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.