Author Archives: willspsy101blog

The Ideal parent

Many people have heard of the ways that parenting can backfire such as tiger moms and the helicopter parents.  These concepts can work however tend to backfire at least in my eyes.  As we grow we adapt and change and I believe due to this parents need to change as well because grounding a seventeen year old for doing something they shouldn’t do isn’t going to produce the same results if the actions are done to a two year old.  Being able to adapt to your child’s needs and age can be a huge help.  The best example I can put to this is I can’t really follow a traditional approach with my son due to medical issues he has encountered in his life.  So the best parent is the one that is always able to change because no parenting style really works for everyone by itself you have to be an adaptable parent to be the best parent you can.


Cell Phone’s vs Drunk driving

I chose to look at Mythbuster’s attempt to see if talking on a cell phone while driving was as dangerous as drunk driving.  How they chose to do this is have the participants answer questions on their cell phone while driving.  This was followed by both participants drinking and taking a sobriety test to confirm that they were in fact drunk then drove the same course.  The test itself followed the scientific method by presenting the hypothesis and using methods to test and eventually confirm their hypothesis.  I personally believe that the drunk side of the test was well done because they best way to test the danger of drunk driving is to have a drunk driver in a controlled environment.  In regards to the cellphone portion of the test, I do not believe that this was highly practical because in most cell phone conversations are not done in this manner.  I believe the best solution to a cell phone conversation is rather than asking someone to repeat exactly what was said or answer a question, actually carry on a normal conversation with someone to better simulate the experience of someone driving while talking on a cell phone.  I do believe overall that this was well done because the experiment shows there is a large difference between driving drunk and driving on a cell phone although I wonder; if the scenarios were in a more practical setting such as regular conversations, would there be as large of a gap between driving drunk and driving while on a cell phone?


The first post

Hey guys my name is Will and I am taking this class as a requirement for a social science course.  Truth be told I have absolutely no background in Psychology. When I first hear Psychology a couple thoughts come to my mind.  The first thing I think of is oh its the study of the mind.  The next thought is even more homework than I could imagine  The most interesting three classes I saw are development, treating mental illness and copint with stress.  I like the idea of development because I am a father to a developmentally delayed child.  I like treating mental illness because it may give me a greater understanding of some of the things several of my family members always have to deal with.  Coping with stress I like because the type of life I have outside of class is quite stressful.  The only topic I can see which isn’t catching my attention at all is theories of intelligence just the idea of it does not seem interesting to me.  One question I would love to answer about psychology is how I can put specific aspects of it to use in order to improve my family’s quality of life.