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Post 9 - Dear AP Psych Students

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     I'd like to preface this letter by reassuring you that earning a good grade in AP Psych isn't difficult; however, you do need to earn it. The majority of the grades you'll receive are based on completion and diligence, so if you simply complete your work, you won't need to approach the classroom feeling stressed about an project or quiz. You may be tempted to test Mrs. Halfen's generously lax approach to due dates, but I'd suggest knocking out the assignments of each unit a couple days before the target deadline. Each project has the potential to help you learn more about Psychology and thus bolster your knowledge for vocab quizzes and, later, the AP exam. The best thing you can do in this class is to be proactive and genuinely try to engage with the material - which shouldn't be difficult with Mrs. Halfen as your teacher.      Initially, I struggled in forming interest for the first couple of units. I was expecting to take personality quizzes or anal...

Post 8 - Psych Memes

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                              Go here for a more in depth look at the complexities of the bystander effect                                     Don't go here , it has frankly too much information about the psychosexual stages. Click here to learn more about the procedures and implications about Asch's conformity experiment. This site has more information on Ivan Pavlov's classical conditioning. Look here to find out more about the serial position effect and how it changes based on context.

Post 7 - How Good is My Memory?

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Test 1 : Short-term Memory for Pictures I chose to take the test with animal pictures because remembering photos of cute animals seemed fun and easy. It was. I'm not sure if this memory test is as valid as the others because in the first test, I had trouble assigning meaning to the variety of words that I needed to memorize. In this test, every picture made me feel something, such as "oooh cute fox" or "wow cool eagle" or "uhh what is that thing?" It was easy to assign emotion or meaning to each picture, so it was also easy to recognize repeated photos.   Test 2 : Short-term Memory This test was fairly straightforward: read over a list of words, focus on them briefly, and retype them in the given blanks. I think it's a valid way to assess one's capacity for short-term memory as long as the test taker doesn't cheat or spend an excessive amount of time reading the words. I myself read the list twice over and scored about average, so attemptin...

Post 6 - Social Psych in Real Life

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    Theme: Interactions in Multiplayer Games (guilds)      Modern technology allows us to text or converse with people across the world. For fans of multiplayer videogames, this technological expansion has led to the popularization of a social mechanic that assists players in communicating and pooling resources between one another: guilds. To optimize their strategic cooperation and resource efficiency, many guilds set up messaging channels outside of their specific game; and wherever people interact, principles of social psychology can be applied. Compliance (Part of the top 50 defense teams used by the top 30 guilds)      In the game I play, guilds can fight other guilds in a game mode called Guild Wars. Each member of their respective guild has a set defense that their opponent can attack, and a crucial component of winning a guild war involves constantly upgrading your units and defense. Recently, I've noticed that guild members have extr...

Post 5 - Anything!

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       Have you ever noticed that the sketch you hastily drew on the back of your math homework or the barely shaded result from procrastinating at 2 am somehow manages to look better than the line art you spent hours perfecting? Well, there may be a psychological reason behind this quality disparity.      When you are sketching, you're not aiming for perfect lines. You'll draw over a line or make multiple lines as a guide for your line art, where your perfect lines will shine. However, your  brain when seeing a sketch will generalize your messy chicken scratch and interpret it as one beautiful line.                                                  Here is a messy sketch vs what your brain really sees:     Basically, it's hard to make a perfect line when tracing the sketch, and if you're n...

Post 4 - Senses and Stuff

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     As the daughter of an optometrist and a wearer of contact lenses, I diligently clean my contacts every morning. Now, this constant cleaning may seem somewhat unnecessary; after all, my contacts are actually hard lenses that never leave the controlled environment of the inside of my house because I wear them during the night. However, for those of you who don't have the time to routinely undergo the grueling ordeal of cleaning your lenses - be they hard or soft - every morning, it may benefit you and your vision to know about a certain microbial corneal infection called acanthamoeba keratitis - or, more simply put, a brain-eating amoeba with the potential to infect your eye. According to Mike McKnight and Jordan Gartner of KKTV , a young woman infected with the amoeba administered about 60 eye drops a day while waiting on the possibility of getting a corneal transplant. She suspects the infection originated from a lake she visited in the summer or yard work she perfor...

Post 3 - BioHero

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Anesthetic Giles had always been an empathetic child. His parents, noticing his helpfulness, were proud beyond belief. Whenever people were in trouble, their little boy would rush to them and resolve it. They had been unsure about exactly how to properly parent, as Giles was their first child, but they knew they had done something right with him. Well, until the fish. "Mommy, he's hurting!" whined Giles, pulling at her sweater in the direction of the small tank. She wanted to dissuade his silly ideas about the fish without sounding too dismissive or discouraging his helpful attitude, but playing along became harder the more he got worked up about the stupid fish. "For the fifth time, Giles, he's a fish. He'll be okay." "But you said feeding him would help but it didn't! Timmy needs a pet doctor." As she imagined a good parent would, she funneled all her confusion and frustration at his nonsense into one heavy sigh. "Okay Giles. We'...