Khamsin Walcott

Reflection Paper I have been at Loras College for four years now and I can honestly say that many of the courses that I have taken have shown me similarities to one another in both small ways and very significant ways. I usually believe that the classes that one takes can only mean something if they are aimed at the same goal (i.e. taking only psychology classes because you are a psychology major). Throughout these four years however, I have slowly come to realize that this way of thinking is false and that there are many courses that may not be psychology based, but can have concepts and lessons that may actually help me to better understand psychology by making connections to different events and situations that have a basis in my non-psychology classes. One example in which concepts from one non-psychology class intertwined with another psychology class would be my intro to sociology class from sophomore year and my social psychology class I am taking my senior year. I personally do not like the subject of sociology mainly because I feel that the topic matter is far too broad for me. However, I seemed to connect with one concept that was taught in both classes, stereotypes. In my sociology class, we talked about stereotypes in the context of realworld situations, such as certain mental judgments people make about others while just walking around during the day and how those judgments influence peoples actions and consequently, their reactions to different scenarios. Social Psychology took that a step further and had us do a study on certain stereotypes that could be represented in the school setting, work setting or even the media. I chose to look at how stereotypes are more involved in looking at deviant behavior such as crime between the United States

and across the world. For my study, I watched certain news and world news channels and also read news reports from newspapers online. I also track the frequency of certain deviant behavior mentioned in the news. I found that murder was the most talked about in the news from 4pm to 10pm. The least mentioned behavior that was mention dealt with situations of religious beliefs. Also, the most frequently reported ethnicity was that of Caucasian males, with African Americans and Hispanics as the least frequently mentioned. Another example in which concepts from a non-psychology class intertwined with another psychology class would be my archeology and world history class and my developmental psychology class. In Archeology, we learned about different eras in the earths history and how people had developed physically and socially throughout the different time periods. This can be connected with developmental psychology because in that class, we learned about the different skills and mental processes that develop at different stages of life. For example, we had talked about the different fossils of early humans and analyzed how they had possibly lived and functioned in their time. One of the aspects we look at was the skull. We found that some of the early humans, like the Homo erectus, had a relatively small skull. However, we discovered that they were very adept at using and making simple tools and was one of the first to use and control fire. This example could be tied into Piagets theory of cognitive development in that thes e early humans were at the last of the four levels of development, the formal operational stage. This is the stage in which logical reasoning is developed and problem solving becomes more complex. The complex problem solving could tie into the making of tools for hunting back in that era such as early spear for faster prey.

The last occasion I can think of would be between Christian Ethics and Research methods. In my research methods class, one of the main recurring topic we talked about was ethical behavior in research. We learned about the code of ethics we must follow if we are to do proper research and to have our research published without repercussions. Some of the ethical decisions we had to know about involved experiments in which we had to test a range of people on a specific skill or responses to a certain stimuli. We had to inform them of all of the risks involved and tell them the basic nature of the experiment without telling them the true purpose as to not skew results. They also had to sign an informed consent form telling them who the experimenters were and where and how the data was going to be used and if they would be able to see the results at a later date. This I felt could be connected to my Christian Ethics class in that we talked about how important it was that we were to understand and connect different issues in the world today, like abortion and immigration and know some of the ethical repercussions of each. For example, abortion is a debate talking about whether the fetus being aborted is counted as a living human or is not at the stage to be able to live outside the womb. The ethics involved included the welfare of the mother in the process of the abortion and the thought of if the abortion would be considered murder or not.