i have no concept of time other than it is flying

Wow. In a week and a day, I will no longer be a college student. In a week and two days I’ll be gone from the city I called home for 3 and a half years. In a month I’ll make my home in San Marcos. In a  month and a half (hopefully) I’ll be making my own money, entirely by myself for the first time in my life. Hooooly shit! I mean I think we (Americans) forget how big of a deal this kind of transition is because it’s so typical. But just because everyone does it, doesn’t make it any less difficult or significant. Difficult, but exciting. I’m so ready! Bring it on, life!

picture of the day: santorini

attachment theory

Learned something interesting in my Lifespan class today about attachment. So some researchers did a study where they observed baby monkeys’ behavior and categorized them into groups based on personality characteristics – shy and timid or bold and outgoing. They they took note of the type of attachment pattern the babies had with their mothers. Turns out that most shy babies tended to have mothers that were protective and anxious, while the bolder babies had mothers who were relaxed but available. The researchers deduced that the babies’ personalities were largely inherited rather than learned, because they showed these behavior patterns even within the first week of life, before it would be possible to learn them from their mother. With the assumption in mind that personality (at least for these monkeys) was genetic, they set out to test whether the baby monkeys’ personalities could be shaped by raising them with a mother that displayed a parenting style opposite from their biological mother. In other words, they paired infants that were shy with mothers that were relaxed, and bold infants with mothers that were uptight. What they found then is what is so interesting to me:

The monkeys that displayed profound anxiety and shyness as infants grew up to be fairly bold when paired with a relaxed mother. Even more interesting is that, while they became bolder and more curious when their foster mother was around, they tended to revert back to their inherently shy personality when separated from the mother.

This suggests that personality can be shaped over time, but is largely inherited and thus predisposes them to display inherent personality characteristics when in stressful situations. They don’t know if this can be directly applied to humans because obviously we are much more complex and affected by an infinite number of factors, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

 

 

picture of the day: barcelona

Best Careers 2009: School Psychologist – US News and World Report

Best Careers 2009: School Psychologist – US News and World Report

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it made sense at the time

I feel like most people wish they were strong-willed and resilient. Who wouldn’t want to say they know exactly what they want out of life and when they set out to do it, it gets done every time and never changes in the process. I think the reality is that, while there are certainly people in the world that are more strong-willed than others, most of us have pretty regular moments of indecisiveness. In fact, I’d say more often than not, we’re affected by the weight and complexity of the world, and we let it get to us. We become overwhelmed with impending decisions, persuasive family/friends/media, and the general relativity of our life situations.

But you know what? I don’t think that has to be a bad thing. I think our inability to stick to a decision (most of the time) is a reflection of our ability to reason. Millions of years of development has brought us to this point, where we can willingly assess our environment and act upon it. But because the environment changes, so do our actions  or decisions. In addition, we are creatures who are uniquely aware of the future and our capability to change it. I think that’s another reason we have a hard time sticking to anything – we know every decision we make affects our future, so we’re a little more wary of the quick  and concrete.

The inevitable process of “growing up” is what prompted me to wonder why we are this way. Leaving my comfort bubble and joining the rest of the world is equally exciting and terrifying. I know my future is the topic of just about every recent post of mine, but what else do I know, really? All I know in life is what I’ve experienced what I’m experiencing right now, and what I anticipate experiencing in the future, and all of those things collectively seem to focus on this question: WHAT THE HELL DO I DO NOW?

To put my perspective in more understandable terms (because now I’m starting to confuse myself..), I’m trying to decide what academic path I want to take, which in turn will determine where I live, which will determine where I work – minor details (sarcasm). I have found myself stuck in this endless cycle of trying to choose between School Psychology, School Counseling, and Community Counseling. To most people those probably seem synonymous. I wish. They’re all very different and involve totally different programs and degrees. As soon as I think I’ve decided (for good this time!), I go and change my mind. I’ve done countless hours of research about each field and I just feel stuck. I don’t have the time to seek out the professionals and get their expert opinion, because I need to decide on this like 2 weeks ago. I know I’ll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just try and ride it out, and maybe even try to appreciate the power I have over my own future..

nonmarital sexuality

This table comes from my Psychology of Religion book by Hood, Hill, and Spilka.

I think what’s interesting about this study is how the “nonaffiliated” group compares to the religious groups. I wonder if the “nonaffiliated” people would be representative of the general population on average?

operational definitions

Religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature…

- Sigmund Freud

Freud was one of a long legacy of influential figures who have discounted religion as illusion, fraud, or fiction. Based on this quote, I would assume that he believed religion is simply a clever derivative of our instinct for self-preservation. We have this innate need to protect ourselves, so we contrived this convenient explanation that we call religion. Many questions about our existence can be answered with religion, and those that cannot be answered directly are explained away with terms like “faith” or “karma” or “divine will”. When we have a way to explain uncontrollable phenomena like death or natural disasters, we feel safe. I agree with that idea to a certain extent. I think it’s human nature to seek meaning and understanding of the world around us, and when we can’t find it, we find a way to explain it. The problem I have with the above quote, then, is that it assumes that the “superior force of nature” is purely corporeal. I think nature is God, and God is nature. God’s force is indeed superior, and we do tend to try and find ways to defend ourselves from it. This is why people become Christians – to defend themselves from what they believe is inevitable damnation unless they accept Christ as their savior. So in other words, I think there is some truth to Freud’s statement, but I also don’t think it necessarily reinforces his assumption that religion is an illusion.

saturated

Ok. I don’t know if it’s hormones or stress or what, but I have become completely exasperated with my situation. At the same time that  I’m trying to plan my future (moving, finding a job, a place to live, applying to school, etc.), I’m also still stuck with all these meaningless obligations and I am just so ready to be through with it all. Some would argue that routine brings comfort, and that is certainly true in many cases, but for me right now, I am so unbelievably tired of getting up at the same time in the morning to the same apartment that I hate, parking in the same place, running late to the same stupid classes that I am completely uninterested in, and striving to make decent grades when I can hardly motivate myself to open a textbook. School has become a chore and it upsets me because I have what a psychologist would call a “high need for cognition.” I like to learn for learning’s sake, and I like to challenge myself intellectually, but for whatever reason, being here has started to reverse that. I find myself skimming through chapters in my textbooks just so I can say I read them, and memorizing the information just long enough to take the tests. I don’t care about my classes, my teachers, my classmates, and I only marginally care about my grades at this point. And I know it’s school and not just stress in general that’s weighing me down, because I’m actually kind of enjoying the “stress” and newness and unexpectedness of graduating and trying to scramble to find a place to live and work. To borrow Karen’s terminology from her latest blog post, I am just saturated. I can’t find any more room for caring about school – I am full to the point of breaking.

And I want to make the same point Karen did (such a wonderful, insightful writer), I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I have an amazing dad who has committed to paying for most of my college education, and that is more than a LOT of people can say. I am incredibly fortunate, and I honestly think about that on a daily basis. I’m just frustrated and feel like I’m stuck, stagnant, and am just counting down the days until I’m done with this place and can start my own life the way I want to, and not the way “they” tell me to.

tomorrow if a golden train came to take you away…

Thought of the day:

People change their minds because they cannot change outcomes.

That idea was brought up during my Psychology of Religion class the other day (which, by the way, might be one of like five classes total that I’ve really enjoyed at Baylor.. how sad). It suggests that people have a tendency to accommodate their values or beliefs in response to their situation, particularly when they cannot change their situation themselves. For example, a person may shift from believing in intercessory prayer to not believing in it after many fervent prayers went unanswered. Instead of continuing to try and change the outcome, they decided to change their set of beliefs. Or as another example, a person might begin believing that every event is part of God’s plan when they didn’t before because no matter what they do, every event in their life goes unexpectedly and in a way that is out of their hands. In a non-religious context, an example might be when a person faced with a terminal illness changes their mind about being resuscitated. Once they realize they can’t change the outcome of their situation (inevitable death), they may go from believing that doctors should keep patients alive by any means necessary to believing that when a patient approaches death, then it is their time to go.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this necessarily. I mean it seems natural that we experience life as it comes, and accommodate our beliefs accordingly. To take the idea even further, though, it was also suggested in class that behavior precedes belief. Whereas the earlier quote implies that we adjust our cognitive mindset according to external events, this notion implies that we adjust our cognitive mindset based on our own behavior. In other words, we behave a certain way, and if that works for us, then we adopt that belief even if it’s contrary to what we believed before. Something to think about anyway.