Internal Assessment Stroop Effect

In psychology the Stroop Effect means the reaction time. The experiment was originally made by John Ridley Stroop in 1935. Today, records have shown that people had replicated this study 700 times. He conducted the experiment in 3 different ways: the 1st one was use the name of the colors in black ink, the 2nd was done the same way as the first one but with different color ink used, the last one was using squares with different colors. Sroop identified a large increase in the time taken by participants to complete the color reading in the second task compared to the naming of the color of the squares in experiment 2 while this delay did not appear in the first experiment. Such interference was explained by the automation of reading, where the mind automatically determines the semantic meaning of the word, and then must override this first impression with the identification of the color of the word a process that is not automatized. Unlike researchers performing the Stroop test that is most commonly used in psychological evaluation J.R Stroop never compares the time used for reading black words and the time needed for naming colors that conflicted with the written word. Stimuli in Stroop paradigms can be divided in 3 groups: neutral, congruent and incongruent. Neutral stimuli comprise those in which only the text, or color are displayed. Congruent stimuli are those in which the ink color and color name refer to the same concept. Incongruous stimuli are those in which ink color and concept differ. Three experimental findings are recurrently found in stroop experiments. A first finding is semantic interference, consisting in the fact that naming the ink of neutral stimuli is faster than in incongruent conditions. It is called semantic interference since it is usually accepted that the relationship in meaning between ink color and word is at the origin of the interference. Semantic facilitation defines the finding that naming the ink of congruent stimuli is faster than with neutral stimuli. The third finding is that both semantic interference and facilitation disappear when the task consists in reading the word instead of naming the ink. It has been sometimes called Stroop asyncrony, and has been explained by a reduced automaticitation when naming colors compared to reading.

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is somewhat a felt improvement in health which dose not include medication or a proper treatment, also fake surgeries and therapies are considered placebos. In 1995 Henry K. Butcher found that 35% of the people recovered using pills with no active ingredients. Other researchers studied 10 of Butcher´s 15 studies and found that 67% of the peoples condition improved without the using a placebo, another study was shown that people who had a cold where given a placebo and they experienced improvements in six days. It was also found that Henry K. Butcher only reported the percentage of conditions that shows improvements of the placebo, not the percentage that deteriorated. After examining 800 studies of the placebo effect, that was published worldwide by Henry, there was no evidence for the alleged placebo effect. The researchers did an experiment using 3 groups of participants: a group with medication, a group with a placebo, and a group with no treatment. The results of the 3 groups where matched 100% of the time. In my opinion of the effectiveness of placebos its kind of weird how the body behaves when received a treatment that doesn't cure the disease, but I think that some placebo work because for example every time I get a headache I put a pillow on my head for 40 minutes and it results that the pain is relieved or slight pain remains.

Gender and Cultural Difference

The Gender

In this article the Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm investigated that if man or women had more accurate memory in remembering every day events. They found that episodic memory was a strength for women, in detail this indicates that women are excellent at remembering words, objects, pictures of every day life, etc., but men have a better ability at remembering non-linguistic information for example, finding there way back when lost. Another discovery that they found was that women where better at remembering faces than men, to prove this they did a an experiment where they presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The results where found that women where able to remember female faces than the male faces. To conclude this research they found that Environmental factors, and education influence the differences of memory between men and women.

The Culture

In this article Michelle Leichtman researches about memories of children and how well they can remember their childhood when they grow up, they found that people from the US have more strength in remembering their childhood because they grew up in societies that focus on individual personal history, but in Asia many people don't remember their childhood because they grew up in culture where they value there interdependence rather than personal autonomy.

Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's is a disease that occurs at the age of 65, in which your brain starts to deteriorate and you lose resent memories, your personality, and you might forget things that are common in your daily life such as the location of your house, or the names of your family.This disease starts off in the minor stage in which many symptoms are noticeable by others, as the person ages the disease get worse at the point in which you don't remember who you are, and other people who know the person will visualize him as a stranger. Not all people get Alzheimer's , and the people who get it don't necessarily get to the severe stage of Alzheimer's. After watching the video of people with Alzheimer's I felt sad for them because its terrible that you forget the common things that revolve around you, and your education. Especially your personality because when you become disrespectful and angry others will not what to talk to the person or take care of them, which basically they will be left alone until they die. Although there is a medicine that can slow down the progress of the disease, but not curing it, but I wish that in the future there will be a cure for Alzheimer's, my mom says that to prevent this disease you have to keep your brain active by reading, solving puzzles, or anything else that stimulates the brain.

The Language Of Emotion: Ad Slogans In Native Tongues Connect To Consumers' Emotions

In this experiment Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer were trying to find out the expressions of people towards marketing messages in different languages. They tested this by using different slogans expressed in different languages with the participants, it turned out that messages expressed in consumers native language tend to be more emotional than messages in there second language. The conductors don't believe that the effect is not due to the language or the difficulty in understanding the message, they said that it depends on the personal memories and the language context, reading or hearing a word (unconsciously) triggers memories of situations in which that word played a role, because consumers usually have more personal memories with words in their native language than in their second language, marketing messages in their native language tend to be perceived as more emotional. Through out there study they also found out that the effect is more found in women than in men.

Early Scents Really Do Get 'Etched' In The Brain

Yaara Yeshurun of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel conducted this experiment, she said that she found the first associations between an object and a smell had a distinct signiture in the brain. In her study the reserchers where presented a group of adults with a visual object, and later a set of pleasent and unpleasent oder while the brain were imaged by funtional magnetic resonance imaging. A week later the same adults where presented the same objects they used previously, the reserchers noticed that they remembered early associations clearly when they were unpleasant, the researchers even found that they could predict what a person would remember later based on the activity in their brains on day. Yeshurun said that its good to remember unpleasant memories as a risk management. These results could suggest ways to strengthen particular memories, more importantly, it may help us generate methods to better forget early and powerful memories.

Some Short-Term Memories Die Suddenly, No Fading

The conductors of this experiment was Weiwei Zhang a postdoctoral scholar, and Steve Luck a professor of psychology. There experiment was about short-term memory, 12 adults where participating, and each one was a shown three different colors on a computer screen, at the end of each color they where given a color wheel to match the colors. The conductors also took into account the amount of time it took them to observe the color and choosing the color on the wheel. They also did the same process but with shapes instead of colors. This could be important in everyday life, because it would provide a mechanism to help us avoid the confusion that might occur if we tried to make decisions on the basis of weak, inaccurate memories. Zhang and Luck are currently incorporating these findings into a study of short-term memory dysfunction in people with schizophrenia.