. After several experiments they found that to really learn from your mistakes you must really have the feeling of failure.

Rather then just looking at what went wrong, for example let’s use a test, they [Ohio State investigators] suggest that for the next test you won’t try any harder if you didn’t feel the pain of failure. This is because when a person feels any negative emotion their brain will make a tag to remember this. The more failure a person feels the more memorable the tag will be. So when a person sets the same goal for a similar situation then they will have a better chance of remember the negative feelings of past experiences and since no one enjoys feeling like a failure, the person would try harder.

For people the norm  when faced with failure is usually to protect themselves and make excuses as to why they may have gotten the test question wrong or made some other mistake. Which is exactly what researchers found. In their first study they had volunteers from their campus search for a blender online with specific specifications with a lower price than what the researchers had found. Although the researchers had rigged the computer to make sure the price the volunteers used wasn’t correct to make sure they would feel the sense of failure. Half of the participants were asked to focus on their feelings after being told they failed while the other half was told to focus on their thoughts.

Then they were asked to complete a similar task, looking for a gift for a friend that best suited them or find a book that best fit their college budget. Researchers predicted that those who focused more on their thoughts would put in more effort in trying to find a book best suited for their budget while those who focused on their thoughts would put the same amount of effort.

Results showed that their predictions were correct. By looking at the amount of time a participant took to complete the task it showed that those that spent more time completing the task were those that focused on their emotions while those who focused on their thoughts spent about the same time as the task before.

As stated before when a person is faced with failure usually, not always, a person makes an excuse for making the mistake and they try to protect their self-esteem. This does nothing when it comes to trying to prevent later mistakes.

So when a person tries to think and focus more on the actual feeling of failure they later on will have the same displeasure and try harder to put more effort into future situations that are similar to the original task.

So next time you don’t get the grade you want on a test or make some form of mistake try to think more about how you actually feel rather than the mistake itself and you can better prepare yourself for next time.

Reflection:

Summarizing from the original study was difficult, mainly from trying to explain what the study was about and the significance of it. To me reading the study top to bottom it makes sense to me. But trying to reword it all and have it make sense is a different story. As for being a journalist I believe I wouldn’t have the job, I feel as though I am too wordy to be a journalist. When comparing to the article I have actual paragraphs while the author for the article has quite less than paragraphs. He gets the point across clearly with less for sure. Also while I was typing the article I tried to keep in mind the potential audience that may read it, meaning any teens on up to those with PhD’s. Keeping this is mind I know that teens may not have as long of an attention span to read as much as those higher in the field, so I tried to keep the article somewhat short while also explaining one of the several experiments and its results. Also I feared if adding the other experiments and their variables as well as the researcher’s explanations to why they done this or that would have made it incredibly wordy and I wouldn’t get the right points across, or repeat the same information. Overall journalism to me is still a difficult task, I still have no desire to come close to being a journalist but I respect those who are since there are more restrictions that they have to work with than many may realize.

Link to original article:  https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/09/14/owning-your-mistake-can-enhance-chances-of-future-success/125994.html

--Original published at Site Title

Summary:

Scientists at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have made a major breakthrough in understanding the specifics and biology of schizophrenia. Their breakthrough, which was published in the journal Nature, has pioneered a new age of understanding and research about this disease. The principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Geschwind, and his team used a brand new type of technology commonly referred to as chromosome conformation capture to further investigate their questions and claims.

Some background knowledge on this disease needs to be known ahead of time in order to understand the extent of their fabulous work. Prior to the team’s findings, not much was known about schizophrenia from a biological perspective and its origins. What was most well known by most was that this disease is highly genetic and until 2014, no one knew why. 2014 being the first major breakthrough with this kind of work. Scientists found a link between 100 different DNA variations located on several distinct locations on the human genome and schizophrenia. The details between exactly how they were link being a bit fuzzy.

Using this knowledge as their baseline, the team started digging into the depths of the unknown. Before starting, they obtained human fetal cortical tissues from several different individuals who were at different gestation periods. The intricate and elaborate system they used chemically marks and maps where looped chromosomal DNA meet. By doing this, they could find the schizophrenia linked sites that contact gene’s known for brain development. There were several genes found that were found in previous studies but the new ones discovered made the study take an interesting turn. These new genes were found to connect to cell receptors that were triggered by neurotransmitter acetylcholine. It was theorized that increases in this neurotransmitter worsen the schizophrenia symptoms but it wasn’t actually confirmed until this study.

These scientists have found several hundred genes that were previously unknown. Though no solid facts and evidence came from this study, they took a big step in the right different. Dealing with the brain can be a tricky concept but thanks to these scientists, we’ve taken a step in the right direction to further understand the workings of our brains.

Reflection:

Before I even started rewriting this article I knew it was going to be very difficult to write. Overall, the original article was simple and relatively easy to understand but I had gotten very confused once I read the actual journal from the research study. The content was difficult to comprehend and most of it didn’t make sense to me. Honestly this made it hard to figure out where to start. So I tried to use the same technique that was used in the article and I gave background information. Personally, that helped me better understand the information. The only piece of information that I added that wasn’t in the article was a sentence or two about the sample size that was being used. I thought it was very hard to figure this out since I could barely understand anything in the journal. Mainly though, I took out a bunch information that I thought was needed so my summary was relatively shorter than the first article. It’s hard to choose which one I like better but I guess it would have to be the first article. I thought that the author did a very good job with their article and putting all of the essential information into simple terms that made everything easy to understand. They did make theirs somewhat long but I think that it really worked out since there was so much information to cover. I think that journalists who write about psychology deserve more credit because they have to write about some difficult topics and I think that they do great jobs of making it easily understandable.

Won, Hyejung, et al. “Chromosome Conformation Elucidates Regulatory Relationships in Developing Human Brain.” Nature, vol. 538, no. 7626, 2016, pp. 523–527., doi:10.1038/nature19847.

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