Field Day Reflection

I really really loved the field day. I thought it was so fun to see the University campus and experience a little piece of college life. The lectures were interesting and the student panel was cool. My favorite part was our lunch break! Collin, Kristen and I walked to Dinkytown with Collin's brother and ate at this super cool pizza place called La Mesa. They have all these weird and crazy pizzas like macaroni pizza and pizza with french fries on it and potatoes and honey mustard and all these weird things that sound really gross at first, but are insanely good! At first Kristen and I wanted just like peperoni, but then we decided to just point at a random slice of pizza that looked good and just eat it and it turned out to be so good! After that we walked down to this cool frozen yogurt place and got that and walked round a bit and went back to the lecture.


I had a very..interesting...experience in the lecture after lunch! I was sitting in the lecture and about ten minutes into it I heard Claire and Sydney and everyone behind me like whispering and talking and I turned around and they were all looking at me like super funny and I was so confused so I turned back around, but they kept whispering so I turned around to them again and was like what are you all looking at? And then they proceeded to be like "Brooke don't freak out and don't move, but there's a bee in your hair" and was like oh my goodness...! Bees totally freak me out and Kari was right behind me and she's allergic to bees and I didn't want to get stung so I didn't know what to do about the situation. Kristen and I ended up leaving lecture and went walking outside where Kristen wanted to try and hit/kill the bee on my head by hitting it with my zip-up I was wearing. I was not at all okay with that idea because it probably would have stung me. I tried like running around to see if the movement would cause it to fly away, but when that didn't work we went up to this random guy who was getting his bike and asked if he knew how to handle bees. He was super nice and friendly and got the bee out of my hair for me!! I was so grateful to him and that experience made my day at the University so much more memorable! (:

Big Five Model

I enjoyed the part about the Big Five model in this chapter. I like but yet it bugs me how there's all these test to determine your personality type and such to help figure out what kind of person you are. One thing that bothers me about these tests and rankings, and like the questions of the ones we took in class, is that you can totally tell what is being measured in each question and what you will be rated as if you answer a certain way. Because of the predictability of the questions, I think these tests can be extremely inaccurate because people tend to pick what they would want to be more than what they really are. I have taken tests before that rates you on extroversion versus introversion. I always tend to be more introverted, but I am usually like a half and half split between the two because it always depends on the situation and whose in the scenarios and such. I feel like it's wrong for tests like these to group a person based off a few questions when there's so much more to a person than what information is gathered through the personality test! Just my little rant on personality tests! (:

Another part that caught my eye was the little part talking about how in cartoons and different shows when a person is making a decision, there will me an angel on one shoulder and a devil on another and that the angel represents the superego, the demon the id and the person is the ego. I never really understood that they stood for those and it's really interesting to note that!

Personal Space and Nonverbal Cues

I really liked this chapter because I found it to be very applicable to my own life. I thought the part about personal space was really true and I liked how it mentioned how you can go into an empty movie theater and how if someone else comes in they always tend to sit right by you and it always annoys you and how this can be addressed through proxemics. I have had this happen to me when me and mom have gone to a movie like right after school or just some random time when she's of work and we will be the only ones in the theater and then someone else will come in and sit right in front of us. And I'm always like really? You couldn't at least move down a few seats so I can put my feet up? It just always seems so rude and I never get it.

I also liked the part about nonverbal cues because it is very true that you can tell a lot about someone through their body language. Nonverbal cues tend to be very universal as well. If someone has their arms crossed they look uncomfortable or shy and closed in on themselves. If someone is biting their lip they seem nervous. This applies with many different nonverbals and helps to figure out how a person is feeling.

Premature Babies

I really liked the small part in this chapter about premature babies. It says that they are underdeveloped and often experience serious delays in cognitive and physical development. The main reason I liked these little tidbits of information was because I was a preemie baby.

When my mom was pregnant with me she had many problems and was in the hospital a week before I was born because she couldn't eat and would constantly get sick so I wasn't getting enough nutrition and had to be feed nutrients through a tube. I was born after 35 weeks gestation through a c-section my mom had because I needed to be born or she might die. Before I was taken out she had an amniocentesis done to make sure I was ready. After I was born I stayed in the hospital for 19 days with my mom. She had to recover from her pregnancy and I only had to really stay a week, but they decided to hold me longer because my dad didn't know how to take care of a baby yet. Since I was about a month early it's interesting to look at the pictures of fetal development that the book has. It shows how developed my brain was and such when I was born. I don't believe I had any of the cognitive or physical development delays, but that is probably because I wasn't a very premature baby, only slightly. Also, the doctors probably kept me to make sure I was developed enough before they let me go.

The ACT and IQ Tests

I liked the part in this chapter about college admission tests such as the ACT and SAT and if they really predict academic success in college. Recently, I have been looking into colleges myself and seeing what types of academic scholarships I could receive. The part that always frustrates me is the fact that the majority of the scholarships are based primarily on my SAT or ACT score and GPA doesn't pay a huge part in it. This is so frustrating to me because I think GPA would be a much better predictor in college success and smarts then one test you take for 5 hours. The book says that tests such as the ACT and SAT sometimes do predict college GPA success, but other times they do not.

Another section that interested me was about the commonly used IQ tests for adults like the WAIS-IV. I have never taken an IQ test before, but after reading this chapter it really makes me want to because I think It would be very interesting to see what I would get.

Also, on a little side note, my mom's friend Sue is a adult physiologist who I met and talked to about her job a few days ago. She said that she had been in the practice for 20 years and got so burned out with it and was constantly stressed that she stopped doing it and now works at Pier One as a type of stress reliever, easy job, where she still can have some sort of small income. I thought it was interesting because my mom always used to talk about how I should be a child psychologist and after talking to Sue I really don't think I would want to. She loved her job and all, don't get me wrong, it's not like a bad job at all. She said it was very interesting and rewarding at times, but yet she stressed the fact that it was so hard hearing about so many peoples problems all the time and that she would constantly think about them outside of work and that they would just weigh her down at times.

Smartest Person I Know

This person I know is extremely smart in many different ways. She had a 4.0 in high school and is doing amazing in college. She aspires to be a plastic surgeon someday. She has always had good grades and has been good in school her whole life and was in national honor society and academic clubs like that. She was also smart with who she picked as friends and always made good choices to do the right things.

The theory of intelligence that best explains her smarts is the Triarchic Theory. This theory proposes three kinds of intelligence: analytical, practical, and creative.

This applies to her because she has a very high analytical intelligence with her grades and through school. She also has a fairly high creative intelligence and can think about situations in different ways. But one thing that she often tends to lack is practical intelligence or in other words, "street smarts". She doesn't always understand others well and is naive about basic social principles that others are more aware about.

Exam 2

Exam two went better than my first exam. I think this was because I knew what to expect from the tests more. Also, I think I did better on this second test because the material was easier for me to understand and was more interesting to me and I tended to understand and relate to it more where as with exam one, the material was harder to relate to. One thing I did again that worked really well was to have a study review session. I also retook the quizzes many times which is the best way to study for these exams I think. They really help me a lot because if I get one wrong on the quiz then I go back and make sure I understand that part of the chapter well. Overall, I found these chapters in general to be more interesting then the previous chapters. I really enjoyed the chapter on dreaming and the parts about reinforcements and classical conditioning because you could relate those to real life. I found it interesting how stuff from the previous chapters like heuristics came up again and I have a feeling they probably will continue to come up in later chapters as well.

One thing I really need to work on is my lecture notes. I print off all the power points so I always feel like I don't have to take notes at the time, but then when I go back later and look at the lecture I find that parts of it don't make sense and I always wish I had written some note by it to help explain it to me later when the lecture isn't fresh in my mind.