Psychology: Thinking Ahead

“Psycho”. A word that is often heard by many people and often misinterpreted too. I could still remember when I was a small kid last time, every single moment that I heard the word “psycho” being mentioned, my mind will automatically associate the word with the state of being mentally deranged or better yet, insane. What I thought was indeed a naive ones of which most people and not just me could not understand fully the concept of psychology itself. And when I saw adults working as a psychologist, I have always thought how much worse could it be for a person to deal with such people that are mentally deranged. I was completely clueless of what psychology really means, not until I had a few friends who in Psychology major of which the first question that popped up in my mind was “How is the work of a psychologist?”. Just one simple question, but it made them instantly knew what had I been thinking all this while about psychology. And so, they just told me that psychology is something much more than that and is divided into many different branches. For sure, I could recall them saying that one day if I had the opportunity to learn psychology, I would really be interested in the whole concept of psychology. Hence, that was the first exposure that I had about psychology. What an absurd perception to have of psychology at first, but it all changed ever since I entered a Psychology class. 

All this while, I have always been curious of how the mind really works and how we react upon what is in the mind. Nevertheless, I have never really had the time to look up for answers, and amazingly I manage to find them in my Psychology class. The first time that I received the textbook, I was completely amazed as there were an immense amount of knowledgeable contents and definite answers to all of my questions that I have long pondered about. I then started to feel enthusiastic and excited to be a part of the class as I was given the opportunity that I have wished for quite some time. I looked forward to discover the real meaning of psychology and to know about what I never seemed to know before this. Throughout my psychology studies, there were certainly a lot of inputs that I received and outputs that I can work on with in real life situations. During the first day of my class, I still remember that the class was basically all about psychology — an overview of the subject. That was when I truly learned about the conceptual meaning of psychology, and even during the first class I have managed to gain interests as what has been said by my friends. For one that really cleared up my understandings would be in the career of psychology itself, in which that was the time that I knew how to differentiate between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. It might be  a simple matter or the most basic ones, but in my context of being naive about psychology, I was thrilled to learn such facts! 

Besides that, I have also learned something that is unnoticeable in my life and that would be in one of the processes of acquiring knowledge on psychology; maintenance rehearsal. Who would have thought that all this while when I was learning and trying to memorize the facts for my examinations, I actually used this method that researches have been able to discover a long time back; a method used to retain informations in short-term memory. When memorizing, I tend to repeat one thing over and over again, so I thought that it might just be one of the effective ways for myself to study but true enough I was applying one of the mechanisms in psychology. All to all, I can say that psychology is yet an important field in life because through psychology that we are able to find the reasons behind  every single thing that happened around us. Even if we could not see with our own eyes, we feel the psychology mechanisms or we experience it or we deal with it in everyday lives. It is indeed really amazing to be learning such things. I was always once curious of how all of these personality and multiple intelligence tests that I have taken are so accurate to my own self. They could be seen as some sort of psychic activities, but what I can say is they are not! In fact, the results are all accurate because of step-by-step researches that have been made by professionals. One thing that I agree is that through all these researches and perceptions that we have towards something, we are always bound to what is called confirmation bias in psychology of which we agree to the things that are parallel to our beliefs and ignore those that are against our beliefs. Hence why, I can say that psychology is a form of definite reasoning to the happenings around us or in our minds. 

At the end of the day, I see psychology as life and life as psychology; both of which work simultaneously. Learning psychology has certainly been able to make myself to think ahead and to learn about myself - my personality, learning capabilities, feelings, thoughts, behaviours, and most importantly my interaction with other people. Last time, before taking Psychology class, I wondered  how can psychology help me in my engineering major; the relation between both opposite fields.
But now, I realised that it truly helps me in so many ways especially in understanding the process that I will go through along the way of becoming an engineer and also understanding the human psychology mechanism (social psychology) between people of different perceptions as mine.
Even though, the period of learning psychology was no longer than 2 months, I am truly glad that this opportunity came along during my foundation years. Learning psychology was indeed an eye opener for me to value things in life through concrete reasonings that have been done by researches in this field. 

- Nabilah Aina Taufek

Solve it!!

Problem Solving

Honestly, i am not good at solving problems. Why i said so? Because i am not good at Calculus. A wise man said to be able to do mathematics, you have to do mathematics which i think accurately describing me but vice versa. I am lazy to do the exercise given and i am not a gifted person which make my performance in Calculus going down the drain. In psychology, we had learned the ways of solving problem and one of them is heuristics which means educated guess. I like this way of solving problem but it is not so friendly when doing Calculus test especially person who dislikes doing exercises. Instead, what I found is rather logical to apply in solving calculus problems. It is the problem solving barriers which also we learned in class. One of them is mental set. Mental set is trying to solve problem with the patterns that worked for them before. Say that you had done all the exercises given by your lecturer and add some more on your own, you, logically had answered and faced a lot type of questions by doing so. When in a test, you met the same question with just a change in number and you, with pleasure, answer the question. Poof!! You get right. The mental set which we called a barrier, worked to solve  Calculus and change from a barrier to an easy way of solving problem. Is Calculus just a ‘mental set’ subject or more than that? Later i figure out this. This ‘mental set’ kind of solving Calculus is only applicable on an easy questions. A hard Calculus question surely need more than that and it is creativity. Creativity is you come up with different ways of thinking and ended up with the problem solved. Those who are gifted in this subject always can figure out the proper way to solve it where some intermediate people like me have to think longer than them. Also, these people can easily have an insight which gives them the ability to tackle the problems easily. What i can conclude here is Calculus is not a ‘mental set’ subject. It implicitly trained your mind to be creative by thinking a lot to get the correct answer, Yeah can'twait to learn Calculus 2 in the next semester and surely i have to do a vast exercises in order to excel. See you soon my fellow readers !!! :)

Oh Stress!

Greetings readers,

Welcome to the Power of The Mind!

Here we are again at another blogpost of Oh Stress! Well, I'm going to tell you now why do I choose this topic. Simply said, everyone had encountered, is encountering and will be encountering this problem in everyday lives. It is the forte of life as its own. Often when we hear the word stress, what comes into our mind will always be associated with the perception of negativity. Because that's how it should be? Well, think again readers. Here's a little bit of information or facts on stress in which it is divided into 2 different types, the positive stress (eustress) and the negative stress (distress). I hope that has somehow cleared your mind on the perception of stress.

Now, let's not wait longer. I will tell you exactly what's interesting to know about stress. One thing that I learned in psychology is cognitive factors of stress. Does this occur something to you readers? The word cognitive perhaps? Well if you're not sure of what does cognitive means, simply take it as "thinking". That's how I perceive cognitive because generally cognitive and thinking should be associated with the mind.
Readers, mind is just something that is super fascinating! Many researches nowadays have seemed to get to know the mind better or be "friends" with the mind. Well, thanks to them that now we have been able to seek for reasonings based on the happenings in our daily lives. Hands down!

Readers,

I must say that the fact that cognitive or thinking leads to stress may be familiar enough to all of you. But it's just that we never thought that thinking too could lead to being stressful. In this phenomena, to my understanding: anything that you're thinking is generally affecting the amount of stress that you have. Before I further discuss about cognitive factors, try and ponder this question first - have you ever wondered why overthinking leads you to become much more stressful? Why am I asking this is because reality tells us that most people tend to overthink when they encounter a problem. With overthinking, some people are bound to perceive their problem in a positive way and some in the negative's. This is mainly caused by two cognitive processes: primary and secondary appraisal. So, in primary appraisal a person will start to classify the stressors as either threatening or challenging; whereas in secondary appraisal, a person will try to search for the resources available to himself or herself in coping with the stressors.

Now, what has awed me is the fact that the mind itself decides on whether the stress that we are having is a threat to ourselves or a challenge. Conclusively, the ones that we assume as threat is with the respect of negative appraisal; and on the other hand, the ones we assume as a challenge is a positive appraisal. The fascination to me when knowing this fact on stress is that the mind influences the amount of stress! Proven to be true, I would say that I'm positively an over thinker and as it is being said, it does affects me so much to be so. For an instance, recently I was in a very tight schedule, I literally burnt the midnight oil preparing for an event that was under my responsibility. To certain extent, I was caught into being stressful as some things had happened and those problems completely block my way on making the event to run smoothly. I became completely distressful, and in that state I tried to look for ways on what can I do myself to solve the problems. Some solving methods were practical but being under pressure, my mind didn't seem to give me solutions but it appeared to add in the amount of stress! The mind eventually controls everything and thus making you mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted.

Thinking, coming within the individual, can be just as stressful as other external factors of stress too. Previously, I thought that perhaps thinking and being an over thinker as not much as harmful to me because in my perception, thinking helps you to be much more rational in solving problems but instead it does not. So, here comes ways of coping with those stress that I've been working on for quite some time and they do include in even psychology perspectives. Meditation is one of the right way to go when there's an obstacle ahead of you! Some simple form of meditation that I have come to practice is to inhale and try to concentrate. Refocus your attention and put away all unnecessary random thoughts in your mind. It works for me, so perhaps it would work for you too.

So, here's the end of Oh Stress! Now I hope that you would probably be able to change it to Hi Stress! Embrace the stresses and use most appropriate strategies to cope with them. Don't let thinking be a hurdle in your life. Get up and be free from stress.

Till then, see you again readers. Stay tune with much more new and fresh posts from my teammates.

My Social, My Psychology

Greetings readers,

Welcome to the Power of The Mind! 

Today, the things that I'm going to talk about is pretty simple - My Social, My Psychology. You must be wondering of the significance of the topic. No worries! Embrace the journey of reading this post because from  now onwards you'll get to know me better.

Readers, 

When we talk about people, we all perceive them as either family, friends, teachers, mates, so on and so forth. The reality is just that there are a lot of different people with different personality out there. How we see other people may differ from one another; say for example we have person A as a subject, this person might be known by person B as someone who is friendly but to person C, this person might be known as just someone who is passive. Now what we can learn here is that no one is able to judge a person similarly to the other because we can sometimes be judgemental or in other words prejudice towards one another. Simply said, our thoughts about someone else are very subjective depending on how we find commonality towards him or her. 

To some who have known me for long, they'll know that I'm a people oriented kind of person. Does it occur to you people oriented? Well, say no more, "people oriented" would be something that I refer to myself if I were to describe myself in a word. I mean two words! Basically, I say so because I've always seen the beauty in each and every one person standing on Earth.
Sometimes, I could be really into "people" in general. Won't say that I'm obsessed with other people. But it's just that there are times of which I will sit down and see others walking, talking, laughing, smiling, chatting, running and so much more. In my eyes, these people that I see right there and then is special in their own way.
One question that has always occurred in my mind when I see them is "Who are these people?". I just wonder of the kind of living that they are into - are their lives different than mine? Even though I may not know each and every of them personally, but just seeing them laughing and talking with their friends just occurred to me as something that is so AMAZING that out of billions of people in this world, we all have different stories. And I, myself, on the other hand is given the opportunity by God to interact with a few hundreds out of billions. And they're my "society" - families, friends, mates, teachers and many others. 

At times, I ponder to how all of these would be possible - the relationships and interactions that I have with other people. And so psychologically, it all starts to develop from my own thought, feelings and behaviour that I have to another person. One thing that I know, I am the one that shapes other people's characters. I make them who they are now because I am their "society". Hence, it's the same for others too, they make me who I am today. I feel blessed! 

Now think of how wonderful it is that our psychology (thoughts, feelings, and behaviour) are also our  socials. Our in here relatively means "sharing". We share our psychology and social, and there form a variety of interactions among billions of people in the world nowadays. 

Thank you readers. Hope to see you soon!

Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences

During our last class of psychology, Miss N asked us to do an online assessment as our homework to figure out the multiple intelligences that we have. At first, I was quite puzzled as why do I have to do that assessment because I already knew my own strengths and I also believe that most of my classmates already acknowledged about theirs too. However, after I did the assessment, I got to admit that the results were quite shocking!! I never noticed that all of my actions that were asked in the assessment were actually resembled my own strengths that I used to believe that that kind of strengths never existed in me. So, today I would like to share some information regarding these intelligences and also my new strengths that I just discovered throughout the assessment. Oh, if you guys want to know yours, kindly go to this website:
http://www.literacynet.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html

I know that many of us are familiar with the three general categories in which people learn: visual learners, auditory learners, and kinaesthetic learners. Beyond these three general categories, many theories of and approaches toward human potential have been developed. Among them is the theory of multiple intelligences, developed by Howard Gardner, Ph.D., Professor of Education at Harvard University. Gardner’s early work in psychology and later in human cognition and human potential led to the development of the initial six intelligences. Today there are nine intelligences and the possibility of others may eventually expand the list. These intelligences (or competencies) relate to a person’s unique aptitude set of capabilities and ways they might prefer to demonstrate intellectual abilities.

According to Gardner, there are NINE TYPES of INTELLIGENCES in which include:

1. Verbal-linguistic intelligence - well-developed verbal skills and sensitivity to the sounds, meanings and rhythms of words.

2. Logical-mathematical intelligence - ability to think conceptually and abstractly, and capacity to discern logical and numerical patterns. 

3. Spatial-visual intelligence - capacity to think in images and pictures, to visualize accurately and abstractly.

4. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence - ability to control one’s body movements and to handle objects skillfully.

5. Musical intelligences - ability to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch and timber.

6. Interpersonal intelligence - capacity to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, motivations and desires of others.

7. Intrapersonal - capacity to be self-aware and in tune with inner feelings, values, beliefs and thinking processes.

8. Naturalist intelligence - ability to recognize and categorize plants, animals and other objects in nature.

9. Existential intelligence - sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence such as, What is the meaning of life? Why do we die? How did we get here? 

Well, basically above are just a brief explanation about the Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Now, I would like to share with you my top 3 intelligences.

So, among the nine intelligences according to Gardner, I scored the highest in Body Movement (Kinesthetic) with the score of 4.29 out of 5.00!!!

According to Gardner, a person with this intelligence love to make body movements and has a great ability to control the body movement as compared to others. I must say that I really love to move, dance, swim, and also walk. It seems that my life would be completely

 dull if I couldn't express myself to the fullest as I can. Not to brag much about myself, but I am really good at sports in which I have a well developed motor skills that able me to be great in netball, basketball, and also track-and-field events. With this kind of intelligences, I can read while walking without any difficulties and I can build things using my hands as I have a great deal of physical dexterity. 

Next, my second highest intelligence goes to Intrapersonal (Self) with the score 4.00 out of 5.00.

As said by Gardner, people with intrapersonal intelligence have a good sense of self and I realize that this intelligence has become as a part of my life. For me, it doesn't mean that people with this strengths always prefer to be alone or shut people out of their life because everyone in this world are in need of their own time and people with this intelligence usually are good enough to maintain and control their good sense of self. I like to spend time by myself and think things over as my own self- reflections towards this life. I often prefer to learn alone by trying learning through trial and error because I believe by doing that, I can develop my skills to another higher levels and I can know myself much better than before. I will always acknowledge my weaknesses and I will try to fix them. 

Last but not least,  my other remarkable intelligence is Language (Linguistic) as I scored 3.71 out of 5.00.

Well, of course, Language (Linguistic) intelligence has to do with words, both written and spoken. It describes how people really enjoys to express themselves clearly and easily through essays, articles, books, and debates. As for me, I enjoy talking, hearing, and also hearing words. Sometimes it makes me feel content to have a talk with others and to hear other's stories. One of my most favorite activities to do during my free time is writing down reflections about my life. Whenever I write about my thoughts, I can feel that I am actually expressing myself to the fullest! For me, it feels so satisfying to write down everything that you really want to say and it really help to develop one's critical thinking. With this intelligence, I can enhance my freedom of thinking. 

*****

In the nutshell, you will never know your true colors until you decide to explore and discover them. I am really happy and glad to acknowledge my strengths that will help me to succeed in the future. If Miss N did not tell us to do this assessment, believe me, I will never know my own strengths. I truly believe that when we know which ones come most naturally to us—and which require more conscious effort to develop—we can create strategies for ourselves that will help us to go far toward helping us achieve our  goals. I hope this post will inspire the readers to discover more about themselves. Have a great day ahead.

XOXO, 

Shykeen

Crash Course on Social Psychology

For this topic alone, there are three crash course videos. I hope this will compliment the post we made to make it clearer.

Social Psychology

Hey fellow people!

Welcome aboard to the Power of Mind.

As you've read earlier, there are so many things around us that are associated with psychology. Amazing isn't it? Now let me bring you to the world of Social Psychology. Now when we think of social, what comes across our mind? Interaction, communication, people, so on and so forth. It is just super AMAZING that in psychology, you could really venture deeper into social. But the question to perceive now is that how social could possibly be related to psychology? Well, in simpler words, psychology defines SOCIAL! It's about understanding the human behaviour in social context.

You might now be wondering what does that really means.

According to Baron, Byrne & Suls (1989) social psychology is “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations”. 

Now to get to know about the human behaviour further, let's move on to SOCIAL COGNITION - attitudes, impression formation, and attribution. 

Attitude

Attitude is defined as the tendency to respond positively or negatively towards ideas, persons, objects or situation. There are simply three components of attitude: affective (emotional), behaviour, and cognitive. All are which important in describing and emphasizing the concept of ATTITUDE. Besides, you might also be wondering how does one form an attitude or in fact how do you tend to have such attitude that you are having now? In an insight, you might think that attitude is somewhat related to your personality, to how you view things, and so on. Yes, true enough but the question now is HOW? Simple enough, there are four main reasonings to how attitude is formed: direct contact with the person, situation, object, or idea; direct instruction from parents or others; interaction with people who hold a certain attitude; watching the actions and reactions of others to ideas, people, objects, and situations. 

Moving on to the next crucial matter, possibly the ones that most of you have been waiting for, IMPRESSION. This is so interesting to learn and to understand because it is what we do in everyday lives, having the first impression of everything that we can sense!

Impression Formation

Impression formation is the forming of the first knowledge that a person has about another person. This might as well be taken as a subjective matter. But you as a person needs to figure out the reason behind having those first impression  thought. So hold your horses! For we will reveal the truth of IMPRESSION... Impression formation is actually a part of social cognition as people make sense out of the world around them. But how do we make initial judgements about certain things? What sorts of information do we use to evaluate? Have these kind of questions came across your mind before? Well if it has or it has never, let us together embark on the journey to find how it really occurs.

Now, some are the questions we might consider when we meet someone are:

• How old is he or she?
• Gender?
• Role?
• Marital status?
• What is its favourite leisure time activity? 
• Is it intelligent?
• Extraverted?
• Friendly?
• Dishonest? 

So on and so forth. Some of these first impressions may come from observations and some may even require further interpretations. Basically, the physical cues of impression formation are physical attractiveness and observation. Nevertheless, there are still barriers when we rely upon impressions: reliance on schemas and heuristics can be problematic, over-reliance on first impression, observer differences, focus on dispositional and not situational cues, and expectancies can influence behaviours.

Attribution

Last but not least, nothing other than ATTRIBUTION! What is an attribution? Basically, attribution is an inference that people make about the causes of events and behaviour. Attribution has now been classified into internal and external as well as stable and unstable. In terms of internal and external it's  a very simple conjecture; internal attribution suggests that an event or a person's behaviour is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities or feelings while external attribution is that an person's behaviour is due to situational factors. 

Example:

Sally gets a poor grade in her recent examinations and if she believes that the cause of the poor results is due to her own fault of procrastinating her work, then it is said that she is making an internal attribution. But if she believes that it is because of the hard and tricky questions being asked in the examination, then it is an external attribution.


Besides, researches have also been able to distinguish between stable and unstable attribution of which when people make a stable attribution, they infer that an event or behaviour is due to unchanging factors whereas unstable attribution is due to temporary factors. 

Example: 

Hana gets a poor grade on his sociology paper and if she attributes her grade because of the reason that she is unwell when she is taking her examinations, then it is said that she is making a stable attribution. But if she attributes the cause of her poor grades by saying that she does not have much time, then it means that she is making an external attribute. 

Extra Feature: Classmates with the song we made

In class, we had the chance to have our song sung by members of other groups which is lead by Hakam. It was surely fun and enjoyable as we had a good laugh with it at the same time gain the knowledge from the song. Here is the video recorded by our group member, Bella, as she was in BTN when we created this song.

Crash Course in Intelligence