Choose one of the topics and respond in a minimum of 200 words answering the questions included in the topic of your choice. This assignment will contribute to the last section of your final paper.
- The Keirsey Temperament Web Site
Visit this website at http://keirsey.com/
You can take the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, a personality test similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory that includes four scales assessing the dimensions of extraversion/introversion, intuiting/sensing, feeling/thinking, and judging/perceiving. This categorization parallels Carl Jung’s effort to classify people according to specific personality types.
When researching this topic, some questions to consider in your response may include:
Do you agree with your scored profile? Do you think that this site provides empirical support for the author’s claims? How are personality tests used in our culture? Would your results be the same if a good friend or family member answered the questions for you? Why are these tests important and how can they be helpful to you and those who view your results (remember to use sources to support your claims)?
- Reciprocity: Smile and the World Smiles Back
Find a friend and go to a public area (e.g., a mall, a grocery store, a library) and observe how strangers respond to a smile or a frown. One of you will be the displayer, making the facial expressions at the strangers, and one of you will be the coder, recording the responses of the strangers. The displayer should walk about 5 feet in front of the coder and make eye contact with a single oncoming stranger (whose face the coder can see). Once the displayer has made eye contact, he or she should discreetly gesture to the coder with a little wave of the hand to watch the stranger’s face. Then the displayer should either smile or frown, and the coder should record the stranger’s facial expression changes. Make sure that you get together after the stranger passes and record which facial expression the displayer made next to your record of the stranger’s facial expression. To complete this assignment you will have to download the chart, PSY1010_Wk6_Chart.
When researching this topic, some questions to consider in your response may include:
What did you find? Did strangers respond differently to smiles than to frowns? Did it matter if the stranger was the same or the opposite sex as the displayer? Did male strangers respond differently in general than females did? Can you link your findings to the use of food demonstrators in supermarkets who give away free food? What does the law of reciprocity state? Support your findings with those found in the text which indicate why/how this concept works. Would the results vary from one culture to the next (why/why not)? Were there noted gender differences in your results?
Note: Be careful. Make sure that the coder is not writing anything down in view of any strangers. After the encounter between the displayer and the stranger, the coder and the displayer should quietly and unobtrusively meet to discuss what was just observed. There have been students thrown out of malls for being too overt in the recording of this experiment. You don’t want to elicit anyone’s suspicions, and you don’t want to infringe on anyone’s privacy.
- Intercultural Learning Activities
Read the following anecdote:
Yuri, an exchange student from Russia, was gratified by the warm reception he got upon his arrival in the U.S. He was greeted by broad smiles and was frequently invited into homes for meals. He was invited to stay in American homes several times. At cultural events, people would say to Yuri, “You must drop by and see us sometime.”
Yuri called home and enthusiastically told his family, “Americans are so friendly! We are going to be close friends and see a lot of each other.”
When researching this topic, some questions to consider in your response may include:
- What is Yuri’s view of Americans, and on what does he base this perception? (Before you answer this…think of how many times you tell someone to “stop by anytime” but really anticipate that someone would call first.)
- Is Yuri’s perception accurate? Will the friendly Americans remember the invitations for Yuri to stop by? How durable are friendships with strangers in the U.S.?
- Are the signs of friendship the same everywhere? To what do friendships obligate you in the U.S.? Are the obligations the same in other cultures?
- What do our social interactions tell us about trust vs. mistrust, relationships, and how accurate our perceptions are about others even in our own culture?
Prior to submitting your work in your final project, compile all previous lab assignments to include a comprehensive paper that reflects an understanding of the basic concepts in Psychology. Be sure to include final revised work from previous weeks and make sure the paper flows from one topic to the next.
Remember, your paper should include:
- For Weeks 1 and 2, the beginning of your paper will be about research (testing, intuition verses data collection, emperical evidence) which you already have a foundation for in your Lab reports.
In Weeks 3 through 6, you may choose one topic per week to include in your paper. The choices are as follows:
- Week 3: Sensation and Perception, Dreams, or Paranormal/Parapsychological Phenomena
- Week 4: Memory, Problem-Solving Strategies, Learning
- Week 5: Motivation and Emotion, Stress, Health, and Human Flourishing
- Week 6: Personality and Social Psychology
Your final paper should have 5 sections represented as Weeks 1 and 2 with a primary focus on research and Weeks 3 through 6 with a primary focus on the topics you chose.
By the due date, please submit your paper to the Submissions Area on the next page.
