Introduction My first impression about Understanding Human Behaviour, Psychology 103 was that I thought the class would be teaching individuals especially students about human behavior, counseling, and evaluation of an individual mental state (health). But after completing this course, I realized that this course not only teaches you about human behavior, but goes in-depth as to why people behave the way they do. We looked at the different Theorists like Abraham Maslow with the Hierarchy of Needs, Sigmund Freud, who came up with the Level of Personality, what is the Id, Superego and the Ego as well as the psychosexual stages of development which are the anal, oral, phallic, latency and the genital, culture it terms of how it impacts society and individual, discrimination, prejudice, gender, diversification, motivation and self in terms of self actualization and how an individual can achieve it. This class also encouraged critical thinking where each individual had to apply what he or she learned in class to their everyday life. In the first week of class Miss told us that we would be covering Units 1, 2 and 3 for this course. She gave us a course outline of the different topics that we were going to cover. For each unit, this included Unit 1 Explaining Behaviour, the Scientific Schools of Behaviour, the Introspective Schools and Nature vs. Nurture and Freewill vs. Determinism. The topic that was a bit challenging for me at first in Unit 1 was Introspective Schools, which covers the Psychoanalytical, the humanistic and cross- cultural perspective. At first when miss was discussing these topics in class, I was a bit confused, and all I could remember was the different theorist that was associated with the different perspective. For example, with classical conditioning, and operant conditioning, I was joining these two with each other up until miss posted two videos up on e-classroom that gave me a better understanding of the two. With these conditioning, it is practiced in my life. For example, I have a little nephew, who is 5 years old. At the time he was only 3. Everytime he would cry when mom and dad was going out, and I would say to him we were going to get candy in the shop, and after mom and dad left I would take him and he would stop crying and forget mom and dad left. This is an example of operant conditioning.

Unit 2 In Unit 2, there were many topics discussed but the one that was most controversial was culture. Many people might argue that culture has to do with race, gender, and ethnicity only while others would say that culture is the values and norms that an individual learns when growing up and that culture can affect an individual, a society and even a whole country.

Page 1 I was one of those individuals who said that culture was the values and norms that an individual learns when growing up (embedded into us from infancy) and deals with the different ethnic groups in society. But after doing this topic in this course, I realized that culture was more than that. It played a very important role in an individual life and society by shaping it. It can be learned when it is passed from one generation to the next, this process is called enculturation. Culture can be influence by many factors which are ecological, historical, social, geographical and natural resource. In addition, culture is said to be discussed in a descriptive, historical, and normative way. During class when we were discussing this particular topic, I was very shock as to the seriousness of culture and how an individual of another culture can react to a particular culture that is different from theirs. For example, the Documentary of Daughter from Danang which is a story of a Vietnamese mother who after 22 years have been reunited with her Amerasian daughter who was taken from her and flown to the United Stated and was later adopted during the Vietnam War. In addition, this video also shows the bittersweet and challenges of the reunion. While watching this video in class I had mixed feeling about it. For example, during the first 50 minutes of the film, I was touched and happy after hearing Hiep story about her experiences growing up without a mother’s love even though she had a mother (adopted), she never felt that love and also wonder whether her real mother had loved her or not. After writing a few letters she had finally found her real mother and she wanted to meet her so she decided to take a trip to Danang Vietnam where her mother lived. After arriving from America to Vietnam Hiep had hugged her real mother after 20 year of not seeing her. At that very moment I felt happy to see the reunion between mother and daughter. Later she was then introduced to the rest of her Vietnamese family; her sisters, brother, cousins etc. After the first 52 minutes of the video coming down to the ending I was confused and angry by the behaviour of Hiep towards her family. For example, when Hiep said that she felt insulted by the fact that her younger sister had asked her for money and that she did not want to be look as a savior. Another one would be when she felt that her mother was being too clingy because she would not leave her side and would only touch her and she felt uncomfortable and needed a bit of space to breath. On the day of Heip’s departure her bothers had asked her if she could bring her mother to the United States of America and also if she could send some money for her on a monthly basis. She was very upset of them asking her for money and she began to cry and walked out of the room because she did not want to talk to anyone not even her mother and she quoted that she wished she could take back the time and never know none of this. After returning to the U.S.A. she never wrote nor sends money for

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them. In my opinion, I thought that she was rude and very unappreciative of her family and that she was wrong to behave the way she did. I thought she should have took the time to understand the culture of her Vietnamese family, then maybe she would have been able to understand them better but she did not, but then again I cannot blame her only because she grew up in a different culture, different from her real family and that the culture she knew showed discrimination against people of a different race because at a very young age she had to change the way she look which was like a Vietnamese into an American by perming her hair and learning to speak English and many people experience culture shock. To me it was very sad to see and know that many cultures feels that their culture is far more superior to others and presently in today’s world, I see that people and culture are changing but the world generally is far from being perfect when it come to culture. Unit 3 In my opinion, I thought that this unit was the easiest of the three. In this unit Miss had looked at emotional intelligence, motivation and self. After learning these topics during the last three weeks of class I have now realized who I am as a person, who I would like to become, what motivates me in life and what I can do to motivate myself. Furthermore, these topics especially self have taught me a bit more about myself as a person. It has opened my mind up to new ideas as to what is self, who I perceived myself to be to people and society and helped me grow as an individual. In today’s world not many young people like me have the opportunity to voice their own views and even vote. In Trinidad and Tobago once you are over the age of eighteen and is registered you can vote and the country has a youth forum ever year where students from all around the country gathering together to discussed issues that are happening in and around the world local and internationally. While in some countries like India and Pakistan many young people does not have the opportunity to vote or even voice their opinions because if they do then they will be persecuted or even killed. These countries does not place enough interest in the youths of today and I think that in order to help shape the future of the youths we as individual needs to motivate them to achieving the best whether it may be academically , sports, or family. Further, we have to guide them towards the right path and help them decide who they want to become as individuals. Lastly, I would like to say that the when miss was doing the Wheel of life in class I had no knowledge of the areas that I was weak in and after doing this exercise I realized that in order for me to be successful I need to balance my physical environment, fun and recreation, personal growth, romance, family and friends, health, finances and business/career.

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Experience This experience has helped me in many ways. It has opened my mind to being a critical thinker, creativity, discipline and knowledge because when I first started this class, I was unaware of what exactly was psychology till over the past 10 weeks. I have gained a level of knowledge and understanding about the whole concept of Psychology which has greatly helped me in my career path of becoming a Human Resource Manager, because I am now aware of people’s behaviours, and how I can deal with employees who have problems in terms of low self esteem, discrimination in the workplace, and motivation in term of encouraging employees to performed better. This course has also helped me to achieve my personal goal which is to be able to communicate better with people and enhance my critical thinking and behavior towards people.
Personal Learning
The main things that I have notice or learn that I want to remember is self and the different theorists who have contributed their knowledge to determine the behaviour of people and their experiment that have shown the reason why people behave the way they do. Example, the Albert Bandura Bobo Doll Experiment.
The things I learned about myself in the conduct of the various classes and team exercises and projects is I must be able and willing to works in teams or groups, communicate with people, be aware of what is taking place during class discussions, able to take notes and apply it to my projects or team exercise, must be understanding and reasonable and willing to work with others and lastly I must be discipline in what I do and a good team member and a critical thinker.
Class Experience
The one thing I like most about this class is how very interactive the students were with each other and the teacher. The students including myself were allowed to voice our opinions on topics discussed in class. We would also have small activities in class that was very educational and fun because everyone participated. For example, I remember when we had a class discussion about the Trayvon Martin vs. Zimmerman case many students had viewed their own opinion on the matter and the majority of us agreed that it was the system that had fail to do their job.
The one thing I disliked most in this class was when we had do our group projects, some persons were not doing their part as group members and not delivering what they had to do
Page 4 and as a result of their non-participation it caused a burden on the other members to complete the project because they had a due date to meet.
The activity that made the most impact on me was the group presentations which were held on Saturday 12, August, 2013 because I had learned new things pertaining to some countries like India, Pakistan, Netherland and United States of America in terms of their culture how different they all are to each other for example, in India their tradition in terms of marriage is completely different from Pakistan while Netherland culture is more opened when it comes to same sex marriage than America even though they are now on the path of accepting same sex marriage there is still a long way to go.
The material for this class is a lot but the lecturer breaks it down into smaller pieces so that it would not be too much to grasp and the exercise was a very creative way of getting the students more involved because that was one way I started liking the course . I would not change anything about the course nor its contents.

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