I look back over my first blog post about psychology and saw how time flew by since the beginning of February to May 2017. The class and I,  all covered most of the psychology topics and the topics which were most interesting to me were the Sleep, Drugs ,Alcohol and the Brain and Classifying Mental Illness. At the beginning of the year I said the same exact topics and they resulted being interesting to me. My least favorite topics were scientific method, brain structures , and neurons. Those topics also resulted to be hard for me in class and exams. Before the course started, I thought scientific method, research method, and experimental design were not interesting. My question about this course was, what kind of  psychology skills can I develop and put to use? The skills I developed from this class is, how to study for tests, how sleep affects the body, the effects on drugs, how to do research, and the mental illnesses caused by genetic or formed by a certain disorders.  Since this was my first psychology course I was amazed of how much information I have learned throughout this course and will use it to my advantage and future use to help others and myself.

Sadly the semester is coming to a close, though this is a super sad thing there have been so many amazing concepts I have been able to learn thanks to Dr. MacFarlane! Now, going back to my introductory post talking about subjects that I was excited about and a question that I would like to get answered, I am happy to say that not only was I able to answer my question but my knowledge in the topics that I was excited about grew and the topics that I was least excited to learn about I was able to see them in a different light which made them exciting to learn.

My question was “How do I personally cope with stress better?.” I noticed that most of the time when there was a problem I would cope using emotion focused coping which is where one focused on the feelings resulting from the stressor. Even though this is under the umbrella of constructive strategies, for me, I wouldn’t be able to do anything constructive when I was just stress thinking. So, I switched over to problem focused coping which is dealing with the stressor directly rather than focusing on the emotion from the stressor. This has increased my productivity immensely, it is difficult to take that initial step to start dealing with the stressor and not think about the emotion but once the step is taken I’m good to go!

The topics that I was interested in learning were emotion, coping with stress and conformity. I do agree that after taking this course I am still interested in all three of these topics, and  while learning the material I was engaged and interested. As for the topics that I thought I wasn’t interested in because I had been studying them so much for MCAT, the topics were neurons and the brain structure. I actually ended up learning things in a new way and was able to see the same topic in a different light which was nice since seeing the subject the same way over and over again just starts to look like mush and nothing is really gained out of it. Overall, I am happy that after taking this class I was able to learn so much material and gain a good understanding of general psychology. I hope in the future I have more opportunities to learn about psychology!