Munsterberg: Applied Psychology

            Applied Psychology is an interesting study.  To bring psychology into our everyday life and watch it influence us is a study I am sure many people would want to take part it.  Whether we are aware of it or not we think, breathe and talk psychology everyday anyways.  Even if you did not go to school for psychology or know anything about it you still use psychological concepts when talking to friends and family about their problems.  Having psychology actually brought out into the open though and made aware to people who do not even think about it seems to be a great idea.

            Applied Psychology is the use of psychological principles and theories to overcome problems in other areas, such as mental health, business management, education, health, product design, ergonomics, and law.  In his first chapter Munsterberg explains what Applied Psychology is and how it can affect our society.  Munsterberg explains what Psychology should be doing now that all of the past psychologists had gained a lot of data, “the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry.”  He believes that we should stop collecting data and start applying (Applied Psychology) to the world around us and within our jobs so we can put our theories and data to work instead of just sitting on it.

            I decided to read “Chapter 20: Experiments on the Effects of Advertisements” because I know that advertisements are starting to become quite questionable is some of the messages that they are sending.  This can be quite a concern especially since children are watching the commercials when they are waiting for a movie or a show to start.  Just as well Billboards and websites can be just as damaging or helpful.  In a sense this article could very well tie into Binet’s Mental Test of Suggestibility.  Since this is the case we definitely should be more careful because our memory will remember these images and apply to them to everyday life and if a Child sees some pretty graphic material or questionable statements it will cause them to ask questions that their parents feel they are not ready to hear or that are just never going to be answered.

            Applied Psychology affects in Clinical Psychology, Counseling Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Occupational Health Psychology, Human Factors, Forensic Psychology, Engineering Psychology, School Psychology, Sports Psychology, and Community Psychology.  One branch I am pleased that Applied Psychology has affected is the Forensic and Legal Psychology.  My plan is to go into Criminal Justice and victim/survivor counseling and Social Work so the fact that applied has helped in this field makes me very pleased and comforted to go out and work in this field.

            So as you can see Applied Psychology is very important to us, even if at first we did not think it would be it has helped us and I am sure it will continue to help as long as people are willing to study it.  The fact that so many of our Psychologies have been affected by this theory already is just phenomenal in my opinion.  It will be very interesting to see what Applied Psychology will do for us more in the future.

A Reaction to Mental Testing in Schools

            When you hear of mental tests the first thing that might pop into your head are asylums.  In actuality though, mental tests can be given anywhere and are usually first given to people in schools; the other more common place where mental tests are given in jails and in today’s society even when applying for jobs.  These articles are more along the lines of mental testing being used in schools though.  If we give children the mental tests within their first few years of school then we may be able to tell what kind of intelligence levels they have and what kind of person they may very well grow up to be.

            Alfred Binet’s article “New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals” was quite interesting to say the least.  His purpose was to “measure the intellectual capacity of a child who was brought to us in order to know whether he was normal or disabled.”  Binet believed that most subnormal children were habitually grouped into two categories: Backward intelligence and unstable.  He also realized that there was a difference between unstable and rebellious children, so he knew they had to be careful not to diagnose the children wrong.  He recommends giving this test in a quiet isolated room with no other children around.  Binet described his psychology method in this way, “The fundamental idea of this method is the establishment of what we shall call a measuring scale of intelligence.  This scale is composed of a series of tests of increasing difficulty, starting from the, lowest intellectual level that can be observed, and ending with that of average normal intelligence.  Each group in the series corresponds to a different mental level.”

            Lewis M. Terman uses his article “The Uses of Intelligence Tests” to explain the various types of intelligence we have and what kind of people the children with these kinds of intelligence could turn out within the school systems and once they are adults.  Terman starts out by saying that Binet was wrong in thinking that there were only two intelligence levels.  Terman and a few other psychologists found there to be at least four types of intelligence levels; disabled, feeble-minded, delinquents, and superior.  When discussing the four types he explained that delinquency was actually a mental deficiency and not just a lack of morals.  He then explained that in the majority of all of the criminal cases that existed they were all delinquent and feeble-minded.  This would then mean that feeble-mindedness and delinquency are one in the same; right?  “Not all criminals are feeble-minded, but all feeble-minded are at least potential criminals.”

            They both believed that we should give children these tests and fix our educational outlook.  However, where Terman wants us to work with all the children no matter if they are disabled or superior; Binet felt that if a child was disabled then they should just stop where they are or just given the same level of work that they can handle all the time.  The high school that I went to had a program for students who were advanced in certain areas.  I am not a good test taker, so when we had to take those intelligence tests for “No Child Left Behind” I did poorly on them and they placed me in lower classes.  I went from being a B student to being an F student because those classes were just so slow and they broke things down too much for me to be able to comprehend anything.  I am an analytical/complex thinker.  I have a very hard time grasping simple context.  I had to go to my school officials and request to be placed back into my previous courses.  At first they did not believe me, but I had shown them my grades and had my teachers talk to them and then they understood and believed me.  Later I had to switch from regular English to advanced English because I had already read all of the books in the regular English curriculum and it was just boring.  I did well in all of my advanced classes, but I did horrible in the simple minded courses.

            Reading these two gentlemen was interesting and fun at the same time.  They knew what they were talking about and went straight to the point instead of putting fluff in their papers.  It is almost as though they knew that people would be looking for examples of intelligence tests within their articles so they refused to go off on tangents and their examples were small and to the point.  These two were just all around great for mental testing.

           

A Reaction to the School of Gestalt

            The Gestalt Theory and these Gentlemen an interesting team.  The fact that they came together as students and teacher and had been together sense for the most part was even more remarkable.  After awhile it did seem that one of them was drifting away from Gestalt theories, but that may have very well been how I interpreted the reading instead of how he actually intended it to sound.  Other than that the fact that Wertheimer related Gestalt to music helped me understand it even better than when he used dots.  Being a visual and audible learner it helped me comprehend a lot better, if only Koffka and Kohler had found a way to do that as well.

            Max Wertheimer was trying to explain a small part of Gestalt psychology, seeing.  “When we are presented with a number of stimuli we do not as a rule experience ‘a number’ of individual things, this one and that and that. Instead larger wholes separated from and related to one another are given in experience; their arrangement and division are concrete and definite.”  All of this was him saying that we learn through our sight and because of that we see things differently.  Uniformly we see things the same, but of course as an individual we see things differently and take in different aspects; Wertheimer uses discontinuous stimulus constellations to explain this.  There are numbers of arrangements.  These arrangements are; Spontaneous (ab/cd/ef, or a/bc/de, or abc/def/ghi, or a/bcd/efghi, etc.) and Objective (20mm spaced out vertical lines of dots).  There are three types of factors to describe these arrangements and constellations; these factors are 1.) The Factor of Proximity – the two arrangements. 2.) The Factor of Simplicity – likes parts are grouped together (music was used as an example). 3.) The Factor of Uniform Destiny – “Sometimes a revolt against the originally dominant Factor of Proximity will occur and the shifted dots themselves thereupon constitute a new grouping whose common fate it has been to be shifted above the original row.”

            Kurt Koffka asked one of the questions that are most asked to anyone who chooses this particular profession, “Why Psychology?”  He of course cannot answer this question for everyone, but he can explain what psychology is about and that is what he does by using the Gestalt School to explain himself and to throw down other theories.  Koffka concludes his article with explanation which I feel is very fitting, “Science abandons its purpose of treating the whole of existence, if psychology can point the way where science and life will meet, if it can lay the foundations of a system of knowledge that will contain the behaviour of a single atom as well as that of an amoeba, a white rat, a chimpanzee, and a human being, with all the latter’s curious activities which we call social conduct, music and art, literature and drama, then an acquaintance with such a psychology should be worthwhile and repay the time and effort spent in its acquisition.”  Also to explain the dilemma of science and psychology Koffka says this is Wertheimer’s solution, “Far from being compelled to banish concepts like meaning and value from psychology and science in general, we must use these concepts for a full understanding of the mind and the world, which is at the same time a full explanation.”  He also concluded that the three only things to use in psychology and science are Nature, Mind and Life.

            Wolfgang Kohler was an interesting read to say the least.  He seemed to compare Gestalt Therapy to Behaviorists, which was quite interesting because he seemed against Behaviorism.  If he was against Behaviorism was he actually against Gestalt then as well; it sure appeared that way throughout this paper to me.  At one point in time he goes to explain how a Gestalt psychologist would go about explaining motivation which I found interesting, “1.) In human experience, motivation is a dynamic vector, that is, a fact which has a direction and tends to cause a displacement in this direction. 2.) Unless there are obstacles in the way, this direction coincides with an imaginary straight life drawn from the object to the subject. 3.) The direction of the experienced vector is either that toward the object or away from it. 4.) The strength of both the need present in the subject and of the valence exhibited by the object can vary.”

            Needless to say I did not necessarily achieve getting two pages worth of material, but I felt as though I grasped everything to the best of my ability as a person who does not specialize in Gestalt and is just learning it fresh.  I only hope I did a decent job in explaining what I got out of it.  It was somewhat difficult to pick and choose as what I wanted to put in this paper without making it three or more pages.  I understood a lot more from Koffka than I did from Kohler, but I understood them both and I very much understood where Wertheimer was coming from as well.  I think you should have people read the entire Wertheimer article next time.

A Reaction to EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed

            Intelligent Design is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God.  Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations.  Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic God.  Darwinism is a theory of organic evolution claiming that new species arise and are perpetuated by natural selection.  When looking at these three definitions if makes you wonder what the big debate is all about.  Nowhere in the definition of Evolution does it say the words “create” or “creation” so why are the ideas of Intelligent Design and Creationism so taboo to the concept of Evolution?  However, Darwinism claims that new species “arise”, but how is the question.

            The Movie EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed was narrated by none other than Ben Stein; who would have thought his voice really was not that boring.  This company thought that Ben would be a good candidate for this production since he was Jewish and he agreed because he himself did not want to believe that the freedom to teach whatever we wished to teach was being prevented.  Ben opened this documentary by saying, “America wouldn’t be what it is today without freedom.  We are losing freedom in science.”  One of the first people he interviewed was Professor Sternberg.  This man was fired and considered a terrorist for just mentioning Intelligent Design as a fleeting idea in one of his papers.  Crocker was disciplined, fired and then blacklisted for just mentioning Intelligent Design in one of her papers as well.  Egnor was verbally attacked by Darwinists for just doubting Darwinism.  Marks II was punished by the school shutting down his website and projects also after just mentioning Intelligent Design, and finally Gonzalez had his application for tenure denied because he did work with Intelligent Design.  Are you seeing a pattern? I know I am.

            Belinski says, “Darwinism is a room full of elegant smoke.” and Wells explains, “Darwin talks/starts with the origin of species; not how life began.”  If this is the case then why are all of these Darwinians getting upset over the idea of Intelligent Design or creationism?  I can understand if they do not want to grasp the concept of creationism, but is Intelligent Design truly that horrible of a concept.  The other question is why can these four concepts not coexist?  What is so wrong about that?

            A thought that is very concerning is that just one of these concepts without the others can lead to a world like Hitler’s.  Darwinism is actually one of the leading causes of the Nazi regime whether people want to admit it or not.  Just watching listening to this movie you could hear the contradictory in people’s voices.  One gentleman even said that the Christians and the Intelligent Design people could keep their churches if they feel that they need the comfort still, but in the same breath he then proceeded to say that eventually all of the churches will change to Darwinian churches and everyone will have to believe in that.  Talk about contradictory.  We have to fight this battle of there being one scientific explanation of creation and notice that there are many different ways to explain one event.  We definitely have to prevent Darwinism from taking hold most of all though.  If we do not do this then there will be more genocides and those of us with physical and mental illnesses will not exist any longer.

How does the Split Brain approach differ from other approaches?

            Split Brain was a term given to a surgery given to individuals who had their Corpus Callosum (piece of cartilage holding the two halves of the brain together) severed so it would prevent their epilepsy.  After severing the Corpus Callosum scientists did not only notice that the seizers stopped, but that the patients had a difficult time functioning within society.  The patients appeared normal, but ones you joined a conversation with them you realized something was a little different and slightly frustrating.

            This surgery is only done in part now.  Instead of removing all of the Corpus Callosum they only cut a small part of it.  This is usually a final result for epileptic patients.  I am sure however, this surgery is the first thing recommended for the more severe cases of epilepsy though.  Some things that are important to know about the brain is that our left brain hemisphere controls the right side of our bodies and the right brain hemisphere controls the left wide of our bodies.  Therefore, whatever we see in our left eye goes to the right brain hemisphere and whatever we see in our right eye goes to our left brain hemisphere.

            The result of this surgery is that when these patients look at something on the left side of their body they cannot speak it and they claim to have not seen it, but their body registers physically towards it but they are not aware of why they moved.  They are also not able to figure out any arithmetic higher than simple addition.  Now, if they look at something on their right side, they can tell you the general picture that they are looking at, but they are unable to affiliate it with anything they are familiar with.  An example of this would be from the game that we played; he saw a picture of one of the scientist, Gloria, but all he recognized was that it was a face and when he attempted to look for a face behind the screen he was unable to find it even though there was a Gloria doll.  Split brain patients also appear to be free of emotion when processing things from the left hemisphere which would mean that affiliations and emotions are controlled by the right hemisphere of our brain and not the left hemisphere.

            The fact that this surgery seems so simple and yet so complex can be very perplexing, especially to the families of the patients who undergo this surgery.  The families will have to learn to show the patients things on their right side and just talk to them and remember not to get upset if they appear distant at times.  Most of the time they will not mean to appear distant, but since the right hemisphere controls our emotions it will be difficult for them to affiliate emotions if they are attaining their information in their left brain hemisphere.

            This approach is different because it is not only a mental approach, but it is also a physical approach.  After being physical it is then a mental process to try and figure out what to do and how to process what they are viewing and attaining information wise in the different hemispheres.  In the end it is possible for these people to function in society it is just slightly difficult and requires patience from them, their family and the people around them.