Today was the last day of my independent study. Most of my work was communicating. I needed to make sure the group members know my part, so they can continue working on it.
The working transition process was not complicated. However, it required time and my understanding of my works. I did multiple works for multiple topics in this month. Therefore, I need to communicate with different personalities in charge of the topic. There are always problems when you are working. The only way to solve it is not flinching, because you cannot have excuses for the mistakes you make of your works. Of course, we faced problems during this process. When I sent my data to Lin, she could not open it because our system versions were different. I tried to return the software key back to Fengjiao, but the key was not working on her laptop. Nothing is hard enough to be impossible. However, nothing can be done if you don’t solve any of these problems. You have to be patient and serious about work. Ms. Li introduced a new experiment in Jinzhou to me. She expected me to analyze the RSA data for this experiment. The RSA data analysis can be able to finish on the software without the software key or any specific requirements. Therefore, I can be a part of the team even if I live far away. The group just collected the original data in December. I am really excited to join this new experiment. I will remember this experience and people here. I am more excited to be continually working with these people for psychology in the future.
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Today was a normal day of working and learning. I worked on videos in the morning and studied for “Introduction to psychology” in the afternoon. In order to know what sensation is in psychology, we first need to know what is not a sensation in psychology. Emotional reaction and awareness are not sensations. The sensation is cognition of the brain to know the individual attribute of things. There are five sensation systems. They are the visual system, auditory system, haptic system, olfactory system, and the gustatory system. These sensory systems produce and receive various information about the world around us. Psychologists can analysis the respondents’ behavior by observing their sensory systems. By comparison, the sensation is a direct reaction of the individual attribute of things. It is more impersonality. Perception is an indirect reaction of things’ integrity attribute. It is more subjectivity. Gestalt is a whole thing that is different from all its parts and has qualities that are not present in any of its parts by themselves. It focused on the subjectivity of experiences and behaviors. There are many principles of Gestalt. For example, the law of continuity is that in the process of perception people tend to make the straight line of the object of perception continue to be a straight line and the curve continue to be a curve. Moreover, the correlation law means that a random graph is treating as a certain format rather than as sections.
Perception is a very interesting topic. It solved the questions of my daily life.
Today was a busy day because our video coding process was halfway through. We had a meeting in the morning to communicate our concerns, advice, and questions. The video coding group has three people who are Fengjiao, Min, and me. Although we often asked each other questions while working to solve our problems, this time was the first official meeting. The official meetings will be included in the experimental analyzation. We can find valuable information about possible errors or flaws of the experiment.
My problems were mostly about listening to the respondents’ speech in the videos. The location of this experiment is in Gansu where has a very different accent as mine. Therefore, it is hard for me to understand some parts of their conversations. Min had hardware problems. It costs a lot of time for her laptop to recognize the key of the observer which is the software for video coding. Therefore, she is slower than Fengjiao and me. Fengjiao was part of this experiment all through, so she didn’t have problems. She always provided advice for Min and me when we had questions. I really appreciated she. At the beginning of the video coding process, I was very confused. She wrote a step by step instruction for Min and me which is the most helpful thing for me in the whole process. An essential step in scientific research is communication. Through discussion, we can learn multiple aspects of the experiment in order to achieve a better experimental system. The topics of today’s online class are “Ethical issue,” and “The history of educational psychology.” In any psychology experiment, scientists have to be careful with the ethical issues. Principles of ethical issues are the basic rules for psychology researchers. First is the informed consent. The respondents have to be willing to join the experiment without any hidden information. The regulation expects the researchers tell the respondents some information of the experiment as much as possible before the experiment. Moreover, the respondents can quit the experiment at any time. Second is the debriefing process. If the experiments have any inappropriate component like privacy issues, the researches have to give enough explanations to the respondents. Last but not least is the principle of minimization risk. The researches cannot hurt the respondents in any way like physical, mental, and privacy.
William James is the founder of American psychology. He did not agree with Titchener's idea. He thinks the psychological behaviors are based on natural evolution. His researches are called functionalism. Functionalism advocates to study for consciousness and augmentation.
The representative figures of behaviorism are John Watson and Skinner. Behaviorism believes that lower needs (such as physiological and safety needs) are inherited, while higher needs are acquired through operant conditioning. Furthermore, humanism psychologists believe that humans should have higher pursuits than simply reacting to the external environment. Although psychology has a short history, there are various theories. Theories are developing with more researches and society. Psychology and human minds are much more complicated than we thought.
Day9:“Introduction to experimental methods,” “The data collection,” and “Experimental study design.”1/17/2019 The main process of psychology is to design research, data collection, and analysis. Data collection is an important step in psychology. There is three-way of data collection which is observation, self-report, and automatic acquisition. Observation has three methods which are the visual method, the acoustic method, and the biometrics method. The scientists use all kinds of machines to collect their observations. Self-report is introspection. Social desirability often affects self-report a lot. Automatic acquisition through facebook, twitter, and Instagram automatically collect data which can be used for psychology research. The data of the company, the government, and the statistics can all be used for psychology. The standardization of the birth of modern psychology is the setup of the lab for experiments. Therefore, setting up an experiment while designing research is necessary for psychology research. Dr. Peng provides an example. He likes to drink orange juice. Dr. Peng feels more active and positive every time he drinks orange juice. Therefore, he thought if orange juice can provide positive feelings for a human. Dr. Peng observed his friends who drink orange juice and found that his friends who drink organic juice did look positive. However, this result is not accurate because the size of respondents and the rules of data collection are not regulated. Experiments and researches require rigorous process and accurate collections. I need more basic knowledge to support my works for the lab. Video coding is one of the steps in data analysis. The purpose of video coding is selecting the important parts of the experimental video which is preparing for the further analysis. I believe that I can understand my works better with more professional knowledge. A famous psychology Ph.D., Kaiping Peng, is hosting a public online psychology lesson for the beginners. Ms. Li recommends me to learn the basic of psychology from his class. The name of the lesson is “Introduction to Psychology.” The topics of today are “what is not psychology,” “the field of psychology,” and “what is psychology.” The purpose of his class is understanding the outline of psychology. I extended my knowledge of psychology a lot through Dr. Peng’s class. Learning psychology is not learning to be a psychological counselor or providing hints to make people be positive. The number of researchers is more than the number of counselors. There are educational psychology, economics psychology, political psychology, and so on. The psychological counselor needs the theoretical support from researches. Moreover, psychology is not just repeating common sense. Mr. Peng provides an example of Arthur Aron who did research of people in love. The result is that people in love gaze at each other longer than others. The public only saw how normal the result is. However, the public didn’t see the complicated data collections and other procedures. Psychology is a science requires falsification, impersonality, assumption, observation, and testing. Basic questions and categories of psychological research are about human psychological processes and human psychological behavior. The previous psychology researches are mainly on the negative side. For example, anxiety, depression, and therapy. Nowadays, scientists are trying to learn more about the positive side. For example, braveness, happiness, creativity, aesthetics, morality, culture, and successfulness. In the afternoon, I worked on the video coding. I used an observer which is an editing software specifically for scientific researches. There were some software problems. I found a way to solve them online. I am getting more and more familiar with the experimental process of psychology day by day.
Video coding is a work requires abundant time. Therefore, most of time today I spent in the computer lab coding the video for the experiment about the influence of length of parent child separation on emotional regulation and the moderating variables of social, family and individual traits. In order to code the experimental videos, I carefully read through the previous researches and reports. This research is about the “left-behind” children. The problem was raised because many young people in the remote areas left home and went cities to work by the development of cities. Therefore, there are many children of these people staying at home with grandparents or distant relatives. Some of these children are even staying alone. The Chinese researches called these groups of children as the “left-behind” children. By this special and long-term social environment, the “left-behind” children can further prove the previous researches about the close relationship between environment and individuals. Moreover, maternal separation is more likely to cause depression, anxiety, and other mental problems. The purpose of the research is testing the psychological effects of maternal separation and enriching the research on the “left-behind” children. Furthermore, the research can provide theoretical basis for the intervention to prevent mental health problems of the “left-behind” children and promote their positive development. In the afternoon, I talked to Huilin who is a member of Ms. Li’s research group and Ms. Li’s student. I knew that she was not major in psychology. I asked the reason why she decided to change her major after studied for propaganda for three years. Huilin answered that she thought propaganda is not a field requires professional degree. Anyone wants to work for propaganda can be familiar with it though experience even without professional studies. However, psychology is different. In order to understand psychology and practice, it is necessary to study for the theory and work in labs. By working hard without professional lectures, many people can work on propaganda, but no one can be a psychologist. When I read the popular researches about psychology, I found an interesting topic. It was talking about eating sugar tends to cause alzheimer’s disease. The scientists said the reason is that glucose and glucose metabolites are able to adversely modify proteins through a non-enzymatic reaction called glycation, which is associated with the pathology of Alzheimer’s Disease and is a characteristic of the hyperglycaemia induced by diabetes. Based on the amount of sugar I eat everyday, I have to start to think that should I avoid sugar from now?
Resource: Kassaar, O., Morais, M. P., Xu, S., Adam, E. L., Chamberlain, R. C., & Jenkins, B., et al. (2017). Macrophage migration inhibitory factor is subjected to glucose modification and oxidation in alzheimer’s disease. Scientific Reports, 7, 42874. Today is the last day of the data analyzation for the questionnaires. After checking in with Ms. Li, I went to find Huilin who is my teammate to finalize our analyzation. Through collecting so many questionnaires, I become really familiar with the process of transformation. While transforming the questionnaires, I looked through those answers and found many interesting things. These questionnaires didn’t show many bullying happening in this middle school. To be more specific, there are only two students count as victims among the respondents, one observer, and one bully. However, many of these students have issues of family, friends, or self-emotion. Another interesting finding is that female students extensively refuse that they have a good relationship with male students. The next step for the professional group is making all kinds of deeper analyzations of the primary transformation and analyzation we did. One of them is Stroop data analysis. Huilin explained it to me once while we are working. All my findings and questions can be answered in the following steps. Although I won’t work for the next steps because the more complicated steps require more professional skills, I am really excited about the conclusion of this topic. After lunch, Ms. Feng asked me to help her team to collect toys for the experiment. Her group will leave the lab and travel to Heibei for a new topic about children for ten days. There were many toys. I was confused. I thought the only usage of the toys for the experiment is pacifying children. I pointed out my confusion to Ms. Feng and realized that the psychology experiments need rest time for the respondents. They normally play cartoons and provides toys to create a comfortable environment for the young age respondents. Later, I went back to my seat to finish the video coding work for “the influence of length of parent-child separation on emotional regulation and the moderating variables of social, family and individual traits.” By the reason of Ms. Feng is going to leave the lab for ten days and she is the leader of video coding group, she gave us some extra training before she leaves. Video coding is not an interesting work because it requires us to watch all the experimental processes with any details. However, this is the best way for someone who was not in the experimental field to understand the topic.
By staying with professionals and doing works for psychology, I get into a new world with all kinds of new knowledge. I am having strongly interested in knowing the conclusions of the researches I had join and expecting to stay with the group for a longer time. Today is the fifth day I join the institute. As time goes on, I gain more information and knowledge. Therefore, my day is getting busier and busier. I had a lot of works today. Except for the data analyzation for yesterday’s questionaries, I got new works about video coding. In the morning, I worked on data analyzation for the questionaries of yesterday. Because scientific researches require abundant data, so we collected more than four hundred questionnaires this time. We planned to finish the data analyzation in five days. Due to high data volume, everyone needs to speed up while maintaining the quality. In the afternoon, I went to Ms. Feng’s office to learn to code the research videos. The main goal of video coding is selecting the important video information among the research. Ms. Feng’s research is different as Ms. Li’s research. The topic of Ms. Feng’s research is “The influence of length of parent-child separation on emotional regulation and the moderating variables of social, family and individual traits.” The group went to Gansu -an under poverty place in China- to collect data last winter. The group chose Gansu because Gansu has many children live alone in their hometown. Their parents often go to big cities to work and come back only a few times in many years. Based on the procedure, the videos can code as unscorable, attention-test, parent-child, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, cortisol-01, speech-preparation, speech, calculate, cortisol-10, cortisol-25, and cortisol-40. Each video is about an hour. Therefore it requires us to be patient to complete this work. Though a whole week work in a professional psychology lab, I understand that the reason for why statistic is the basis of psychology. Any psychology research needs plenty of data. In order to understand psychology, the first step is learning statistics.
Today morning, I went to Feng Lin middle school to pass out questionnaires for a research. Later, I need to transform the questionnaires to quantitative data. The research is about finding the reasons of bullying among middle school students. By collecting the total score of emotional regulation and other scale scores with deeper analyzation, the group are expecting an answer. My goal is understanding how to design a reasonable questionnaire and how to transform questionaries to data with computer programs. For scientific research, it is important that the respondents complete the research on a voluntary basis. Therefore, before I passed out the questionnaires. I passed out a set of voluntary agreements. The questionnaire has seven sections. It takes about half an hour to finish. Seven sections works for seven data. They are Delaware Bullying Victimization Scale, Olweus Bully/Victim Scale, Olson’s Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale, Emotion Regulation Scale, Cognitive Emotion Regulation Scale, Perceived Social Support Scale, and Peer Relations Scale. Each section has a set of questions with different scoring standardization. Through several complicated formulas, the scores for questions can transform to values with meanings. A reasonable questionnaire needs comprehensive questions, detailed answers, and clear explanations before the respondents answer the questions. Moreover, the willingness and privacy of respondents are important to be careful while research.
By using excel for PC or numbers for Mac, we can program the formula and effectively calculate the values. Psychology research requires strong data basis to complete a hypothesis. Primary data is the fundamental step of everything. Anyone has to take a serious attitude while processing data. |
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