Academic Article Summaries
In the past year of my life I have felt the need to change my major from pre-business to psychology. After a year of two business classes, I am feeling that pre-business is not the major for me. Even though I have not gotten around to changing my major yet, my plan is to change my major to psychology during the semester break in December. The reason I am changing my major to psychology is that it is more of an interesting and not as straightforward in the aspect of having to do the same type of thing every day as in business. So instead of summarizing articles on business, I will summarize three articles on psychology. These articles will look at if students can reengage themselves in school, the subject of false memories, and emotional intelligence and the effect of mental disorders on it.
The first article that I found interesting is about vocational education and if it can help disengaged students in their schooling. The author’s suggests that maybe the use of vocational education can help students who do not want to be in school or are having a hard time in school. They say that it can give students in high school a “clean slate”, or giving them a fresh start in school with a new outlook for their own futures. To find out if this hypothesis is true, the authors used propensity score models in their experiments which make sure of an unbiased result. In their experiments they looked at eighth to twelfth graders and how vocational education affected their effort, participation, interest, sense of belonging, and career aspirations. In prior studies of vocational education and its effect have shown that it has risen the levels of interest, concentration, and effort in students. After a longitudinal test, which monitors students over time from the eighth grade to the twelfth grade, it has shown that vocational education reduces students’ ability to expand their academic abilities by it limiting their use of tougher academic courses to help them pursue a successful career. It also says that investment in vocational courses decreases overall expectations and aspirations. They conclude that vocational education starts the trend of a “downward spiral” of school engagement.
After that surprising conclusion to the prior article, I found an article on “false memories” and why our memory system can fail to remember some events or why we sometimes remember something that did not even occur. This article is aiming to explain why our memory system can fail us, sometimes in a rather dramatic way. One aspect that the authors touch on is that our memory runs on inferences such as biases, stereotypes, and expectations that shape our memory system. But with our memory system using these as a blueprint, they say that our memory is bound to fail occasionally. As in the title of this article, they ask “What the hell are false memories for?” Their belief is that false memories have no functionality but they are a product of a very flexible memory system that can lead us to believe something that never really happened. The authors of this article come to see that our memories are for the most part very accurate and serve us well, but sometimes they can fail and can serve us with a sort of fantasy based on inferences which sometimes can be good or bad.
The final article that seemed very interesting to be is about emotional intelligence and how it is affected by mental disorders. Emotional intelligence describes the ability, capacity, or skill to identify and manage one’s emotions. The hypothesis of this experiment was that emotional intelligence would be hindered and not well-developed of somebody that had a mental disorder such as major depressive disorder, substance abuse disorder, and borderline personality disorder. The experiment that they conducted used patients that had these prior disorders and a control group that were classified perfectly normal with no mental disorders. The people with the disorders were broken down into three groups which were depression disorders, personality disorders, and substance abuse disorders. Each group then were administered a test which were a combination of surveys and tests involving emotions with pictures, designs, and landscapes. After comparing all of the results of the experiment, they found that all the subjects with a type of disorder scored lower on their overall emotional intelligence score. They also came to the conclusion that their ability to understand emotional information was impaired.
I believe that I learned great amount after reading these three academic articles. The results of these experiments were rather surprising to me. If I want to succeed in the field of psychology, these studies are something that I will probably have to participate in. Reading these articles and accessing them has made me more interested and helps confirm my switch from pre-business to psychology as my major.