Applying Psychology to Fight Club (Spoiler Alert)

In this movie, the narrator, AKA Tyler Durden, clearly had psychological problems. From the beginning, he had insomnia and needed to go to cancer groups to sleep. At these meetings, he truly let it go and cried. Then, Tyler set up Fight Clubs all over America. These Fight clubs in themselves represented Tyler's sadistic nature; he got pleasure from not only fighting but watching other fight. Finally, Tyler created a separate persona to act for him when setting up these Fight Clubs. Brad Pitt became his other identity. So if I were a psychologists, I would diagnose Tyler with Dissociative Identity Disorder. As a psychoanalytic therapist, I would use Freud's talking cure. I would let Tyler use free association and say whatever comes to his mind. I would also examine his dreams and try to determine his repressed memories. The therapy would be very frequent and over a long period of time.
I could also use the humanistic approach. As a humanistic therapist, I would use Carl Roger's client centered therapy. This involves active listening, which is asking guided questions and restatements. I would try to add as little as possible and act more as a guide. The whole point of this therapy is to work towards self growth.

Example of a Dialogue During Humanistic Therapy:

Me: Hello Tyler, you can start by telling me how your day was. (I have my notebook ready to take notes)

Tyler: Alright, today was another crappy day in my life. I haven't slept since our meeting three days ago. Today my boss yelled at me once again for being late. That son of a bitch tries to maintain his dominance over me in every way he can.

Me: OK, so what you're saying is that your boss acts as your superior in every way possible?

Tyler: Yeah, it's like he has nothing better to do than pick on and annoy me.

Me: So did you have any positives today?

Tyler: The only good that happened to me was that my $8000 order from IKEA arrived. I love that Swedish made furniture so much and it isn't even that great. Then my other personality showed up and ruined my happiness. He called me a weak man and that I would forever stay subservient to the white collar class even though I was an equal. He said that the IKEA furniture was an unneeded materialistic pleasure.

Me: It seems as though your other personality is acting as your alter ego. You bought to furniture to make yourself feel better, but this personality is making you feel worse.

Tyler: After I talked to Tyler I felt really angry and upset.

Me: You need to work past Tyler and all of his opinions and focus on your own growth. Ok, next week we'll work on dealing with your boss so that you can grow in a positive way.

Ramachandran: A Man Looking to Decode Consciousness and Other Psychological Abnormalities

At the University of California San Diego, V.S. Ramachandran strives to work past a mere definition of consciousness by developing causes and explanations. Ramchandran is a very interesting man. He has had a tremendous carer in neuroscience but he can't ever seem to remember where he parked his car. He also cannot remember his wife's or his children's birthdays. Despite his memory encoding failures, Ramachandran has had much success answering many questions of psychology. A major breakthrough he made was figuring out what causes phantom limb pain. An overwhelming majority of amputees experience a tremendous amount of pain in the limb that they had removed. Ramachandran first explored the plasticity of the brain by mapping out an amputee's sensations in his amputated arm when his face was stimulated. The part of his cortex that had been responsible for the arm became responsible for the face but still caused feeling in the phantom limb. To treat the pain, Ramachandran put a mirror in front of the amputee's present limb to make it seem as the amputated limb. Essentially, Ramachandran was using the power of visual capture to trick the patient into believing their limb was still there. This therapy alleviated the pain in most cases quite effectively. Ramachandran also has theories linking synesthesia to creativity and mirror neurons to autism. What makes him a great problem solver is his ability to think simplistically, rationally, and in a divergent manner.

The Superiority of Group Wisdom

So today we listened to another radiolab that focused on the supposed accuracy of group wisdom. Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, went to the town fair and saw this game in which people guessed the weight of an ox in order to win prizes. About 800 common people guessed, but the closest individuals were significantly off. However, Galton was interested in calculating the average of these predictions. As a eugenicist, Galton believed that the average of the guesses of these stupid people would be way off. To his surprise the average was one pound off the actual weight. The group as a whole was more accurate than the closest individual. This experiment has been redone a lot and the same conclusion is drawn almost every time.

For more info on crowd wisdom click here

In order to recreate this experiment, I could take a jar of jellybeans to a public event and ask people to guess the number of jelly beans in the jar. I would probably make the guesses free and have to give out a prize in order to get as many diverse people as possible. I would then average the scores and compare it to the actual.

Another really cool possibility is determining whether this crowd wisdom holds true for future events. If I asked the crowd how many days would it snow over 2 inches, would the crowd be correct? If crowd wisdom, applied properly, is extremely accurate, can crowds determine future events?

Little Miss Sunshine Review

A couple of days ago, we finished watching the Little Miss Sunshine film. I thought it was a really funny movie. A quick synopsis: The Hoover family, composed of a father trying to become a motivational speaker, a mother wanting a divorce, a son that took a vow of silence in order to focus on getting into to the US Air Force Academy, a daughter that dreams of being a beauty pageant winner, a vulgar grandfather addicted to heroin, and an uncle that has tried to commit suicide, takes a seven hundred mile road trip to get their daughter to a pageant. Alan Arkin (grandfather) and Steve Carell (uncle) did a really good job portraying their characters. I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone looking for a mix of drama and comedy. This movie really feeds off the dysfunction in the family through a road trip.

Little Miss Sunshine Free Response

In class we watched Little Miss Sunshine and now its time to apply AP psych terms! Note: definition without application will receive a score of 0 and Do Not Score bulleted information. Alright, so first, Dwayne faces color blindness in this movie. According to the Young Helmholtz trichromatic theory, people have three different color photoreceptors in their eyes that allow color vision. Therefore, Dwayne is colorblind because he lacks these photoreceptors. Next, throughout the film, Olive goes through rehearsal. Olive rehearses her routine whenever she can in order to produce greater neural connections and know it better. Next, when the Hoover's minibus breaks down, the family must fix it thereby creating a superordinate goal. The family stops their bickering because they have a bigger goal to reach, which is to get Olive to the pageant, and they need the bus to get there. Next, the grandfather in this movie took depressants. He actually snorted heroin. This heroin slowed down his heartbeat and his breathing leading to his in-sleep death. Next, at the end of the film, the father completely loses his sense of Kohlberg's post-conventional morality. This stage is characterized by making judgements on deeper morals and doing what is proper for society. He drove in a park illegally in order to make his daughter happy. He could have hit a pedestrian or crashed the car. This was not a judgement made to benefit society. Next, Dwayne is in the Identity vs. Role Confusion stage of Erik Erikson's stages of psychological development. Dwayne takes a vow of silence and acts the way he does because he is trying to figure out his identity and who he really is. Next, when Frank jumps out of the car to run as fast as he can to register Olive in the pageant, his body has released norepinephrine. This norepinephrine acts to aid the sympathetic nervous system which allows Frank to run very fast. The norepinephrine is the stress hormone that directly increased Frank's heat rate. Next, when the mother heard that her husband had not gotten the deal, she told him to work harder, therefore making the fundamental attribution error. Mrs. Hoover blamed her husband's failure on his inability to work hard. She did not even consider his environmental and situational factors. Next, when Dwayne talks to Frank outside of the pageant, he displays his internal locus of control. Dwayne says that society has no control over him and that he'll do whatever he wants. He believes that he alone controls his future life. Finally, the family oversteps safety on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and they hit love and belonging, when they take the trip. The family clearly cannot afford to take this trip and by taking it, they are jeopardizing their ability to pay for their home. But the Hoover's take the trip anyway because they are on the love stage. The love Olive and want to see her happy therefore taking the possibly bankrupting trip.

The Psychology Behind Taking the Psychology AP

Last Monday many of us took the AP Psychology exam. It has been over 48 hours since the exam so the Collegeboard permits me to discuss the free response questions. Click Here to view them. I felt very confident with the response I wrote. I knew all of the words on both prompts and applied them to the scenario. Some of these words (overjustification effect, correlational research, experimental design) have been used on recent free response questions. Also, the experimental design question was very straightforward and simple. You did not need to know erroneous terms to do well on this free response.

#NoMoreAP
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Inheritance Radio Lab

The biggest question in psychology is what makes us who we are? Is it our nature, our genetic DNA that codes for every protein in our body, or is it our nurture, the environment that we live in. A common consensus among psychologists is that nature plays on nurture. In other words, there is an important interaction between the two factors that make us who we are. But now the question becomes, how does our inherited genetic code inside the nucleus of our cells interact with the environment in which we live? In the study discussed in this radio lab, it was discovered that rats that are licked as pups by their mothers lick their own pups. However, rats that were not licked as pups did not lick their own pups. It was concluded that when the mother licked its pup, her tongue aroused the pup and through a series of events, changed the pup's epigenome. In this case, the environment actually caused a change in the pups DNA and it began to lick its pups because of new proteins its DNA produced after it was licked. The idea that the environment can really change people is incredibly interesting. Here are some extras on epigenetics:

In 2010 Time published an article titles "Why Genes Aren't Destiny" as a cover story:
http://www.soulmedicineinstitute.org/TimeMag.pdf

This explains the epigenome in less than 2 minutes!

The Epigenome and Identical Twins