Factitious Disorder

I am factitious disorder. The only cause of my disorder is my yearn for attention. I always feel the need to have people focused on me. All of the symptoms I experience are created by myself to recieve the attention of others. Some days I like to fake sick, other days I like to break my arm. Many people like me inflict damage or hurt their bodies in order to win the attention and sympathy of the people around us. Sometimes I pretend to be sick so I don't have to go to school and my mom can stay home and take care of me. I have become very good at faking the symptoms of the flu and know exactly what to do to get my mom to bring me to the doctor. I like when people feel sympathy for me and give me attention to my needs. My disorder is linked with kids who were abused and had parents that were ill all the time growing up.

Personality Test Reactions

The personality tests are a good judge of my personality. Many of the questions on the tests asked fair questions based on realistic situations. They were easy to relate to and I could easily and swiftly come up with answers. However, there were questions that might have tested intelligence. I was unsure what the dice questions had to do with anything or how they related to the personality test at all. This could be like the ink blot, judging a person's personality based on how they view the dice and answer the question. I don't think this is a fair judgement of personality. Many questions that directly related to situations, however, gave me realistic test results in the end results. I could agree upon all of the final test results that the tests came up with. The Big Five Trait test was far more accurate and reliable than the other personality test. I feel like the questions asked in the second test did not relate to anything what-so-ever and I could not personally relate to the questions from experience. The questions were weird and made no sense. This test exactly relates to the inkblot test. It cannot be proven that certain thoughts are associated with a person's personality.

Universal Emotions

Today, anyone can recognize the emotions of the people around them. Easily recognizable emotions are happy, surprised, angry, or sad. At one point in time, emotions were thought to be different in varying cultures. Paul Ekman, a graduate of the University of Chicago and New York University discovered that facial expression of emotions was universal throughout all cultures. This was an important finding because this proved that emotions were not determined by culture. Ekman went on to study a tribe of people from Papua New Guinea. He studied their facial expressions and made cross-cultural connections to facial expressions of emotions in other cultures. From this, he was able to make the connection that facially expressed emotion is universal throughout all cultures.

Next, Ekman began to study "micro-expressions." Micro-expressions are very brief, involuntary facial expressions of emotion that occur during moments of emotion felt. For instance, if i saw something funny on TV, my eyes might show very slight signs of happiness or the eyebrows might move very briefly in accordance to a happy expression. Ekman started a study with another psychologist called the "Wizards Project." This project evaluated the abilities of over 20,000 people and their abilities to read micro expressions. Microexpressions can be used to detect lies in the individual being surveyed and questioned. The 20,000 people that were evaluated and tested of their abilities to detect lies included attorneys, psychologists, law enforcement officers, secret service officials, and so on. Only 50 of the 20,000 people tested had the unique ability to detect lies. These people have the ability to hone in on emotional, expressional, and behavioral inconsistencies. These inconsistencies last no more than a split second. This is a rare ability to have. These people will also use tone of voice and other keys to the deception of the truth from the individual being watched. Below is a good video I found that shows what exactly these micro expression readers look for when trying to detect lies. They look for wrinkles, movement of the mouth, eyebrows, eye direction, anything that cues a lie.
Paul Ekman has also written a system to detect lies using facial expressions. It is allied FACS or Facial Action Coding System. This takes into effect the different movements of facial muscles, the eyes, body movement, and any other factors in order to detect if a person is lying or not.

Intelligence Tests

Intelligence testing is going to vary by location and race. It is very hard to have a standardized test in the United States with the amount of people, different cultures, different races, and different living and educational conditions throughout the U.S. Standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT are going to show much different results in intercity school systems than in wealthy suburbs. Curriculum and teachers, as well as teaching tools and technology, are much better in wealthy suburbs than those of intercity schools. The fact is, it is hard to even the playing field of standardizing a test for everyone. Intelligence testing is not a fair type of testing. Some classes offered in wealthy suburbs cannot be taught in intercity schools, perhaps from lack of funding or cognitive level of the students attending the school. 

The quizzes we did in class are a perfect example of why intelligence testing is not fair. The first test I took directly applied to my lifestyle and culture. I easily got a 9 out of 10. The second test, however, was quite different. It was the Original Australian Test of Intelligence, not relevant to my life what-so-ever. When answering these 10 questions, I was 1 for 10 correct. This goes to show how much I actually knew about a different culture from around the world that I was never faced with in my life. I didn’t know that you could not eat a kangaroo because it would make children and adults sick. I had no idea that you could eat water. The culture I live in is quick to think that other ideas are stupid and don’t make sense, where as in the Australian culture, this makes perfect sense and they would think we were stupid for saying that we drink water or that flour and water-lilies are not related closely to sugar. 

These tests greatly prove that intelligence tests may be able to be standardized for a specific culture, living style, or location, but not for the whole world, or multiple cultures. I was on a cruise last year and I was talking to a girl from Arizona. I referred to something that was “sweet” as in cool or rad. She looked at me as if I was weird. She had never heard that before or ever though about using that in the context I had used it. It goes to show that location and culture do matter.

Face Blindness

In class we have talked about prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness. This disorder prevents people from being able to recognize faces of people the have met or know. Some people are even unable to recognize their own family members unless a cue is put to their face. Prosopagnosia is a disorder inherited through genes. About 2.5% of people in the world are believed to have this disorder through genetic inheritance. A small part of the underside of the brain allows people to be able to recognize faces. Damage to this part of the brain causes people to lose the ability to recognize people's faces and develop prosopagnosia.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/face-blindness-super-recognizer-try-online-tests-205200765.html

In the link posted above, it shows two sides to the disorder. The first video shows multiple people with prosopagnosia. One woman in particular was shown a picture of her daughter's face. At first she was told it was someone she knew. Then she was told it was someone in their family. After much thinking, she could not recognize the face. She was finally told that it was her own daughter. She was surprised she didn't get it, but after it was mentioned that it was her daughter, she said that she saw it. This is the brain trying to compensate for the damaged part of brain. It is using auditory parts of the brain to link faces to recognition rather than visual to faces. This disorder demonstrates the danger in any damage to the brain. I cannot imagine being unable to recognize my own family members.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, one woman is called a super recognizer. She has the ability to recall any face she has ever seen. The second video does a good job of showing how well she does this. She is shown a series of "before they were famous" celebrity photos. She clearly knew them right away seeing them. Once she revealed the name to us, we could finally link the face to the name. Try these two pictures for instance. See if you can guess them without looking at the answers below.

Vince Vaughn and Brad Pitt.

I will be willing to bet that it took you a while to recognize the faces or recognize them at all. But as soon as you read or hear the names, you can automatically recognize the face by relating it to present day faces. Crazy stuff the brain pulls on us.

Memory

This week we learned about memory. Memory goes through three stages: Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval. In encoding, the brain determines if information is important to remember. If not, this information is discarded within minutes of hearing it. If the brain decides that the information is important, the brain stores this information, either as short term, long term, or sensory memory. Once this memory is stored, the information can be later accessed through retrieval. Retrieval of information is easier to recognize than it is to recall information in any given situation. For instance, if you are given a list of numbers to remember, you will have a higher correct percentage if you are given a list of numbers to choose from. If you are asked to recall the numbers, the likelihood of remembering the numbers better than recognizing the numbers from a list is vastly lower. Two ways information is encoded efficiently is through rehearsal and spacing. An example of spacing would be, instead of cramming the night before a test, studying over the course of a couple of days before. Rehearsal is also an effective way to encode information for storage. The more you repeat something, the more likely you are going to remember it. The movie Finding Nemo clearly uses this form of memory encoding. Dory uses repetition of the address on the back of the swim goggles, P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney.

http://www.hark.com/clips/hkfcgctrkm-im-going-to-p-sherman-42-wallaby-way-sydney


Fast Forward to Minute 7

Dory repeated the address over and over again until it was stored in her memory. When she read Sydney on one of the underwater pipes, she recalled the address, using recognition. This is the perfect example of recognition and memory. The use of repetition as well as recognition better helped her remember the address. To this day, even I remember this address because it has been imprinted into my long term memory for no use of any relevance to anything besides the fact that I know its from Finding Nemo.

Classical Conditioning

This week’s chapter was about learning and the different ways our brains learn. In class, we focused greatly on classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is taking a neutral stimulus and turning it into a conditioned stimulus. The original test that Ivan Pavlov conducted for classical conditioning was with a dog and its response to food. When the unconditioned stimulus, the food, was presented to the dog, the unconditioned response was salivation. Pavlov then tested the neutral stimulus, the bell, which had no connection to the dog food and came to the conclusion that the bell had no effect on salivation in the dog. When the bell was rung with the presentation of food, the dog would salivate. After conditioning, the bell became the conditioned stimulus, and when rung without food, the dog would salivate. Pavlov thus discovered that a neutral stimulus could be conditioned to be a conditioned stimulus. The video I posted represents classical conditioning.

In this video, the unconditioned stimulus is the slap to the head. The unconditioned response is pain to the individual being slapped. The neutral stimulus is the song on the phone. When the song on the phone was played, the guy in the video would slap the other guy. Eventually on the fourth day, the other guy reacted by trying to protect himself. Thus the conditioned stimulus became the song on the phone and the conditioned response was defense from being slapped or not wanting to experience pain from the slap. Another example would be giving a nickname to a friend. For example, my friends name is Matt, but everyone calls him Coop. When he was first given the nickname, he did not react to it, but as more people called him Coop, he responded to it. Now he is called Coop so often that he thinks getting called by Matt is weird. This is a perfect example of classical conditioning.