Psychological Studies

Psychological Studies

Psychology is, of course, the study of the mind, a scientifically designed discipline studying human mental processes, as well as, behavior. Further, psychological studies differentiate into several sub-disciplines, such as cognitive, abnormal, developmental, computational and social psychology.

Many wonder how it’s like to be a psychologist or to have a degree in the field. Others fail to see the difference between the two. The truth of the matter is that whether a first degree in behavioral science grants one the right to practice the therapeutic craft, trade or profession, depends on one’s geographic location and jurisdiction.

A French saying “la vie en rose”, literally translated as “life in pink”, means a happy life. A pink, purple and lilac sky with interchanging stars – a perfect, dream world. But can you say you feel happiness looking at this picture? Image: Copyright © Elena

Many pre-university students think that by choosing the social science as a major, they will be focusing on psychopathology. However, while a course in abnormal psychology would certainly cover disorders listed in the DSM’s (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual) most recent version, social, developmental or computational psychology need not concentrate on the matter. For instance, the social branch, centers on such topics as behavioral aggression, emotion management and display, popularity and peer group acceptance status, interrelationships and interconnections. Conversely, developmental psychology follows the individual’s growth and development throughout the lifespan, while computational psychology relies on computer modeling and quantitative methods to gain insight into the mysteries of the psyche.

Psychologists work in a variety of fields and occupations. Nonetheless (likely the most used adverb in the English translation of Der Steppenwolf by German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse), psychological theory is based on naturalistic observation, experimental methods and research analysis and derivative conclusions.

Moreover, experiments are among the most trusted method by some, since it allows for isolation of effects and controlling variables. However, there is the problem that individuals and the environment are influenced by effects upon it. For example, the Hawthorne effect, or the tendency of people to behave differently when being watched or in a laboratory setting. The latter is likewise likely seen in Stanley Milgram’s sobering obedience experiments.

Also, the social science relies extensively on experiments, although naturalistic observation, surveys (questionnaires), personal, automated, structured and unstructured interviews and other techniques are used by researchers in shedding light on psychological phenomena.

An important area is ethics and the emphasis on disclosure. Today, experimenters must disclose to their subjects a lot of elements in a study, at least after participation or results obtained and data compiled. Consequently, ethics committees for different aspects of the processes are set up, and scientists must comply with the guidelines.

Finally, close or related disciplines involve criminology and sociology. In conclusion, by choosing to study humanities and the social sciences, one likely encounters puzzling psychological phenomena.

Copyright © 2011 Megan Jorgensen. All rights reserved.

Avatars and Neuroscience

Avatars and Neuroscience

Aside from Cameron’s movie in 3D, Avatar, taking place in the distant world of Pandora, the site SecondLife is a popular virtual alternative, so to speak. According to Gajendra and colleagues (2001), SecondLife constitutes an online community, in part created by its members and with its own set of rules, games, communication media and even e-business opportunities.

Needless to say, MMORPGs or Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games are very popular. They typically include some sort of quest to accomplish and tasks to complete, but they likewise fascinate with their social engagement. The virtual worlds of gaming construct an online community, which by itself exercises a range of important socio-cognitive skills.

The very first video games were much less elaborate than contemporary computer graphics, but still, fantasy elements such as the ones in the role-playing games were present. Image: Elena.

In psychology and cyberpsychology, virtual worlds have been looked at as having great potential for learning, such as second language acquisition and e-learning. Although fantasy and the real worlds rarely coincide, a lot of skills can be transferred from specialized video games, as demonstrated from their widespread use in training and education.

With technological advances, avatars and virtual reality have gathered a lot of interest. Naturally, these developments have led to scientific analysis, as in such fields as cyberpsychology and neuroscience.

Avatars are the virtual, 2D or 3D, animated, graphical representations of the self. Interestingly, researchers Ganesh and coauthors (2011) found that the area associated with self-concept in the 3rd person, coincides with the left inferior parietal lobule, suggesting self-identification with the 3D model, a finding supported by cyberpsychological theories. Additionally, avatar related thinking recruited neural populations in the rostral anterior cingulate gyrus, which the coauthors interpret as evidence of emotional relevance. The work likewise draws attention to brain plasticity, as players and users learn to play the game and accommodate to the new virtual world. Interestingly, the authors also talk about self-adornment and bodily enhancements, reminiscent of the cybernetic extraterrestrial life form the Borg in the Star Trek franchise world. Finally, the publication shows that gamers may be experiencing phenomena akin to heautoscopy (an illusion of perception).

CyberNeuroscience Video Transcript:

Avatars have been brought to public attention in part by Cameron's movie - Avatar. Still, even long before the motion picture, online social and gaming communities have popularized the phenomenon. Spending time on Websites such as Second Life, or playing games such as World of Warcraft, persons may indeed be experiencing a sort of virtual, alternate life. So much so, that psychologists have tried to shed light on socio-cognitive skills and other internal, mental processes experienced while playing with, or acting through, oneÕs surreal 3D form. In light of such and related developments, the field of cyberpsychology has emerged, while neuroscientists have recorded greater activity in self-referential brain areas of subjects thinking about their Internet selves. Along these lines, researchers found greater involvement of the parietal lobe, as well as, the cingulate gyrus in reflecting on one's avatar. By the same token, gyrus is the singular of gyri, and sulcus of sulci, the ridges and clefts composing the cerebral cortex, respectively.

References:

• Gajenda, S., Ye, Q., Sun, W. & Daying, Z. (2001). Significance of communication and e-business in Second Life virtual world. Information Technology Research Journal, 1 (1): 1-12.
• Ganesh, S., van Schie, H. T., de Lange, F. P., Thompson, E. & Wigboldus (2011). How the brain goes virtual: Distinct cortical regions of the person-processing network are involved in self-identification with virtual agents. Cerebral Cortex, 1-9.

Experimenting with unconventional lipstick and nail polish colors has been popular among adherents of the Goth subculture, who were the first to opt for black in both cosmetic choices. Image: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen.

Afterimage and Perception

Afterimage and Perception

Afterimages are an optical illusion, which consists of an image persisting after one has ceased looking at a picture or light source. Positive afterimages are less documented, and are believed to be due to neural adaptation. Conversely, negative afterimages are formed due to their imprint on the retina (the lining at the back of the eye).

As outlined elsewhere, vision is achieved thank to photoreceptors, or rods and cones. Further, According to the opponent theory, cones, which are the ones that can register color, get less sensitive with prolonged stimulation and transmit a weaker signal.

As can be seen in the images below, red leaves a green afterimage, blue a yellow one and yellow a blue one. Black and white constitute likewise opposite colors. To see these, one has to stare at the colored square for 30 seconds – 1 minute, and then look at the white space. A corresponding afterimage should appear.

Red Afterimage

Blue Afterimage

Yellow Afterimage

Perception

Perception encompasses the sensation, coding and interpretation of external stimuli. Sensation differs from perception in that it is only the physical recording of stimuli, without the interpretation. Interpretation, in this case, does not necessarily mean the conscious making sense of events, but rather how phenomena are physically interpreted by the brain. At least as traditionally conceived, human beings enjoy five senses: sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste.

To illustrate, one may look (pun intended) at the journey from photons to the conscious understanding of this sentence. Vision’s first step is for photoreceptors to capture the light reflected from an object. There are two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. Rods greatly outnumber cones, and the former are at the periphery of the retina, whereas the latter are at the center (fovea). Rods are more sensitive and enable seeing in the dark; cones work better in the light, display finer acuity and are the only ones to perceive colors.

Of the three cone types, each length is associated with a different part of the spectrum, measured in nanometers (nm). Short of using technology, it is impossible for the human eye to detect light below 400 nm (ultraviolet) and above 700 nm (infrared). Ultraviolet is exclusively accessible to certain bees, while only some snakes’ visibility continuum encompasses infrared.

Cone Type               Short                  Medium             Long

Wavelength        About 420 nm        About 530 nm    About 560 nm

Color perceived            Blue                    Yellow              Red

The receptors transmit the image recorded along the optic nerve. Transduction (the transformation of the imprint into electrical current) occurs at this stage. The exact place where the optic nerve leaves the retina, the optic disk, contains no receptors, so there is a blind spot in vision, which we are unconscious of because the brain compensates (fills in the logical missing piece based on surroundings). If desired, one can actually notice how a tiny object will disappear if the exact site (outer upper side of the vision field) is located.

The optic nerve leaves the eye laterally, and is cross-connected: the left hemisphere analyses input from the right side, and vice versa. The contralateral relation stands for most of the body, the precise reason why a patient who suffered a stroke to the right hemisphere is unable to move his or her left leg, hand, hear with the left ear, etc.

The Wada intracarotid hemispheric dominance test is pretty amazing. To appreciate this, it may be helpful to first localize speech production and comprehension: usually left hemisphere, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, respectively. Through an artery that leads directly to the left hemisphere, sodium amobarbital is injected, so that side of the brain is anesthetized. Subjects almost instantly lose the capacity to lift their right arm, and become mute, for the duration of the barbiturate’s effects.

Vision has been extensively studied in the cat, and even more so in the rhesus macaque. The primate brain being the closest to the human brain makes monkeys excellent subjects for neuroscientific research. Behind the cat’s retina is the tapetum lucidum, that - to make a long story short - functions similar to a mirror reflecting light, this is why Felis catus’ eyes glow in the dark.

Smell is somewhat similar in path, only this time the relay stations are olfactory receptors in the nose and the olfactory nerve. Audition’s counterparts are the stereocillia and auditory nerve, while touch gets more complicated: mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors and several nerves are involved. Finally taste is achieved by chemoreceptors (commonly known in this location as taste buds, topically organized according to flavor) through other cranial nerves, such as the trigeminal and glossopharyngeal. Notwithstanding, smell greatly contributes to taste.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” (C.G. Jung). Illustration: Megan Jorgensen.

Diet, Exercise and Eating Disorders

Diet, Exercise and Eating Disorders

In the Middle Ages, the fatter a woman was, the more beautiful she was considered. Indeed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and beauty standards evolve and change with communities. Furthermore, today, different societies attribute different traits to diverse beauty elements. In most modern societies, the thin female body is idealized and the emaciated waif image is promoted by the media to a significant degree. Some academics believe that such idealization and subsequent internalization of the thin ideal, leads many girls and women to suffer from eating disorders, discussed later in the present short essay.

Diets are dissimilar and vary not only in terms of their efficiency, but also in terms of their health benefits. For example, crash diets are rumoured to be inefficient and to cause health problems. Therefore, crash dieting is not only detrimental to your health, but may not make you lose weight, especially in the long run. Actually, this is a very important part of diet and exercise impact on weight maintenance, weight control, weight loss and weight gain: the long term. Because many diets may appear to make you slimmer in the short run by making you lose water the body holds naturally, but they remain inefficient in the long haul.

An anorexic Woman. Illustration by Elena

Further, countless studies have been done on how diet and exercise interacts with weight control. For example, motivation to maintain and/or lose weight may be extrinsic or intrinsic, just as is the case with motivation in general. Motivation can be intrinsic or internal, and extrinsic or external. Extrinsic motivation remains tied to external rewards and is generally considered less reliable, since if the rewards disappear, so does the desire to perform the activity. Indeed, researchers have shown that people who were intrinsically motivated to exercise, and who exercised with vigour and repeatedly, kept the weigh off for longer periods after an intervention program was carried out.

Alternatively, eating disorders may be viewed as the unhealthy, abnormal continuum of dieting and exercising. To illustrate, wanting to be fit and enrolling in a weight-lifting program is a healthy endeavour, to be praised in many cases. However, counting calories may become an obsession for some and turn into an anorexic or bulimic nightmare. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are some of the most common eating disorders which have to do with excessive preoccupation with weight and body proportions, and also a distorted self-image. Anorexia and bulimia affect mostly women and homosexual men, although extreme bodybuilding has been proposed as the equivalent of the mental illnesses in heterosexual men.

Notwithstanding, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating comprise disorders compiled in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – fifth version). Antidepressant medication may at times be prescribed to treat these in conjunction with other therapies. Moderation seems to be one factor distancing disordered eating from healthy attention to one’s diet and physical activity, but others claim that it is the point when the mind is no longer in control of the regimens, but the calorie counting and strenuous exercising take over and one loses control. Others, mostly scholars, point to neurochemical imbalances, and other genetic, biological and scientific explanations drawing the line between healthy and unhealthy dieting, and normal and excessive going to the gym.

Poker

Poker

Cut the deck, please: A quick review of how to play poker

If you want to learn how to play bridge, you need to either read a book or take lessons. But here are the rules and some tricks too the trade for this popular card game that almost anoyone can play. That's no guarantee, of course, that you'll draw good cards, but at least you'll be prepared to call the other guy's bet.

Poker - five-card draw

Poker pits one player against another. Casinos that provide poker tables make their money by taking a percentage of the winnings or charging by the hour for the use of their table and dealer. If you are not an expert, a casino is definitely not the place to test your skill. Better to wager chips or change in the comfort of your own home

There are hundreds of card games based onslight modification of standard poker of “five-card draw”. Common variations include adding wild cards, changing the way in which players bet, and altering the size of each hand. The goal is always the same: get a better hand (selection of cards) than the other players.

To play five-card draw, shuffle a regular 52-card deck and deal 5 cards to each of three to seven players. Typically each player plays a small sum, called an “ante,” for the privilege of seeing his or her hand. All bets (and antes) are placed in the pot, a pile of money in the center of the table. Players bet on their cards in a clockwise fashion, starting at the dealer's left. The first player has several betting options:

Fold: Throwing in his or her cards and sitting out the rest of the hand. Any time a player folds at this stage, the ante remains in the pot and goes to the winner.

Bet: Placing a wager in the pot.

Pass: Choosing not to make a wager and allowing the next player to go.

If the first player doesn't make a bet, then the next player has the same options. Once a player has made a bet, however, other players may no longer pass, and are required to do one of the following:

Fold: And lose one's bet and ante.

Call: Match the other player's bets by placing an equal wager into the pot.

Raise: Place a higher wager than others have bet into the pot. All other players will need to match this raised bet in order to stay in the game.

After a round of betting, all remaining players are then allowed to exchange up to three of their cards with those from the top of the remaining deck in the same order that the cards were dealt. At this time, the players have a second round of betting. After this round, all remaining players show their cards to each other. The player with the highest hand wins the entire pot.

Cards are ranked in the following order, from lowest to highest: 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, Jack,Queen, King, Ace. Below are a table that helps illustrate the ranking. Each level of the table beats all hands below it. For example, even the lowest straight (2,3,4,6) will beat the highest three of a kind (Ace, Ace, Ace, King, Queen),

If two players have the same type of hand, the one with higher cards wins the hand. For example, a player with a 9,9,9, Hack, 2(Three 9s) would beat a player with a 6,6,6,Ace, Queen (three 6s). Extra cards, such as the Ace, Queen, Jack, and 2 in this example, only matter when two players have identical winning combinations. For example, a player with a 9,9,5,5, King (two pair, with a King) would beat a player with a 9,9,5,5, Queen (two pair, with a Queen).

A poker table. Credit image: Elena.

Low-hand Poker

The rules for this game are identical to poker, except for an exciting 180-degree switch. In low-hand poker, it is the player with the lowest (and not the highest) hand who wins. The lowest hand possible is a 2,3,4,5,7, which is known as a “seven-high” hand. There is no such thing as a six-high, because a 2,3,4,5,6 would make a straight. In this game, it is common to see players discarding Aces and pairs of cards to rid themselves of their beasty hand.

High-low Poker

Two players split the pot – the one with the highest hand and the one with the lowest hand. If all but one player folds, then the entire pot goes to the winner.

Five-card Stud

Unlike draw, this game begins by dealing only two cards to each player. One of these cards is face down and one is face up, in plain view of all players at the table. Each player is allowed to look at his or her facedown card, and then a round of betting ensues. Betting starts with the player showing the highest card. After this round, another card is placed face up for each player (so that each player has two cards showing and one hidden card) and there is another round of betting. Again, betting starts with the players showing the highest cards. This pattern continues until each player has five cards. At any time during the game, a player can fold and the person with the highest hand at the end wins.

Seven-card Stud

This is an extremely lively and often high-stakes game. It is played in a similar fashion to five-card stud, except that the game begins by dealing three cards to each player – two are face down and one is face up. Rounds of betting are then interspersed with receiving additional face-up cards until each player has two face-down cards and four face-up cards. At this time, a final card is dealt face down and the final round of betting occurs.

Players can use any of their seven cards to make their best five-card hand. The catch to this game is that the odds are thrown haywire. Having seven cards makes it much easier to achieve good hands. It is common to see full houses, straights, and flushes.

Baseball

Baseball is a popular variation on seven-card stud, which makes the chances of achieving a high hand ridiculously easy. The game has wild cards, ones that can represent any other card in the deck at the player's discretion. In the game, all 3s and 9s (the number of strikes and innings in baseball) are wild. But they come with a price; a player must either purchase 3s and 9s (at a pre-determined price) if they are dealt these cards face up or they must fold the hand. If a player is dealt a 4 face up (the number of balls in baseball), they are immediately dealt another card face down.

Because of the wild cards in baseball, and the possibility of having more than seven cards (if a 4 is dealt), it is common for player to obtain the absurd (five of a kind). For example, a hand of 5,5,5,3,9 would be five 5s. Five of a kind is the highest hand possible, and beats a royal flush.

What Beats What

Royal Flush: The highest straight flush – 10, J, Q, K, A all of the same suit (number - 4, odds of obtaining - 1:649,739)

Straight Flush: A straight, and all five cards are of the same suit (number - 40, odds of obtaining – 1:64,973).

Four of a Kind:  Four cards of the same value with one extra (number – 624, odds of obtaining – 1: 4,164).

Full House: Three cards of one value and two of another. (number – 3,744. Odds of obtaining – 1:693).

Flush: Five cards of the same suit, such as five spades (number – 5,108, odds of obtaining – 1:508).

Straight: Five cards in a sequence of different suits, such as 5-6-7-8-9 (number: 10,200, odds of obtaining – 1:254).

Three of a Kind: Three cards of the same value with two extra (number – 54,912; odds of obtaining – 1:46).

Two pair: Two pairs of cards with one extra (number – 123, 552; 1:20).

One Pair (Two of a kind): Two cards of the same value with three extra (number – 1,098,240. Odds of obtaining – 1:1.37).

High Card: In a hind with no winning combination of cards, the highest card. (Number – 1,302, 540; 1:1).