Psychology For Dummies Quotes

One reason for this polarisation is that, as a group, people can come up with a bigger set of persuasive arguments in support of the biased options: because everyone favours leaving the job, everyone suggests reasons to do so. But they come up with slightly different reasons. One person may point out that your friend is unlikely to get promoted any more at the bank, another that a new job would mean he’d meet new people, another that he never has the chance to travel in his current job and so on. So by the end of the discussion, all the group’s talked about is a lot of good reasons in favour of one option. As a result, the group agrees on a more extreme conclusion based on this surfeit of good reasons.

Model calm behavior, no matter how upset you feel.

If you’re an educator, caregiver, or parent, and you find yourself unable to contain your anger with kids, please consider getting professional help. Excessive harshness, whether it’s emotional or physical in nature, can cause lasting harm to children.

You don't have any control over whether you win. You do have control over how you perform.

Research has shown that regularly engaging in some form of meditation can reduce levels of stress hormones in the blood, lower blood pressure, and improve mental functioning.

Developmental psychology is a metatheory that is built on the idea that mental processes and behavior change over time, from one mental process to another in a progressive manner. Mental processes are built from and upon previous ones. Behaviors are built from and upon previous ones.

Nobody grins more on their first day on the dev team than someone from QA. Contrary to what people believe, QA people don’t sit around playing games all day. Although they’re the first people to see new titles, one can’t describe their day-to-day routine as fun. It takes meticulous effort to write and verify bug reports. Developers fix bugs at their own pace, after which it becomes QA’s responsibility to test and verify whether the proper adjustment has been made. Some bugs are trivial or are duplicates of others; some are fiendishly difficult to solve and take months or even years to address. Other entries aren’t even bugs and are dubbed “working as intended.” When a problem is discovered by QA, it has to be verified by senior QA staff members. Josh Kurtz described nightmarish experiences he had isolating a bug that occurred whenever a player attacked a monster in Diablo II’s expansion. To eliminate the possibility that a weapon was the culprit of the bug, Josh had to attack a dummy monster using every weapon in the game, a process that took hours. Tasks like these might be split among QA people or sometimes they fell to just one unfortunate soul to sort out. After every weapon was checked, Josh reported the results. The programmers or designers would change something, and Josh would then have to retest every weapon and report results again. The developers would change something else, and Josh would need to test everything again to make sure the bug hadn’t reactivated. And again. After doing something like this repetitively for hours, for days, for weeks, and sometimes for months, QA drudgery feels less like being in a computer game company and more like a psychological experiment. These entry-level positions are minimum-wage jobs, but people endure the experience just for a chance at getting a development position, becoming a QA lead, or attaining some other non-developer position. But everyone’s goal is the same: escape from QA.

Experiments like Lack's indicate considerable flexibility. The results should not be overinterpreted as indicating tendencies to reflexive responding, as Krebs and Dawkins (1984, p. 385) did: *that animals are susceptible to being "tricked" by the crude dummies of ethologists ... makes it Ukely that natural selection will favor similar exploitation by other animals'. In real events stimuli are not isolated. Animals trying to 'trick' other individuals will inevitably supply information from many sources, some of which may be contradictory. Natural selection will have opposing effects, favoring exploita- tion on the one hand and flexible coping procedures on the other. Surely one of the hardest questions about flexibility is: to what extent can signalers anticipate responses to their signaling and control that signaling to influence the behavior of other individuals? Can they choose whether to signal, and perhaps even what signal to use, based on expectations of the responses they may eUcit? The parrot Alex can, with Enghsh words (e.g. Pepperberg, 1990), but can birds have similar control over their species- specific signaling? Evidence of such effects is inconclusive. So-called 'audience effects' are sometimes cited as evidence of volitional control of signaling; some may well be. In many if not most cases, however, plausible alternative explanations have not been ruled out (Smith, 1990, pp. 211-214). For instance, does an individual ground squirrel (e.g. Spermophilus beldingi) behave differently on detecting a predator if it is near or not near its close relatives? It is more likely to utter trills when near close relatives (Sherman, 1977), but is this because in such a situation it is more likely alertly to monitor a predator, or because its audience elicits the calls? If the former, then the audience effect does not influence signaling directly. The influence is indirect, through an effect on the signaler's monitoring behavior. If a high probability of staying attentive is part of the information that the vocalization provides about the signaler's behavior, then the presence of relatives may be simply a condition for the monitoring rather than a basis for a decision to vocalize. The point is that we can not learn whether animals make decisions about whether to signal until we have fully grasped the requisite conditions (and thus the regular correlates) of signaling. If an individual retains freedom with respect to those correlates, then its signaling can be modulated by audience effects and the like. However, if the correlates are regular and thus represented by the 'messages' of the signal, there is little opportunity to signal electively. Signaling behavior is useful for cognitive research only when the referents of signals have been carefully studied. Surprisingly, a signaler can also be its own audience. An unanticipated effect of an individual's vocal signahng on its own hormonal states was discovered by Cheng (1992). The ovarian follicles of female Ring Doves, Streptopelia risoria, who cannot coo because of experimental brain lesions, severed syringial nerves or deflated air sacs do not mature. If the doves are exposed to playback of their own previously recorded coos, the follicles do mature. Cheng proposed that 'vocal self-stimulation' might also be important in physiological responses to other signahng - a male passerine's singing, for instance, or a human's crying, talking or singing in the dark. Any such physiological changes would alter the bases for cognitive processing, and thus for social responsiveness as well.