Personal behaviors and personalities psychoanalysis
Psychology is the scientific study of the behavior of individuals and their mental processes. Throughout Introduction to psychology and from our textbook, I have been able to observe various examples in which psychological concepts and theories can be used to analyze human behaviors, mental processes, personalities, relationships, etc In this report, I will attempt to analyze my everyday behavior characteristics and personalities using psychological ideas that I have learnt during the course. As such, due to the large scope of class topics, I will mainly focus on memory, learning and behavior conditioning, development, personality, and social psychology. In my opinion, these areas have the most impact to my behaviors and myself at the moment. Memory is crucial in order for us to store and retrieve information, as well as making inferences about the world based on previous knowledge. Usually, our memory is working so well that we do not consciously notice of how useful it is. In my experience, I have encountered various scenarios when I realize how useful memory can be. When I play a game on my phone with simple controls (tap left to jump and tap right to slide) for a long time, I am able to both watch a video and play the game. Also, if I switch the controls around by accident, I notice a significant decrease of proficiency in my gameplay. This is one example of production compilation in action. Due to production compilation, all the little actions (tap left two times then tap right, etc) are compiled together to create the familiarity and expertise during the gameplay. As such, it reduces the mental capacity needed to play the game and enable me to do something else while playing. But production compilation can also lead to error, as we see from the act of switching the control around. In this case, the compilation of actions is different (tapping left instead of tapping right) and thus I made more errors in my gameplay compare to the usual setup. This behavior can also be explained by encoding specificity. Because the setting of subsequent gameplays is the same as the setting of the first few gameplays, I am able to recall the specific actions needed to perform a smooth gameplay with few errors. But if the setting is different, I will be more likely to forget what to do during the game. Another example of memory in action is when I remind myself of what to do and a few minute later, I have no idea what the task is. I have a vague feeling that I need to do something but unable to remember what it is specifically. This can be explain as the memory of needing to do something is registered in the short-term memory because the memory is needed for only a few minutes. As such, due to the limited capacity of the short term memory, if I memorize other information or occupy myself with another task during these few minutes, the memory will be overridden by the new information and I will be unable to retrieve the memory. The vague feeling of knowing is probably
because the memory is partially registered in the working memory. To be
able to remember the task at hand, I often employ the use of retrieval cues. By rewinding in my head what I was doing a few minutes ago, I find specific keywords that might link to the task I forget. For example, if I forget that my friend told me to do his laundry, I can rewind my conversation with him to try to find specific words to retrieve that information. Most of our behaviors and learned reflexes can be acquired through conditioning. Next, I will explain some of my behaviors using classical and operant conditioning theories. One example is the link between drinking coffee and my sleepiness. As a student with lots of morning class, I usually take coffee to stay awake during the class. When I smell coffee, I feel more energetic and awake for a moment. When I dont drink coffee, even though I sleep a lot the day before, the feeling of sleepiness is constantly present throughout the day. This is one example of classical conditioning. For the case of alertness after smelling coffee, the conditioned stimulus is the coffee smell and the conditioned response is alertness. Due to repeated pairings between coffee smell (conditioned stimulus) and coffee itself (unconditioned stimulus), the coffee smell becomes associated with alertness (conditioned response). In case of feeling sleepiness without coffee, the environment factors (state of just waking up, before going to class...) is the conditioned stimulus and the compensatory alertness is the conditioned response. The environment factors (conditioned stimulus) are repeated paired with drinking of coffee (unconditioned stimulus) to associate with the compensatory alertness. Without the presence of coffee, the environment factors will lead to more sleepiness because there is no more compensation from the coffee. Another example of conditioning is my use of operant conditioning to improve my study. When I have to study a lot at one time (for term exams), I usually combine study sessions with short breaks. In this way, the behavior of studying is positive reinforced by the break. Also, this is an application of Premacks principle of learning. The more desirable behavior of taking a break reinforces the less desirable behavior of studying. Throughout human development, there
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