hello my name is... GAD

Hello there, I'm GAD which is short for the long name my parents gave me General Anxiety Disorder. You'll usually find me lurking around when there are highly stressful situations. You may think adults and teens are the only ones that can experience stress, boy are you wrong because I can affect everyone, even children. If you're lucky enough to have me in your genes, your whole family can see me! I tend to like women more than men.. what can I say, I'm a ladies man. People that live with me say that they can't remember a time that they didn't feel anxious. I'm great, I know. If you want to look for me, you have to pay attention to how you feel because if you start worrying or experiencing tension for no reason, or your worries never disappear, then you better have a welcome to my family party because I'm here to stay :]

I'm sorry if you can't concentrate, I just like to make your mind wander. I'm sorry if you feel tired all the time, I just really like to sleep... but other times, I just want to stay awake and party so I'm also the reason why you can't fall asleep when you want to, sorry about that.

 I am an anxiety disorder. Only the best kind! If you want to look me up in a DSM book, you'll have to go to the anxiety disorder section. Hope to see you soon!

my personality sucks.. when i'm upset

My personality tests weren't very accurate from the beginning because before taking them, I found out that I failed a government test. Major fail. So, obviously I wasn't in the best mood while taking these tests which caused me to pick answers I probably wouldn't pick if I was happy.

According to the Personality Inventory test, I'm not very agreeable or open. This I will disagree with because I don't like to argue, therefore I agree. Also, I'm very open, ask me pretty much anything and I'll answer truthfully. I did agree with the North Dakota test results because "At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved." This is so true, because most of the time I am sociable and like to be around others and sometimes I like to be quiet and alone. I don't think these types of personality tests are very accurate because my mood caused me to answer different, which in turn, changed my results on the first test.

Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman was born in 1934 and was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and New York University. He got his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University and became a Clinical Psychology Officer in the Army. His early work involved nonverbal behavior and as the clocked ticked he began to focus on evolution and semiotic frame. He also researched emotion and expressions. Paul is now the Manager of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC, which is a company that makes devices related to emotional skills and is researching to help national security and law enforcement. Articles about his work have been published in big magazines like The Times, Psychology Today, and The New Yorker. Paul has been on several well known tv shows like 20/20, 48 Hours, Oprah, Good Morning America, etc.

Micro-expressions are defined as short involuntary facial expressions. They generally occur when someone is about to start an emotion they don't want to show. All micro-expressions can show you is that the emotion is concealed, but not why. The old tv show Lie To Me used micro-expressions to point out those lying and those telling the truth. When you lie you are trying to not show emotions because they generally give you away so a micro-expression appears.

Reaction

The intelligence tests we had to take today were difficult when they weren't from my era or culture. The Reddon-Simons "Rap" Test was hilarious even though I didn't get very many answers correct. I don't think intelligence testing is fair because I don't know the same "general knowledge" that someone in India knows and vise-versa. People have different intelligences based on where they live because of the different cultures. There are definitely cultural stereotypes and you can see them within each test. For example, the Original Australian Test of Intelligence asks questions about kangaroos and whether you eat or drink water. In the U.S., we drink water and eat food but people in Australia eat both water and food. The Chitling Intelligence Test was created by a black sociologist drawing from black-ghetto experiences and some of the questions clearly shows the ghetto stereotype because of the slang used. Finally, the American/Australian Test of Intelligence makes it clear that it is meant for Americans because of the questions like "why does the states require people to get a license in order to get married?" unless you've studied American marriage laws, you'd probably have to live here to answer this question correctly.

The article kind of made me sad and feel bad for those who are intimidated by stereotypes. I can relate to this article because on almost all standardized tests, there is a spot to fill in whether you're, African-American, Caucasian, Asian, or any other race. Like the article stated, whites don't feel intimidated by this question... I sure don't, I don't see why someone should. Just asking your race doesn't suddenly mean you're dumb if you're not Asian or white. I definitely don't understand how asking you're race would affect test scores anyhow. Wouldn't that make you want to try harder to prove your stereotype wrong than just accept it and fail? The part in the article where she talks about females showing lower scores when told males score higher on a test made me a little mad. If i was told that males scored higher previous to taking a test, I would work my butt off to make sure I score just as well if not better than the males.

my memory is working...is yours?

Working memory is memory that is interacting with the environment. It is the memory that doesn't allow you to concentrate on a boring text book, it's the memory that makes you think "what did I just read?" after getting to the bottom of the page. I found an article on working memory from Science Daily. It was kind of funny for me to read because at the beginning they start off with, "Odds are, you're not going to make it all the way through this article without thinking about something else." They were right! I got though part of the article and then I found myself wondering, thinking about the free response tomorrow, what I'm going to wear to school, what I'm going to say in this blog. When i finally started paying attention to the article again, I was almost done reading it! I went back and reread. In Madison they were doing experiments with people's working memories by giving them each a task to do. This with higher working memory capacities were more prone to start wondering than those with normal working memory capacities.

Heres the article, I hope you like it!
Working Memory

memories you shouldn't remember

This week in class we learned about memory: long-term, short-term, false, deja vu, memory storage, source amnesia, etc..
I found false memory very interesting. False memory is a memory of an event that did not actually happen. People often think of their memories an exact recording of their life events so, naturally, everything remembered must be true. False! Sometimes people remember a event that never even happened. In a video I found, this boy was reading a journal that his family wrote about happenings throughout the years. One of the stories was about how he had gotten lost in a mall when he was 5 years old. He went on to tell the story of what happened, how he felt, and who he encountered while lost in the mall. Little did he know, the story was actually placed in the journal just before he was told to read it, so it never actually happened. He had false memory.

Conditioning...Classically

This week in psych we learned about classical conditioning. According to our text, classical conditioning is a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. In order for classical conditioning to work, there needs to be an unconditioned stimuli, an unconditioned response, a neural stimuli, a conditioned stimuli, and a conditioned response. In the video I found on classical conditioning, the Nerf gun was the unconditioned stimulus and getting mad is the unconditioned response. The maker of the video added in a "quack" every time they shot the Nerf gun. The quack is the neural stimulis because it has nothing to do with a Nerf gun. Eventually, the "quack" became the conditioned stimuli and being mad or expecting to get mad became the conditioned response.

unconditioned stimuli = something that triggers a response automatically
unconditioned response = the automatic response
neural stimuli = something that has nothing to do with the unconditioned stimuli
conditioned stimuli = the old neural stimuli
conditioned response = unconditioned response