Skinner Box

The game that I use to play frequently is Crash. Crash is an excellent example of a Skinner box. The only real difference is that instead of it being a pigeon, it is an actual person. Just as the pigeon has the choice to either perform an action and get a reward, the player of Crash also has that choice. In the beginning of the game,  the player is given a little back story and then they are to work through the levels. After a level was completed, there would be more of the story and then a new level would begin. As the player delved deeper into the game and surpasses more and more levels they would learn new moves that would help them with the obstacles. So as the pigeons received food as positive reinforcement, which is increasing behaviors by presenting positive stimuli, the player of Crash received new abilities for the character. Another positive reinforcer is when part of the story is shown at the end of each level. The player is able to learn more of what is going on and know that what they are doing is defeating the villain that is out to destroy the world. A secondary reinforcer is a stimulus that gains it reinforcing power through its association with a primary reinforcer. It can be seen in the game as the player learns new moves and is able to beat levels faster and overcome more challenges. A negative reinforcer, an act that increases behaviors by stopping or reducing negative stimuli, could be seen during the levels. If Crash does something wrong he generally is electrocuted and stuck in that spot until the deed is corrected. So if the player does everything correctly then they will not lose precious time and have to redo certain things. The reward schedule for this game is fixed-ratio. Fixed-ratio is a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified number of response. In the game, the player is rewarded after every level every time. There isn't any mystery or unpredictability in it. Achievement motivation which is a desire for significant accomplishment, can be seen in most players of this game. Players want to beat the levels so they can eventually complete the game and stop the evil villain from destroying the world.

Remember the Titans

 The first psychology term demonstrated in the movie Remember the Titans, is ingroup bias, which is the tendency to favor ones own group. In the beginning of the movie everyone is outraged that the school is becoming integrated and will no longer only be white students. People are protesting outside the school, fights are erupting, and the two races want nothing to do with each other. Before boarding the buses to go to football camp, Gerry Bertier, one of the white players, goes up to Coach Boone and demands that him and his fellow white players get a certain amount of spots on the starting line up. When Coach Boone denies him and later on when some of the black students play before the white ones, many people become upset. They believe that the white students should come first and therefore play first. 

The second term demonstrated in the movie was group polarization. Group polarization is the enhancement of a groups prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group. This can be seen in two different parts of the movie. The first part is when the two groups dislike each other because that is the way society has taught them to think and believe. The players talk only to the players of the same race as them and talk of how they do not like the other race and how they do not want to cooperate with them in the slightest. The second time it can be seen is later on in the movie when the two groups of players have merged and become one, but must go back to their high school. All of the other students at the high school still have the same bias' against the opposite race. At first the players start to revert back into their previous stances but then they all meet in the gym. At the meeting in the gym, they talk of how they aren't different and how they shouldn't change the way they are thinking because of the rest of the student body. This meeting strengthens their beliefs.

The third term is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort we feel when two of out thoughts are inconsistent. This can be seen when Gerry Bertier yells at Ray. Gerry was use to believing with the ingroup bias and that the white players were always right in opposition to the black players. But as captain, he noticed that Ray was not blocking for Petey, a black player. So Gerry chose to reduce the resulting dissonance by changing his attitude.

Obedience is simply the act of following orders and it is seen a lot through out the movie. The players are constantly following the coaches orders. Whether it was to do something routine like run a play, or something they dreaded like when Coach Boone makes the players of each race get to know one another. The coach says to do something, and the players do it without arguement. A prime example would be when they are doing drills. The players desperately want water and to rest, but Coach Boone is telling them to do a drill and continuously blows the whistle. They only go get water when they have been given permission to stop and do so.

Another term found in the movie is foot-in-the door phenomenon. This phenomenon states that if a person starts their requests out small they can eventually get the person to do a larger act. A prime example of this is Coach Boone slowly desegregating the team. First, he makes the players sit on the buses by offense and defense rather than how they had seated themselves, black and white. He also makes the person they are sitting with their roommate. Next he makes the players get to know a player of the opposite race and continues this until the whole team knows one another. His actions eventually grow larger until both black and white students do not care about the different races and the team is a whole.

The Colony

In one of Discovery Channels hit shows, The Colony, peoples ability to survive is tested. A group of strangers with differing personalities, backgrounds and skills are stuck together and must attempt to coexist and hopefully thrive. The area that they must stay in is desolate and falling apart. To overcome all of the many obstacles the colonists must deal with both physical and mental challenges.

One occurrence that stuck out to me was where the colonists bathed in the rain. They had been in the colony for about two weeks, and even though they had managed to rig up a shower like structure, they were still very dirty. So when it was pouring down rain they decided to strip down to their undergarments and go out into the rain to get clean. In common society that would not happen. But because they had been in that situation so long the norms of society were gone and they had made their own. They were so comfortable with it that George got totally naked and didn't think anything of it. An evolutionary psychologist would say that all the colonists were worried about, is survival. There was a precious resource available and they didn't want to waste it. Furthermore, their minds were consumed with getting through each day they didn't have the extras to worry about what the others thought.

The second occurrence that stuck out to me was in the last episode we watched a colonist, Becka, was kidnapped. She had decided to go out and collect berries for food, when she was set upon by three men. As soon as the first man came running out Becka's initial response was to run. Again in the view of an evolutionary psychologist, they would say that her "fight or flight" instinct kicked in. She knew that she didn't stand a chance against these three large sized men, so she chose flight. In the view of a behavioral psychologist, it could be said that in past experiences she had witnessed only flight, or if she had seen fight it did not end well. So she learned from watching someone else that she should run and try to escape.

Sleep Patterns

1) On average I got a little under eight hours a sleep a night.

2) I didn't remember any of my dreams from the two week time period. I think this is so because I never woke up in the middle of the night, I generally sleep the whole night through. So in the mornings if I woke up in stages 1,2,3, or 4 I wouldn't remember my dreams. To help me remember my dreams, I could wake up during REM sleep and stay awake for a couple of minutes. Because if I just woke up and went straight back to sleep I would forget, therefore I would need to stay awake for about five minutes.

3) I didn't have any dreams.

4)On weekends I went to sleep a couple hours later than I did on the week days. But I usually made it up by sleeping in those extra hours, so I ended up with the same amount of sleep a night as I get during the week.

5)My energy levels and attitude on the weekend is a lot like it is during the week. This is probably because I get the same amount of sleep on both occasions. It is just as hard for me to get out of bed on the weekends as it is the weekdays. I think this is because I work all weekend, so it is like I am exchanging school for work, except work has longer hours. If I was able to sleep in as long as I would like I would probably have a lot more energy on the weekends and be more apt to get up in the mornings.

6) No, I am not getting enough sleep. I often doze off if I sit still too long and at night I have no problem falling asleep.

7)To change this, I could go to bed earlier or sleep in later. But that is hard because I always have things to do. During the week, I have homework at night to do so that puts off going to bed earlier and in the morning I have to be at internship at 8:15 so I cannot sleep in later. During the weekends I usually don't get home until after midnight because of work and then in the mornings I have to get back up for work, so there really isn't anything I can do there.

David Reimer

In the documentary, David  Reimer is born a normal, healthy, baby. But in his circumcisions things go wrong. The damage is too extensive to be repaired so the parents decided to follow Dr. John Moneys advice and raise him as a girl. From then on they referred to her as Brenda and treated her like she was a typical little girl. The only oddity was that every year they had to go see Dr. Money. In the sessions, Dr. Money would asses and see if his experiment was going well or not. When Brenda was six or seven she responded in a way that made Dr. Money think that Bruce had truly become Brenda, so he published his findings in a book. Not long after it became apparent that Dr. Moneys findings were incorrect. Brenda preferred her twin brothers toys and other male oriented activities. Dr. Money could not accept the fact that he was wrong so he began making the children do things to help them realize that they were different. He would have them strip down so that they could see that they were not anatomically similar. He even had a person come in and talk to Brenda who use to be a male but had had surgery to reassign her sexual origin. When Brenda was thirteen she told her parents that if she was made to go back and see Dr. Money, she would kill  herself. That is when her parents realized that they needed to tell their children the truth. Brenda was happy, but her twin, Brian had a different reaction.  He did not know what to think and distanced himself from Brenda. In later years he ended up becoming schizophrenic. Brenda decided to go back to being a male and renamed herself David. From there he started living a relatively normal life, he got married and had children.

The main theory studied in this film is nature versus nurture. Dr. Money believed that Davids male nature could be overcome by the his family treating him as if he had been born a girl. His main method was to instill in the parents the idea that they could absolutely not tell Brenda that she had previously been a he. That way it would ensure that Brenda would grow up believing that she was a girl and society would believe it also.
When it comes to the ethics of this particular case I believe that Dr. Money was way off base. I understand that David Reimers parents were seeking to do what was in their child's best interest, but they only ended up hurting him more. Dr. Money, made Brenda and Brian strip down at a very young age and that is not ethical. He also brought in a person who had had a sex change to pressure Brenda into having further surgery, when it should have been her choice. The biggest breach of ethical standards though was that the parents had no idea that any of this was going on. The children were too young to know that what was going on was wrong, and with the parents in the dark there was no one to oppose Dr. Money.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

The first clinical tale that I chose was Reminiscence. In this tale Mrs. O'C constantly hears songs from her childhood in Ireland. Twenty-four/seven the songs are playing until one day they just stop. It first starts one night after she dreams about her home in Ireland. She wakes up, wondering who could be blasting a radio at such a late hour, but soon realizes it is all in her head. Due to and EEG the doctors find out that the songs are coming from her temporal lobe. This makes them think that the songs are merely hallucinations that will go away as a small thrombosis in part of her right temporal lobe goes away also. In time, the infarction resolves itself and the songs stop along with it. I believe that if it was not in her temporal lobe than it would have most likely been in her auditory cortex. There could have been something going wrong that caused the cortex to think that it was hearing something that actually wasn't there at all.

The second clinical tale that intrigued me was Murder. In Murder a man named Donald kills his girlfriend under the influence of PCP. To make matters worse, after it happens Donald has absolutely no memory of him committing the crime. The evidence though is overwhelming, so Donald is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. I believe that something had to be wrong with his hippocampus. The hippocampus is in the temporal lobe of the brain and is responsible for a persons memory. With it being damaged, whether by the PCP or by something that happened that night that he cannot remember, Donald would have very little memory or the event.

Awakenings

In the movie Awakenings,  Dr. Sayer gets a job at a medical facility. At first he believes he is applying for a job in research, but in truth it is for a job as a regular doctor. His research background begins to show when he starts questioning why some patients were simply part of "the garden" and did not interact at all. Instead of bypassing them like all of the other doctors, Dr. Sayer begins to form a theory. He thinks that the patients have an extreme case of Parkinsons disease. Parkinson's disease is a progressive disorder of the central nervous system that impairs the motor skills and speech of the patient. Dr. Sayer then forms a hypothesis: If he gives the patients a drug called L-dopa then they will wake up. When his superiors give him permission to only start one patient on the drug, with the consent of the family, Dr. Sayer begins a case study on Leonard Lowe. At first, Leonard does not react to the drug so Sayers response is to up the dosage. When Leonard finally does wake up and starts to function like a normal adult, permission is granted to give L-Dopa to all of the other patients in "the garden." After a extended amount of time, Leonard's condition starts to go down hill. He begins losing control of his arms and facial muscles and often has trouble doing regular tasks. This continues until Leonard is back to where he started.

Dr. Sayer discovered something medically very important, but ethically I would say that the experiment was wrong. Yes, Leonard was woken up for a period of time, but he was fully aware of decent back into his coma and knew that there was a good possibility that he might not wake back up again or if he did it might be in another thirty years.