Teaching an Australian marsupial to choose life

This article, by Amina Khan, was published in the LA Times on April 17, 2010. It describes a method that scientists used to get the Australian quoll to stop eating poisonous cane toads. They took baby quoll and fed them tiny cane toads laced with a nauseating agent to try and have them associate the nauseating effect with the cane toads. They released them into the wild and their method worked to help prolong the life of the Australian quoll.

This article correlates perfectly with chapter 5 and operant conditioning. These toads were laced with an undesirable agent that caused nauseousness in the quoll. This agent was a negative reinforcer. When the quoll suffered the negative effects of the nauseating agent they declined the toads in order to avoid the negative consequences.

Social stress triggers gene.

This article, written by Marina Murphy, was published in Chemistry and Industry on October 18, 2004. It discusses how awkward or difficult and stressful social situations trigger a gene that makes it more difficult to say no to drugs and alcohol. This gene is present but only stimulated when the individual is put into a stressful situation.

This corresponds to chapter 11 in the text book and the whole section on stress and its health effects. The book discusses how some stress is related to your heredity. This article talks about having this gene and how it is stimulated when in a stressful situation. This article also ties in with chapter 4 in the textbook and the section on drugs and alcohol addiction. If this article proves to be true, then it gives more light into why some people are addicted to things. This does not mean that stress is a cause for addictions but it means it is harder for some individuals to resist the addictions if they live stressful lives.

Iowa State U.: Iowa State U. study: Violent video games increases aggresive behavior.

This article appeared on The America's Intelligence Wire on January 15, 2005. It discusses how a recent study by Iowa State University of their students showed that about 70% of students who played violent video games showed more of a leaning to give violent answers to various scenario questions. It also states that video game makers are partially responsible for youth violence but that video games are not the main source or the most important.

This relates to the text book in chapter 5 where it talks about learning and observational learning, as well as the section on conditioning. When these games are being played, the players see the subjects in the video games doing violent things. When there are no negative consequences or reinforcers, they will start to accept violence as being ok. Video games are generally played for an extended period of time. While the game is being played, players observe the violent actions of characters in the game and begin to mimic these actions.

Taming your nightmares: think of recurring bad dreams as important messages from your psyche, and then learn to decode and even rewrite them.

This article, by Diane Guernsey, appeared in Town and Country magazine on March 1, 2002. It discusses how dreams can be windows into your psyche and how you can learn many things about your dreams and your subconsciousness by writing down your dreams and trying to understand them. This article states that dreams are urgent messages from your sleeping mind that you should take head of. It suggests that things that happen in dreams are metaphors and the key to understanding them is to turn them into words.

This can be easily related back to chapter 4 of the textbook and the section on Dream Interpretation and Freud's theory. He claimed that you can understand a lot about a person's past and also understand the conflicts they may be facing. This section also talks about how understanding our dreams can give inside into the subconsciousness of your being.

Ongoing Experiments in Artificial Stupidity

This article by Thomas Sowell was originally published in the Gaston Gazette. It describes how a woman took a petition to the state fair and asked people to sign it in support of banning dihydroxymonoxide which she said is found in our streams and ponds. She gained many signatures in favor of baning this chemical dihydroxymonoxide. It turns out that this is just a fancy chemical name for water. The article goes on to say that people today are trained to act upon the first seemingly good cause they find and not to examine the other side of the argument or situation.

This relates back to chapter 12 of the book and the section on social psychology and conformity. People are born with the desire to be like others and are easily influenced by the actions of others. In conformity people change their behavior to mimic the behavior of those around them. This article shows this concept very well. When people saw this cause for which they could join up with and they saw that many other people were doing it they jumped at the chance to be a part of it.