Meeting November 3rd - The Den

The next peer mentor meeting is November 3, 2011 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm (ish) at The Den. 
Hot Topic: Drinking and Driving . . . . are you going to order a beer . . . we'll see after the debate!


Hosted by Sylvia Tsang

Meetings

The peer mentors all met today to discuss new ideas for our upcoming meetings. Just so you know, the meetings will be getting revamped and we want to know what YOU the students would like to participate in. Any comments or suggestions would be great. 


After all, we are here to make your first year experience better, so what is it we can do to improve?

Second Exam Thursday

This upcoming Thursday will be your second exam. Take advantage of the study session offered by the peer mentors this week, they know how to write exams after all these years.


Study Session:
When: October 27, 2011
Time: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
Where: A248
Peer Mentor: Alicia Kassian


Come on out and if anything, refresh your memory of all the terms and concepts banging around in your head.

Popular Myths in Psychology

Myths about Personality

Myth: People’s responses to inkblots tell a lot about their personality

by Kent Bastell

What do you see when you look at this?

I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t wanna know what my answer to this question says about me haha. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with my mind in the gutter, so many of us (well at least I hope you guys are seeing what I see) would probably be labeled as sex addicts and/or offenders by approximately 43% of clinical psychologists. Why 43%? Well that’s the approximate number of psychologists that use inkblot (also known as projection) tests (well according to a 1998 survey).  How does this test work? Well a psychologist would ask you to describe what you see in the inkblot diagram and would come to a conclusion about your personality and/or your deepest unconscious thoughts. Sounds pretty reliable eh?...not. Research has found no viable evidence that these techniques work consistently. The one area that it does a serviceable job in is that of people with disturbing thoughts like in schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, but it plays a dangerous game because some studies have shown the inkblot testing to be misleading to psychologists making their predictions less accurate. Plus individuals with disturbed thought patterns would most likely show symptoms regardless of an inkblot test or not. How would you feel after taking this test, if the psychologist, after analyzing your responses, said you suffered from narcissism (inflated self-importance, egotism, vanity, or conceit)? How would you begin to view yourself? Would you start analyzing your every move to “find” evidence of your “disorder?” Chances are you would, because now you have a label put on you from an uneducated guess. Ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy? That means that when you look for evidence that you have a problem, you end up finding (sometimes ridiculous) proof of your supposed disorder, thus convincing yourself that you actually have it. Using the narcissistic example, if you begin to see that you look at yourself in the mirror several times a day you might begin to think you are vain and self-absorbed, when in reality you look in the mirror as many times as any one else in the world. This is why labels are dangerous and inkblot tests have the ability to put these labels on people without being a reliable way to test. Sigmund Freud was even skeptical about these tests and we all know how stable he was.  Because when it comes down to it “sometimes an inkblot is just an inkblot”.

Popular Myths in Psychology

Myths about Consciousness

Myth: Researchers Have Demonstrated that Dreams Possess Symbolic Meanings

by Sylvia Tsang

According to Dream Central’s dream dictionary, if you eat macaroni in a dream, it means that you could be in for various small losses financially. According to Freud, in his landmark book, The Interpretation of Dreams, he reported that the dream image of a straw hat with the middle piece bent upwards and the side piece hanging downwards symbolized a man’s genitals. Moreover, the loss of teeth and beheading symbolize castration.

For the longest time, mankind has tried to make sense of dreams images, and since then, countless websites, blogs, and books have been created to explain what could possibly be the reason of dreaming of a house with many doors or falling down 50 set of stairs. I know I have been guilty of standing at my neighbourhood Chapters/Indigos in the ‘Self-Help’ sections for hours and hours looking at dream books which costs about $40-100 each.

However, contemporary scientists have rejected the idea that specific dream images carry universal symbolic meanings. They know that in the early stages of sleep, before our eyes begin to dart back and forth in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, most of our dreams actually mirror the everyday activities and concerns that occupy our minds, like studying for a test, shopping for groceries, or doing our taxes (Dorus, Dorus, & Rechtschaffen, 1971). The activation synthesis theory, proposed by Hobson and McCarley states that when we cycle through REM periods every 90 minutes or so during sleep, various neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) are responsible for generating dreams. More specifically, surges of acetylcholine hype the brain’s emotional centers, while a decrease in serotonin and norepinephrine inhibit brain areas that govern reason, memory, and attention. Hence, dreams are actually just our brain’s best way, to gather together a meaningful story based on a jumble of random information transmitted to it. Hence, these images that we spend hours over thinking what they could possibly mean are actually gibberish.

Therefore, rather than relying on a dream dictionary to foretell the future or help you make life decisions, it would probably be wisest to consult good friends and trust yourself in the end. Still, as far as your dreams go, it may still be a good idea to  avoid thinking about losing your teeth and guillotines. All this being said, if you are sure you haven’t been thinking of lap dances lately, and hence, want to desperately seek some kind of explanation why such an image would make itself present in your dreams, I would suggest this website to satisfy your curiosity.

http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/

Hope you are all having a great week!

Popular Myths in Psychology

Myths about Memory

Myth: Hypnosis is Useful for Retrieving Memories of Forgotten Events

by Kent Bastell

Can you imagine that as you are going through your daily routine, minding your own business only to find a police car in front of your house, wanting to question you over a crime that happened at a train station you frequently use? And as you are being taken to the police station, the officer tells you that you will have a picture taken of you and put in a lineup for the victim to identify a suspect for yesterdays attempted murder. By this point you would probably be really confused and most likely start to freak out when two weeks later the victim who has notified police that he is 100% confident that you are the one who assaulted him that night. Sure you take the train everyday, sure you were home alone doing homework and no one can vouch for where you were at that time, but you know that your not guilty and there should be enough evidence (or lack there of) in order to prove your innocence.

Well technically this is how the legal system works, except when you throw a monkey wrench into the equation that comes in the form of eyewitness testimony through regressive hypnosis. Regressive hypnosis is a technique used by some professionals in order to help patients’ retrieve, usually traumatic, memories that they experienced in the past, through “hypnotic” process.

You are getting sleeeeeeepy…which actually means you are might mean you are in the process of making crap up in your head. What if the man who was assaulted was unsure the day he looked at your photo, but all of a sudden became unshakably confident after he could visualize your face while in a hypnotic trance, even though it wasn’t you? How could the victim visualize you doing the crime even though you have never even occupied the same air space as this person?  It’s called false memory. Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of our environment and when it can’t figure it out it creates a story to try and make sense of it. These stories are not always accurate however, as seen in a variety of studies done. A study by Elizabeth Loftus (it’s in one of your textbooks) really highlights how scary false memories are. Long story short, she took a 14 year old kid named Chris and had his older brother, Jim, make up an untrue story of Chris getting lost in a mall when they were younger. Chris read the untrue story along with 2 other stories that actually happened in his life so it “seemed” like it was a legit event. Loftus asked Chris to write down exactly what happened the day of the untrue event. Surprisingly Chris wrote down exactly how he perceive the event saying things like “I was with everyone for a second and after I went to look at the toy store I realized I was lost” Chris’ mom vouched that this never happened and that the entire story was made up.

This is all scary stuff because the suggestibility of hypnosis leaves a lot of room for error when trying to retrieve memories. The situation described above has happened to countless people, where these people have had to serve several years in prison due to a false testimony based on hypnosis, just ask Larry Mayes how 21 years felt in the pen, when he was completely innocent. Approximately 70% of intro psych students believe that hypnosis is effective for retrieving memories, where the number rises among other disciplines. Don’t fall into the trap of taking things at face value, because you may be the unlucky bloke who gets burned by it in the future.

First Exam Thursday

Thursday will be your first Psych 203 exam . . . good luck to everyone. Don't stay up all night studying either; believe it or not, your brain does remember information better if you sleep the night before a big test.