1. Is there such a thing as ESP?
There may be no topic in psychology quite as controversial, or as fascinating, as extrasensory perception, or ESP. There are three forms of ESP that psychologists study: 1. Telepathy- transfer of information from one person to another without known mediation of sensory communication, 2. Clairvoyance- acquisition of information about places, people, or events without mediation of known senses, and 3. Precognition- acquisition of a future event that could not be anticipated through any known processes of inference. In a study of telepathy, or psi(link is external), for example, participants are seated in two separate rooms; while one “transmits” signals, the other attempts to “receive” them. However, critics argue that many of the effects demonstrated in ESP experiments can simply be explained by faulty methodology and sensory “leakage” in which participants inadvertently give away the answers. The only extra-sensory feature of ESP would be, if this were true, the fact that people who can perform feats involving ESP are actually very good at reading people’s very subtle signals.
2. Why do we dream?
Our dreams mystify us and often leave us waking up confused, disoriented, frightened, or perhaps very, very satisfied. Freud, of course, proposed that our dreams represent unconscious wishes that we’re afraid to express in our waking life. The most recent explanations aren’t totally incompatible with this theory. According to the activation-synthesis model(link is external), dreams are stories that we create out of the random stimulation that occurs in the brain while we sleep. The updated activation-integration-modulation (AIM) model proposes that dreams reflect the activity of regions of the brain active at a particular moment as well as the activity of particular neurotransmitters. This neuroscience explanation regards the stories we make up as reflecting, in part, our hidden desires, but they are not primarily the products of repressed wishes.
3. How can we motivate ourselves more effectively through reinforcement?
We’d all like to be more effective in reaching our goals, and according to behaviorists, the way to improve our effectiveness is by rewarding ourselves for the little steps that take us closer and closer to those desirable outcomes. First, find something you really like to do or something you’d like to have that can, realistically, serve as a reward. Then, take the goal that you are hoping to achieve that, realistically, you could achieve but just haven’t succeeded at yet. Next, work backward from that goal to your present state. Arrange to give yourself those desired rewards as you inch closer from where you are now to the desired end point. As you start to make progress, only give yourself a reward when you’ve moved forward from where you are now. For example, if you’d like to cut back on your television watching and instead read more often, reward yourself by allowing yourself to watch television only when you’ve read for 20 minutes, then 30, then maybe 2 hours. By the time you’ve gotten to the 2 hour mark, who knows, you may enjoy reading so much that you won’t even care about watching television anymore.
4. How can we get our working memory to work for us?
Working memory is that part of your memory system that allows you to keep information actively in “consciousness,” either because you are learning something for the first time, or are trying to recall something you learned in the past. Theoretically, you could keep information in working memory indefinitely if you thought about it and nothing else, but obviously this would not be a very feasible task. The trick is for you to keep information for as long as you need it or be able to haul it into working memory when you need it. Psychology has three simple tricks to help your working memory: 1. Chunking- by organizing large amounts of information into a smaller number of units (the “magical number of 7 plus or minus 2”), you will be able to store the information much more efficiently but then you have to use step #2; 2. Encoding so you can retrieve- you have to be able to pull up the organizational framework you created at the time of encoding if you’re going to be able to use it later, so you need to follow the adage “If you don’t encode, you can’t retrieve,”; 3. Using “deep” processing- According to levels of processing theory, the more meaning you put into what you’re trying to remember, the better your chances of remembering it. Even putting a list of words you need to remember into a sentence, rather than just memorizing them through rote, will give you that deeper processing edge. At the same time, though, we know from eyewitness memory research, people’s memory is highly unreliable. We are likely to forget small details, or change the small details of experiences to fit with what we had expected to have happen. The classic eyewitness memory research asked participants to estimate the speed of two cars involved in an accident. If they were asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” into each other, participants estimated the speed as higher than if asked how fast they were going when they “contacted” each other. Similarly, people can be misled into thinking that an item was on a word list when it in fact was not. If you read a list of words that all relate to the category “sweet” (but don’t actually include “sweet”), people will think that the word “sweet” was on the list. Relying on your own, or other people’s, eyewitness memory is a risky proposition. If you need to remember something that’s happening in front of you, either write it down or snap a picture with your smartphone!
6. How can we communicate more effectively?
Good communication is the key to our interactions with other people. When we think of how to communicate, we often focus on spoken or written language. However, when it comes to language, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. For example, when you speak you, by definition, must get your point across in linear fashion, meaning that the first words you utter in a sentence will guide the listener to understanding what will follow. Saying “I’m sorry “ at the beginning of a conversation will have a much greater impact, for example, then throwing your apology in at the end of a long explanation. The tone in which you speak lets your listener know whether you’re asking a question or making a statement. However, if you’re like many people, you may find that you speak your sentences as if they were questions. This can make you sound less confident and can undercut your effectiveness when you’re trying to convince someone to believe that you know what you’re talking about. Your body language may say even more about you than your verbal language. Most people fail to look others in the eye, slouch, jiggle their hands and feet when they’re nervous, and reveal what they’re really feeling inside through the tiny “microexpressions” on their faces. Learn to control your body language, and you can control the impression you make on others.
7. What is intelligence (and why should we care)?
This is definitely one of psychology’s “big” questions. The study of intelligence has a long history in psychology, going back at least to the early 1900s when educators sought to test the mental abilities of schoolchildren. There is no one, set definition that psychologists generally agree upon nor is there even now one clear-cut way to measure it. There are also many controversies regarding such issues as whether intelligence is inherited or not, whether men or women are smarter, whether it can be “trained,” and whether being “intelligent’ even makes a difference in your real-life accomplishments. However, psychologists seem to be coming to an understanding that intelligence is more than just academic knowledge and that any good definition must include such attributes as practical knowledge (“street smarts”), self-understanding (emotional intelligence), and understanding of others (“wisdom”). We should care about what intelligence is because these skills extend well beyond the classroom and can enrich our lives, and the lives of others, in important ways.
8. What does it mean to be self-actualized?
According to Abraham Maslow, who was instrumental in developing the theory of self-actualization, self-actualization is a continuous process of realizing our own unique potential. The theory proposes the famous hierarchy of needs to show that self-actualization sits at the top of all of our motivations. Often, this theory is wrongly described as suggesting that you can’t consider fulfilling your higher-order needs until your lower-order needs are fulfilled. However, you only have to think of a few examples of some of the most famous self-actualized individuals to see that this is not necessarily the case. In fact, Maslow himself believed that many self-actualized people specifically chose to make sometimes life-threatening personal sacrifices in order to fulfill their inner potential. It’s also important to realize that there is no one state of “perfection” that characterizes self-actualization but, instead, each of us has our own idiosyncratic way of achieving inner fulfillment.
9. How does the mind-body connection affect our emotions?
Psychologists from William James to Richard Lazarus have struggled with the notion of specifying the ways our mental states are affected by our physical states, and vice versa. William James proposed a theory of emotions that emphasized the body’s role in producing emotional experiences. Physiologist Carl Lange proposed a similar theory, and so the theory is known by both of their names. The theory proposes that our bodily changes follow directly from the perceptions of an “exciting fact,” and that these bodily changes are the emotions. Physiologist Walter Cannon, regarded the thalamus as the key relay station between the cortex and the autonomic nervous system. An emotional stimulus activates the thalamus which, in turn, activates the autonomic nervous system (which then produces arousal) and the cortex (which interprets the event and the experience of the emotion). According to Stanley Schachter and his colleague Jerome Singer, emotions are the product of autonomic arousal and the reactions of other people in the environment, or context. The facial feedback hypothesis proposes, instead, that our emotions are determined by the muscles of our face. If you want to be happy, this suggests, you should smile. Even though no one of these theories may be completely correct, psychologists seem to agree that our emotions are defined, at least in part, by the responses of our bodies, with perhaps the added coloring provided by our thoughts about a given situation.
10. Which is more important, nature or nurture?
Here’s one of the truly enduring questions of all time. However, despite what you may have learned in your introductory psychology class, there’s no longer a question of “vs” in the nature-nurture debate. The question instead is a matter of “and,” and “how.” For example, through the process called epigenesis, while pregnant a stressed mother can change the expression of genes in her unborn child. Other ways that nature and nurture interact include niche-picking in which children’s genetic predisposition leads them to seek certain environments which, in turn, further alter their development. In addition to these possibilities, the fact is that studies on identical twins, even those reared apart, aren’t all that definitive. For example, true “identical” twins only occur in 1% of all monozygotic twins. Furthermore, when we hear the amazing similarities among identical twins reared apart, we forget that they don’t share every single characteristic. Also, the researchers in these studies were not blind to the hypotheses of the study. The people who adopt the twins reared apart may also have some of the same characteristics, particularly because they had to pass stringent criteria before they could adopt a child. Finally, identical twins who grew up in the same historical period, even if they were reared apart, were also subject to similar influences. We do know that early parenting matters a great deal, especially in providing young children with a secure base of attachment. However, people are remarkably resilient and change is possible throughout life. The good news is that, even if nature didn’t give you everything you wished it had, and even if your parents weren’t always there for you when you were little, you don’t have to be fated to play out the hand that life dealt you, no matter what your age.