I will be choosing the psychology prompt.
I. Writing in Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences (psy 2932)
In this class, an expansion of the student’s writing on a short article, or the combination of 2 or more articles, (similar to the way in 1101 and 1102 we look at the effects of looking at texts in combination), forms the basis for the long paper.
Here’s a link to the electronic book, full text and abstracts available online, mentioned below from which the short articles come. You’ll choose, as class students did, an article that interests you, or a combination of articles that seems to you would have an interesting effect on each other.
With this prompt it seems as though I should have, by the time of the long paper, written a smaller paper on a short article or a combination of two or more articles. the articles I will base my paper on will be from the following abstracts:
ABSTRACT—Recent longitudinal and cross-sectional aging research has shown that personality traits continue to change in adulthood. In this article, we review the evidence for mean-level change in personality traits, as well as for individual differences in change across the life span. In terms of mean-level change, people show increased self-confidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability with age. These changes predominate in young adulthood (age 20–40). Moreover, mean-level change in personality traits occurs in middle and old age, showing that personality traits can change at any age. In terms of individual differences in personality change, people demonstrate unique patterns of development at all stages of the life course, and these patterns appear to be the result of specific life experiences that pertain to a person’s stage of life.
ABSTRACT—Synchrony—a construct used across multiple fields to denote the temporal relationship between events—has been applied to the study of mother–infant interaction and is suggested here as a framework for the study of interpersonal relationships. Defined as the temporal coordination of micro-level social behavior, parent–infant synchrony is charted in its development across infancy from the initial consolidation of biological rhythms during pregnancy to the emergence of symbolic exchange between parent and child. Synchrony is shown to depend on physiological mechanisms supporting bond formation in mammals—particularly physiological oscillators and neuroendocrine systems such as those involving the hormone oxytocin. Developmental outcomes of the synchrony experience are observed in the domains of self-regulation, symbol use, and the capacity for empathy across childhood and adolescence. Specific disruptions to the parameters of synchrony that may be observed in various pathological conditions, such as prematurity or maternal affective disorder, are detailed. A time-based, micro-analytic behavioral approach to the study of human relationship may offer new insights on intersubjectivity across the lifespan.
ABSTRACT—Relations between developments in neural structures and changes in memory in infancy are a relatively recent focus of research. Greater knowledge about brain development, as well as methodological advances such as combined use of behavioral and electrophysiological techniques, have led to the generation and testing of specific hypotheses regarding sources of age-related change. Theory and data converge to suggest that the early-stage processes of encoding and consolidation are a significant source of age-related variability in memory early in life. Additional research is needed to determine how these processes change and interact with myriad other determinants of recall.
I will take these three abstracts and form a thesis that relates them all together. It will be something along the lines of how a brain develops in infancy, and any damages that can affect that, to how a person matures through adulthood, and the different parts of the brain that can affect memory in later ages and personality changes.
