Kourtney's Blogs

Personality is such an interesting subject. Trying to understand how the brain develops and ultimately shapes who we are as humans is unbelievably fascinating. It is also quite amazing how different everyone's personality is. Even within close families, personalities can vary drastically. This difference is what psychologists try to understand and make sense of. There are so many different theories trying to explain this phenomenon, but which one is "right"? I decided to analyze my dads personality and see what I can figure out about the way that he was raised and the person that he turned into as an adult and see how they correlate. I found an online  personality test and had my dad take it to see his results: His personality was characterized as CONSUL MIND- 74% extroverted 26% introverted  ENERGY- 44% intuitive 56% observant   NATURE- 49% thinking 51% feeling  TACTICS- 72% judging 28% prospecting IDENTITY- 69% assertive 31% turbulent  Look...

Personality is made up of the characteristics that make someone unique such as thoughts feelings or behaviors. Research has shown that many external forces can influence the way that a personality is formed. One a persons personality is created there is little to no change throughout their life. So many people are interested in looking at how and why a certain personality is created that there is an entire branch of psychology dedicated to understanding it. A number of different psychologists including Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson came up with theories that attempt to further understand personality and how it develops. There is a biological theory, psychodynamic theory and behavioral theory. - Biological Theory : Biological approaches state that genes control the way a personality develops within a person. This ties back to the nature-nurture debate I talked about last week leaning more toward the nature side of the debate. Biologists or any scientist for that matter tends to lea...

There are three problems that arise at the intersection where philosophy and science cross that are fundamental to our understanding of our relationship with the natural world: the mind-body problem, the free will problem and then nature-nurture problem. In the history of psychology the biggest debate to this day is the nature-nurture debate because our sense of moral character depends on it. Behavioral genetics is the way that genes and environment work together to influence someone's behavior. There are two different sides to this problem, nature and nurture.  Nature pertains to our genes in our cells that make up our body. Now we know that the differentiation of these cells is what gives us our physical attributes like hair color, eye color, height etc. The debate is on if these same genes give us our behavioral attributes like personality, intelligence and sexual orientation.  Nurture is the other half of the debate. The nurture theory  states that genetic influen...

Reaction time is a measure of how quickly someone can respond to a particular stimulus. Reaction time has been widely studied and many factors have been shown to affect reaction times, including age, gender, physical fitness, fatigue, distraction, alcohol, personality type, and whether the stimulus is auditory or visual. The flow of information is Stimulus … Sensory Neuron…  Spinal Cord or Brain… Motor Neuron…   Response We are going to be doing three different tests to test how fast your brain reacts to a stimuli. Visual, auditory and tactile. Visual Test 1. Subject one dangles dominant hand off the edge of a table. 2. Subject two holds a 30 centimeter (12-inch) ruler between two fingers at the 30 cm mark, having the 0 mark touching subject one’s index finger. 3. Subject two tells subject one to grab the ruler as fast as possible, when they SEE it being released. 4. Record the centimeter measurement. 5. Repeat this three times, for a total of fo...