I Am Conversion Disorder

I am conversion disorder. I may cause you to become paralyzed, blind, or give you any other neurological (nervous system) symptoms. The most curious thing of all is that these ailments will not be able to be explained by medical evaluation. I may occur because of a psychological conflict, and it is likely that I begin to show up in people after a stressful event occurs in their life. People who are at risk to have me also commonly have either a medical illness, a personality disorder, or a dissociative disorder. Some doctors doubt my existence, but it is important to understand that people who suffer from me are not making up their symptoms, in fact, these symptoms cause them real distress and they can not be turned on and off at will. The physical symptoms I cause are often said to be an attempt to resolve the psychological conflict I mentioned before. For example, a woman who has beliefs that physical violence is not the answer to anything may suppress her violent feelings, when she has the urge to hit someone/something, I cause her arms to have the physical response of turning numb. Numbness is one of my main physical symptoms. Others include blindness, muteness, and paralysis. The symptoms I cause generally begin suddenly and the person I affect typically has a lack of concern about the symptom, which oddly increases with the severity of the symptom. I am usually discovered after the doctor does an examination on one of the patients and rules out all the physical possibilities of the symptoms. I can be treated by a form of psychotherapy called talk therapy. Stress management training may also reduce symptoms. The body part/physical function I debilitate should continue to be worked in either physical or occupational therapy until the symptom disappears. I do not cause life threatening symptoms, but they can be debilitating for days to weeks, after that the symptoms usually go away.

One of my victims

Personality test results

The big five test was a very long personality test that looked for five different categories of personality as well as cognitive ability. This was my table:

Extraversion	Low				High
Agreeableness	Low				High
Conscientiousness	Low				High
Emotional Stability	Low				High
Openness	Low				High
	Percentile		0 ---------- 25 ---------- 50 ---------- 75 ---------- 100

Extraversion - on the extraversion report I scored in the 37th percentile for girls aged 14-17, which is average. I do like to be around people most of the time and consider myself a social being so I thought I would have scored higher but maybe not. I was warned that I skipped one of those questions on accident so I'm not sure how that affected my score or if it did or not?

Agreeableness - on the agreeableness report I scored in the 75th percentile for girls aged 14-17, which is considered high. I value "cooperation" and "social harmony" that comes with being an agreeable person, so I believe this to be pretty true to myself. However, I don't really care much for being 'popular', which is a trait that agreeable people tend to have. I do my own thing.

Conscientiousness - on the conscientious report I scored in the 8th percentile, which is low. This surprised me because being conscientious means you can regulate impulses, and I can. I don't usually get in trouble or do anything bad but I guess I am more id-dominant than I thought.

Emotional Stability - on the emotional stability report I scored in the 25th percentile, which is considered low. My emotions can be affected greatly in response to positive or negative situations so I think this is probably accurate.

Openness - on the openness report I scored in the 80th percentile, which is high. I am an individual and I do my own thing, so I feel like this is pretty accurate. I am open to experiences and maintain a pretty open mind. I am a very private person though.

The cognitive ability I scored 6/12 and the average is 5.7/12 so I was pretty average. I really didn't know what was going on so I'm impressed that I got half right because those questions seemed difficult for me to wrap my head around.

The second test I took was very strange. It was composed of 36 True or False questions.The questions varied greatly and were accompanied by pictures that were sometimes relevant but almost always disturbing. Examples included: My eyes are always cold, Spinach makes me feel alone. What?! When I was finished with the test my results told me that I am critical of myself, have personality weaknesses but compensate for them, my aspirations are pretty unrealistic, I pride myself in thinking independently and do not accept other opinions without proof. It also said that I have found it unwise to be too revealing to others and that while I'm disciplined and controlled on the outside, I tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.

I am amazed. The results I got were accurate and I could agree with most of them. I don't know how these questions got to the bottom of my personality but somehow they did and I would rank this more accurate than the Big 5 test, actually.

Paul Ekman and the Evolution of Emotion

How has emotion evolved? Is it universal or does it vary significantly from culture to culture?

Paul Ekman is a psychologist who is an expert on microexpressions and provided a theory for the evolution of emotion. He has done research which has provided back up for Charles Darwin's theory that some emotion is universal, even though emotion can vary somewhat between cultures, especially the amount of emotion used in different cultures. One of his research methods was taking people and showing them photographs of people exhibiting basic emotion expressions and asking the subjects to identify the emotion pictured. He compared those in Western cultures to other cultures and found that the majority of the time, their choices matched. Ekman has also compared to human expressions with similar expressions of primates, which also backs Darwin's theory. He has said that emotions were first meant to serve an adaptive purpose, then later to fulfill a primarily socially communicative function that can influence others. Another study on the blind has shown that they even use the same expressions as those who are not blind to express emotion. To me, that is some of the most strong evidence that emotion has indeed evolved in humans.

Ekman also note that while emotions do appear to be more universal, many people have trouble with interpreting microexpressions, split second changes in the face that indicate whether a person is suppressing their true emotions, consciously or unconsciously (if it makes any difference, I got a 10/10 on my microexpressions quiz!) Microexpressions can help you understand people better, detect lies easier, and protect yourself, among other things. Perhaps being able to detect microexpressions will be the next order for evolution, you know, as sort of a survival mechanism? Who knows?

Ekman's theory of an evolutionary influence on emotion is very interesting. Do I believe in evolution? Sort of, I believe in a creation-evolution hybrid. So I can see where he's coming from and some of his evidence is very convincing (such as the study on the congenially blind). I'd say that emotion is influenced by evolution but also by environment.

Novel

Today I am presented with a bunch of new information I have never thought about before and a question: is testing intelligence fair? I thought it was, after learning how standardized modern intelligence tests are, but there is another thing to be considered: intelligence varies across different ethnic groups and cultures. Different cultures have different values and intelligence is one of them. In class, my group and I took several different quizzes, I saw that they said they were Australian intelligence tests. I figured since Australians spoke English that the tests would not be too difficult. However, the questions were quite strange and while some seemed easy, my group found ourselves only getting a few questions right. My psychology teacher informed us that these questions were basic knowledge for the people in that specific culture and that we probably fell into the "mentally retarded" category of their intelligence.

In order for intelligence tests to be completely fair, people should be tested on what they put values on. It wasn't fair for me to be considered 'mentally retarded' because I wasn't aware of wallabies and kangaroos. Nor is it fair for members of various tribes to be considered 'mentally retarded' because they do not put an emphasis on counting and math. Intelligence is very complex, so the testing should be complex too, it's the only way to make it completely fair.

We also took a test on "street smarts" written by a black sociologist. I thought that my group had maybe gotten most of the questions right but we ended up only getting two right. Many of the answers we chose were based on stereotypes and things we had heard, rather than facts we knew. This relates to an article I read for psychology too, an article titled "You Can't High Jump If the Bar Is Set Low" by Connie Leslie. This article was very interesting and proposed a perspective I had never thought of before. It proposed that the reason black students do not fair as well educationally is 'stereotype vulnerability'. This means that the threat of a stereotype on people can affect their performance. The article says "when blacks (or any other group) are confronted with a stereotype about their intellectual skills before they take tests, they tend to perform according to the stereotype). The article was very clear in providing studies with evidence to back up this statement. It makes perfect sense, too. Imagine if nobody believed in you and thought you were stupid, what would you do? Many would probably say "I would work hard to prove them wrong" and maybe they would, but it is easy to say that when it's not the reality. It makes sense that people would succumb to the negative stereotypes of others because they feel bad about themselves and how people perceive them.

Stereotypes are all around us. As a teenager, some of the worst stereotypes are set on me. Stereotypes like "bad tippers" or "trouble makers" have caused me to have rude waiters and openly suspicious store clerks when I'm with my friends. Do I act on those stereotypes? No, I actually try my best to disprove them, but I can see why some teenagers do. It is annoying for a waiter not to be friendly to you just because other teenagers haven't tipped them before, but I am always a good tipper and try to give them hope for teenagers. I understand that I do not succumb to 'stereotype vulnerability', but several other teenagers do. Discrimination and stereotyping are not okay, whether it be because of ethnicity or age. I believe that stereotype vulnerability exists and is important to keep in mind before judging someone on their actions and abilities.

Photographic Memory: Does it exist?

This article from Psychology today struck me. We have started to discuss the Memory chapter in class lately. This article is about 'photographic' memory and what it is and whether it exists. I was quite interested in this article because I had a teacher my sophomore year (who has since retired) that claimed to have a photographic memory, and she seemed very credible. She could pick up a book she had never read, glance at a page, and recall what happened. (Wow, what a talent!). It made for her to be a very fast reader.

This article makes the claim "It's impossible to recover images with perfect accuracy. The myth of photographic memory". That is interesting and I wonder if it works the same way for images with text on them or not. While the article does not acknowledge photographic memory, it says that memory that comes very close is "eidetic memory". Good eidetic memory is something people are born with, it can not be learned. After staring at a picture for 30 seconds, people with a good sense of eidetic memory can remember the image with very great detail. Still, even for seasoned eidetikers, their reports may contain flaws and the vivid memory only lasts a few minutes. Children have a very good eidetic memory that seems to fade over time. This might explain why children have a very keen sense for detail.

So, was my teacher a fraud? Well I'd like to hope not. I bought into it. Maybe she never lost her "eidetic memory" that she had as a child. I think it'd be very interesting to get inside her mind.

Cry baby

No parent likes to see their child sad or to hear them cry, but how should they deal with it? If a parent gives their crying child a cookie, will they stop crying? This video suggests otherwise. This child, after receiving their cookie, starts to fake cry in hopes of getting another cookie from his mother. This is an example of positive reinforcement, something we learned about in class today. Positive reinforcement is part of B.F. Skinner's Operant Conditioning theory. The behavior (crying) will increase because a stimulus (cookie) is added. It is somewhat confusing because crying doesn't sound positive, but you can't exactly think of it that way. This mom has gotten herself into a pickle by rewarding a behavior that I'm sure she does not want to continue because as I said before, no one wants to see their child sad.

Hail to thee Ashwaubenon...

In our project for AP Psych, we had to make a PSA convincing possible movers to Ashwaubenon. Upon watching my classmates PSAs at home, I found myself more interested in the ones that were filmed instead of the picture slideshows. They kept me much more entertaining and gave me a better sense of Ashwaubenon and what the people in the videos really had to say for them.

That being said, I would have to say my favorite video was Ric, Tommy, Tyler, and Elliott's video. I will embed it at the bottom of my blog post. Even though I did not see all of the PSAs because not all of them are on youtube (heck, mine's not even on youtube), I liked theirs out of the ones I did see. It was engaging to watch them film theirs, going from location to location. I also really liked the fact that it was set to music. It was not boring because they gave quick, clear, and concise definitions and examples that, while they were easy to understand, were not read from the textbook and boring. I quite enjoyed all of the different places they went and the slight humor was very entertaining. Their voices were very engaging and not monotone and I wouldn't mind if it was longer because it entertained me and made me want to move to Ashwaubenon. I also liked that they exposed the dark side of Ashwaubenon (literally it was dark the entire video, but also they seemed to have caught a drug deal outside of the School House). While not ideal, no neighborhood is perfect and people should always know that. Ashwaubenon, though, in my biased opinion, comes pretty close :) Nice job guys!

Who Am I?!

This week in psychology we learned about different theories of psychological development throughout life. We took a look at a few different psychologists and studied their ideas on how people develop psychologically. One of the psychologists was Erik Erikson. Erikson's theory involves 8 different psychosocial stages. They are:

1. Trust vs. Mistrust (birth-1)
2. Autonomy vs. Doubt/Shame (1-2/3)
3. Initiative vs. Guilt (3-5/6)
4. Industry vs. Inferiority (5/6-11/12)
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion (adolescence)
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation (early adulthood)
7. Generativity vs. Self-Absorption (middle adulthood)
8. Integrity vs. Despair (later adulthood)

According to Erikson, all of the steps coincide with each other. Success in each step determines their success later in life, whether they can look back on their life and be proud of it or look back on it negatively and realize it's too late for them to do anything about it.

I was mostly interested in the stage identity vs. role confusion, which occurs in adolescence. I was interested in it because that is the stage of life I am currently in and want to see what I need to do to become successful in this stage. This stage of development is all about realizing who you are now and wondering who you'll become in the future. Many people in this stage will continue to experiment with different behaviors until they reach one that they are content with. In this video (warning: mildly inappropriate, I would give it a PG-13), two teens have a conversation about their roles. One teen (the nerdy looking one) seems to seem sure of who he is and what he wants to be as he confronts the other teen (the interesting looking one) about her current identity crisis. This crisis seems to have developed because of the previous stages and outside forces. She seems to be experimenting with different behaviors to find out who she really is as a person. Whether she's going in the right direction or not is up to her because ultimately she has to become content with herself, and I think the nerdy guy should cut her a break a little bit.

I think it's important that this stage exists and at the time it does. I don't think that college could come at a better time for kids. They meet more people and have more freedom to do what they want to do before completely realizing who they are and what they want to do with their life. I can relate because I applied undecided to college. I am hoping to have things sorted out sooner or later to avoid role confusion as that can lead to failure later in life. I do not want to end up a grown adult looking back on my life and being unhappy. Okay, now I think I'm over-thinking this a bit...

Ice Ice Baby

My name is Taylor Kurowski and I was addicted to ice.

But I am proud to announce that I am 12 hours clean.

For a couple days, I was addicted to ice. The ice was deemed socially unacceptable, so anytime I drank ice I had to be quite shady. I am too rushed in the morning and forgot to bring ice to school, but there were a couple students that served as dealers for me, (thank God they did or I would have remained parched because I took the assignment very seriously!). At home I mainly drink water with no ice, but I do like ice.

I don't have many interesting stories to share because nobody really noticed, especially in my family. Our family really keeps to themselves, which is nice in a way. But it concerned me...if I actually had an addiction, would they notice? I would hope they would. Even my friends didn't really pick up on anything. I put ice in my school lunch drink and they didn't think much of it. When one person asked I said "don't worry about it" and they dropped it. How shady is that?!

What I got from the experience is that it is hard to be an addict and get away with it. Just imagining that ice was socially unacceptable and illegal was challenging. I think that dealing with a drug that was actually illegal would be even worse! And I'm not sure if if would be worth it. I hope that I never believe that it's worth it...

Multitasking......

I am doing this while watching a video of the daily news.

How Generation X and the Millennials differ

I am part of the millennial generation. Most kids my age have parents from generation X (mine are older). The most obvious difference is that the millennials are those born from 1982-2000. Generation X is older (1965-1976). There are various differences between the generations. A large noticeable one is the millennials have a much smaller population of only 51 million compared to 75 million coming from generation x. Another way is the way diversity is handled. Generation X accepts diversity while the millennials celebrate it. Think of how far we've come as a generation in handling racism and homophobia. Diversity is much more celebrated now than it was in 1965. Generation X is also considered more practical while the millennials are more optimistic and realistic.

More differences

Generation X Millennials

reject rules, rewrite rules

use technology, assume technology

casual work environment, structured work environment

mistrust institutions, institutions irrelevant.

Blogging Assignment Drei

"Pain teaches. Pain Protects. Pain can save you from a lot of bad things."

Imagine not being able to feel pain. At first, it sounds pretty awesome. Pain is not a fun experience. Most people do not like to feel pain. However, not being able to feel pain has devastating consequences and is actually cause to worry.

In this article, young Gabby Gingras has a very rare disorder called congenital insensitivity to pain (also known as congenital analgia). This means that for reasons unknown, the connection between the nerves that sense pain and the brain's recognition to pain is missing. Other sensory areas remain in tact. Young Gabby also suffers from a disorder called anhydrosis, meaning she can not sweat. This makes it difficult for her to keep her body temperature stable.

To say that a child living with congenital analgia lives a careful life is an understatement. Everything is dangerous because the child doesn't know when he/she is hurting him/herself. In Gabby's case, her fingers became mutilated from biting them too hard as a young child. She has been injured many times, breaking her jaw and not knowing until the infection caused her to have a fever. Her eyes became damaged so badly she had to have her left eye removed.

There is no cure for congenital analgia. The only thing someone can do is try their best to prevent injuries, which is much easier said than done, especially dealing with a young child who doesn't know any better. Pain is the definition of a blessing in disguise.

In the Spirit of Valentine's Day

In this article titled "Brain Study Reveals Secrets to Staying Madly in Love", psychologists discuss what makes long-term love possible on a brain level and compare couples who have been married for years to those that have newly fallen in love. The researchers did this by scanning the brains using functional MRIs to monitor the brain activity of the different individuals that were in love. These individuals had been married for an average of 21 years!

The researches created a list of 5 "symptoms" of intense love that were frequently found in newly in love couples and applied it to the research of the couples who have been in love for a long time. They then recorded neural activity taken during the fMRI. The participants were shown pictures of their spouse as well as control pictures of a friend and someone they weren't as well familiar with.

The results of the study helped to reveal which parts of the brain are responsible for the various "symptoms" of intense love (ex: the posterior hippocampus is responsible for the interest). It also helped to compare the newly in love individuals to the individuals who have been married for a long time. The study concluded that people that have been married for a long time were just as strong, if not stronger in every area of study as newly in love couples were. In long-term love participants many more regions of the brain were in use than the newly in love participants. The study essentially proved that love can last! Now if only someone could only explain high divorce rates these days...

Three things I learned from the article:

1. Data suggests that the brain looks at a long-term love relationship as a goal oriented behavior to attain rewards such as feeling secure, being a part of a union together, or feeling less stressed.
2. The dorsal Raphe is a part of the brain known for involvement to the body's reaction to pain and stress. In the study of the neural activity of the individuals who were in love, the dorsal Raphe were activated in intense romantic love. This is what connects love with stress and makes one of the goals of long-term love a feeling of being less stressed.
3. Regions of the brain that are rich in dopamine is where long-term love activity is most prevalent.

One thing I am still confused about:

The article referenced the difference between friendship-based love and romantic love. What was confusing about it is that it didn't exactly specify what friendship-based love was and what romantic love was. It mentioned something about a control picture of a friend being shown to the person in the fMRI as a control image, so I thought it meant liking solely based on friendship, but I wasn't sure because of the terminology used. The article said to make sure the difference between "liking" and "wanting" was understood. It also said that "liking" was just based on emotion while "romantic love" was based on motivation. This made me think of the terminology of "liking" being used to describe people before they fall in love. That part was not made clear to me as a reader.

Blogging Assignment Zwei

The route through childhood is shaped by many forces, and it differs for each of us. Our biological inheritance, the temperament with which we are born, the care we receive, our family relationships, the place where we grow up, the schools we attend, the culture in which we participate, and the historical period in which we live—all these affect the paths we take through childhood and condition the remainder of our lives.

–Robert H. Wozniak

Nurture vs. Nature is the biggest and most enduring issue in psychology. It is the debate that asks the question: are we who we are because were born that way, or do our experiences shape us? It looks into different genes compared to the environment that we were raised in. Most psychologists can come to the conclusion that in fact, both do influence us, but many have an opinion as to which has a greater influence. Personally, I have always thought that nurture was of greater importance.

There have been several different cases and experiments where nurture vs. nature has come into play. The best case studies with nurture vs. nature are feral children, since creating a feral child is a "forbidden experiment" because of various ethical reasons. These studies on feral children, while rare, give great information about the nurture vs. nature debate. Studies done more often for nurture vs. nature are twin studies, since they are quite a bit more practical than feral children studies. Since (identical) twins have the same DNA, they are easy to compare on the nature side. Twins separated at birth that meet each other later in life are great for nurture vs. nature. In the video above, twins were separated at birth when they were adopted as part of an experiment. When the experiment fell apart and the twins finally met each other through the help of the adoption agency, they couldn't help but notice the similarities in their personalities. One twin even goes on to say "I think nature trumps nurture". And they should know, they are a living nurture vs. nature experiment.

I don't know that the nurture vs. nature debate will ever declare a winner. I just think that everybody has their own theories as to which is more prevalent to a person's development. As for me, I still say that nurture beats out nature for the most part. I'll demonstrate it with a picture:

Blogging Assignment Eins

"The implications of the placebo effect are wide reaching. Most immediately it highlights how much we still have to learn about the relationship between a patient's mind and body...."

The placebo effect is something that fascinates me because it's something that remains somewhat of a mystery. It's also something that is questioned ethically. While reading about the placebo effect in chapter one, it was mainly regarded as the un-manipulated variable in an experiment, and the text mainly focused on how the placebo generally did not work as well as the actual drug in most cases (the example of Viagra was used). This video, on the other hand, exposes some of the secrets of the placebo effect. What's interesting is that many drugs have to pass a placebo test, and many don't. Can the human mind really be more effective than a scientifically engineered drug when it comes to the physical health of a human? Well, sometimes, yes. According to this video, the placebo effect is a cause for worry in many drug companies. The video argues that the placebo effect is getting stronger.

What was interesting to me, that wasn't really brought up in either the video or the textbook reading was the question of whether a placebo was ethical or not, especially in the use of humans. Of course when entering a study, patients must be informed of the possibility that there's a chance they might be receiving a placebo treatment, right? Doctors admit to prescribing placebos? Did their patients not have a clue? Is this legal? This left a few questions unanswered for me. I feel as though if I was a patient suffering from, say, cancer, and there was a drug that could potentially treat me, I think I'd be eager to sign up to participate in a trial. However, if I learned there was a chance that I could be receiving no treatments I would be much more hesitant to jump on board. Sure, double blind studies can be effective in finding out whether or not a drug is effective treatment, but at the expense of who?

All ethical questions aside, the fact that some placebos can be more effective than an engineered drug is so interesting. It leaves a lingering "why?" This is something that shouldn't be happening, but is. The placebo effect is wonderful because it's somewhat miraculous, and behind every great miracle is a big mystery. I guess my question is when the mystery behind the placebo effect will be revealed, if it ever will.

I remember my first blog post

Hello! My name is Taylor Kurowski and I will be in 2nd Hour AP Psychology this year.

Having taken two AP classes already, I anticipate that this class will be difficult and have a heavy workload. I am expecting it to be worth it. I have taken regular psychology and found it so interesting, I am excited to continue to learn about it more in depth and expand my knowledge about the human mind and how internal factors affect behavior. I am excited to learn about disorders, I think they are so interesting and unique. The classes I have this term are: Anatomy, AP Psych, Concert Choir/APUSH, and Brit Lit. I understand that the only class that is somewhat similar to AP Psych is Anatomy. The rest are quite different. I've been taking APUSH since the beginning of the year, and since they both are advanced placement classes they most likely have similar workloads. I am excited to be in AP Psychology this year and to increase my knowledge about such an interesting subject.