Hunger and Motivation: Check it Out

Just in time for the holidays: can thinking about eating help you eat less? This was on NPR this morning and speaks directly to Hunger motivation. It's a short and sweet little treat.

Taylor, Derrick and other undercover artists should love this animated piece about the effect of rewards on motivation.

Share what your thoughts!

Take this one to Heart! (or to the Cerebral Cortex, or wherever)

What's more important brains or determination? You may or may not be surprised by the findings of a research team from the University of Pennsylvania.

Read the article "Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ...."  . This article is typical of some that you may find yourself encountering next year, so I'd like to hear your opinion about three things; the results of the research, how it is related to what you've looked at withing the field of motivation and how you feel about the level of the article itself (comprehension difficulty, presentation of statistics etc.)

This Emotional Life

 PBS ran a really cool series at the beginning of this year called "This Emotional Life". Take a look at the companion website.

Click on topics, scroll down to see all that are available, choose one (example “Anger”, “Forgiveness”, “Grief and Loss”) and then select a subtopic (if necessary). Read the overview of the topic provided by PBS and then find the area within your topic that is titled “Additional Resources” and select an article that looks interesting to you. Read the article. Respond on this blog in the form of a short review.

If you're truly interested in the topic and want to take it a step further AND could use a lil extra credit, read three of the articles, prepare a 2-3 minute INTERESTING overview and presentation for one of my General Psych classes.

Memory, Cognition, Language Review

Can you imagine how hard it was to find an image that actually connected turkey and Cognition?

I've got quite a few sites for you to peruse at your leisure, some of them, like the one that outlines the seven sins of memory are purely academic, while others, like the memory experiments and the creativity tests are amusing while helping to illustrate the concept at the same time.

I've already provided the language link in your Thanksgiving assignment, but here it is again.

Also, I was going to make some of the Elizabeth Loftus experiments part of your break assignments, but instead just take a look at the overview of her work on suggestibility and implantingof false memories.


So have a lovely day, chew slowly and analyze the emotional and cognitive states of all around you!

Thanksgiving Break Assignments

For the very few of you who did not receive the handouts at school last week, here they are. I'll be posting several links for Memory and Components of Thought tomorrow.

Does it seem like you've read this exact same thing before?

So what does this monkey have to do with deja vu? I'm not sure really, but when you do a google image search for the term, this little thief pops up.

Anyway, as per the discussion in class today, thought you might find this article from Discover interesting, it goes along way in normalizing such a strange seeming phenomena.

Learning Review

Although there is a part of me that would like to postpone the test until next Monday, I realize that I would only be negatively reinforcing your behavior. By taking away something that you don't like I would only be increasing the likelihood that the next time you don't want to take a test, you will also not do your homework en masse.

Having said that, here's a review of some key concepts:

This is a study sheet comparing the particulars of classical and operant conditioning.

This is an explanation to the seven examples of classical and operant that most of you attempted to conquer. In other words, the "answer sheet". For those of you who haven't turned it in yet, at this point, don't bother.

It seems that the majority of you do not really understand schedules of reinforcement. The following links provide some good explanations and examples of the various schedules;
fixed ratio  ,   variable ratio ,   fixed interval,   variable interval

And finally, many of you have blown off the work of the cognitive learning psychologists (Bandura, Kohler, Tolman). We haven't spent much time discussing them, but here you will find an excellent overview of cognitive learning theory. It's 10 pages long. If you find that overwhelming (hope you don't plan on a rigorous university next year) read at least the first three pages.

Good Luck!