When NURTURE comes to play

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed,
and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him/her to become
 any type of specialist I might select:
doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, even, beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his/her talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations,
 and race of his ancestors."

 John B. Watson

It is not very frequently - if ever - that I have seen interviews of victims of child abuse. If I have, I don’t remember. And now that I researched on one case about a psychologically disturbed child I chose from a list our Psychology professor gave us, I think my eyes are looking like two fried eggs, LOL! In doing some research about the case I chose, I found this interview - part of a documentary called “The Child of Rage” - where little Beth Thomas - a pretty, brown-haired, soft spoken, six year old - calmly reveals to her therapist - Dr. Ken Magid - how she tortured animals and sexually molested her brother Jonathan. 
Beth Thomas was a victim of childhood sexual abuse until she was approximately 19 months old. Her mother died when she was one year old and she and her infant brother Jonathan were left at the mercy of their sadistic father; the NURTURE part of the “NATURE versus NURTURE debate”. (Nurture refers to all the environmental variables that impact who we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were raised, our social relationships, and our surrounding culture.)

In the documentary, Beth describes her father’s abuse and displays a crayon picture of herself lying in bed weeping as he touches her genitalia. Her voice is as strangely calm when speaking about her own abuse as it is when talking about the abuse she inflicts on her brother. By the time Beth and Jonathan were rescued by Child Services she appeared to be deeply scarred by neglect and severe abuse.
That's how she was nurtured (or not nurtured, for that matter). See the dictionary definition of nurture HERE.
The two children were given to loving adoptive parents, Tim and Julie, who had no biological children. Tim and Julie were not given any information as to the children’s abusive background. At the time of the adoption little Jonathan was 7 months old. His head was flat at the back and bulged forward at the front from being left on his back in his crib all day. He couldn’t raise his head or roll over. Beth suffered from nightmares of a “man who was falling on her and hurting her with a part of himself.”
It took approximately two months until Beth’s adoptive parents discovered the truth about Beth and Jonathan’s upbringing. They recognized that both Beth and Jonathan exhibited disturbing behaviors. Julie caught Beth masturbating several times a day until she made her own vagina bleed and had to be hospitalized. Beth poked pins into her brother and into the Thomas’s pets. As she got older, on a particular occasion she smashed her brother’s head into the cement floor of their basement until he needed stitches to close a gash in his forehead. Beth’s intention was not merely to harm her brother but to kill him. She often voiced her desire to kill her entire family including her adoptive parents. 
Now - to me - the most disturbing aspect of Beth’s behavior was her complete lack of remorse and concern for her actions. She was well aware that her actions were wrong and hurtful but this didn’t matter to her. 
Not long after these incidents her adoptive parents brought her to a therapist named Connell Watkins, who diagnosed Beth with a severe case of Reactive Attachment Disorder. 
Reactive Attachment Disorder is characterized by markedly disturbed and DEVELOPMENTALLY inappropriate ways of relating socially. It can take the form of a persistent failure to initiate or respond to social interactions in an appropriate way - known as the “inhibited” form - or can present itself as indiscriminate sociability, such as excessive familiarity with strangers - known as the “disinhibited form”. Beth’s condition involved a complete inability to bond with any human being and a complete lack of empathy. This is also known as sociopathy or psychopathyalthough those terms are not used about children under the age of 18. RAD arises from a failure to form normal attachments to primary caregivers in early childhood.
This results from severe early experiences of neglect, abuse, abrupt separation from caregivers (Beth’s mother passed away when Beth was one) between the ages of six months and three years. It also results from a frequent change of caregivers or a lack of caregiver responsiveness to a child’s communicative efforts. That Beth Thomas developed RAD is certainly beyond her control.  The assessment is not a criticism, nor is it blame against the child.  It names the cluster of symptoms Beth displayed due to her nightmarish life with her father. Due to the kind of negative NURTURING she received during her DEVELOPMENTAL years.
Beth’s condition was so extreme that in April 1989 Connell Watkins removed Beth from Tim and Julie’s home and brought Beth to her own home to give her intensive behavior modification. In spite of Beth’s dangerous behavior the therapist was confident she could help Beth since her professional history included working successfully with extremely disturbed children, such as 9-year-old murderers.
At first all of her freedom was restricted until Beth demonstrated that she could be trusted. It was a difficult transition for Beth. At first Beth was locked inside her bedroom at night so she couldn’t escape and hurt other children or adults in the house. She had to ask permission to do everything from play with a particular toy to getting a glass of water. Over time these restrictions were slowly removed as Beth’s behavior improved. Within one year of living in the house and being NURTURED lovingly, respectfully, fairly… her behavior was so recovered that Beth was permitted to share a bedroom with the therapist’s own daughter.
 A remarkable transition took place in Beth Thomas. She learned empathy and remorse when someone was hurt. She learned about right and wrong. When she talked about her earlier abuse of Jonathan she wept openly. She no longer talked about hating anyone or wanting to kill anyone. She didn’t abuse herself anymore. Her therapy took years to complete and Beth, like any child abuse victim, will likely live always with the consequences of her abuse; with the NURTURE she received in her first developmental years.
Yet Beth Thomas grew into a mentally healthy woman. 
She obtained a degree in nursing and has authored a book entitled “More Than a Thread of Hope.” 
She and her adoptive mother Nancy Thomas established a clinic for children with severe behavior disturbances. Nancy and Beth Thomas’ website is www.attachment.org   


Memory Biases


How interesting to learn that there are quite a few predominant memory biases (also called memory errors) that affect all of us! A memory bias is a cognitive process that alters the way, the time or how we recall memories. Memory biases are subtle to pick up on and, looking at the list our Psychology professor gave us, there are a lot of them. As per this assignment, I intend to write about three memory biases I believe to be both easier to spot and common in occurrence.
Hindsight Bias: Most of us have excellent hindsight, I mean, who looks back on a mistake and says: “I would’ve done that the same way or worse”? We tend to look back and reflect at how we could have done better. Hindsight bias is where we tend to look over past events as being predictable, particularly if we are looking over what someone other than ourselves has done. It is very easy to say how you would have done something differently following someone else’s failure. But think about it; how do you know that you would have done it differently, and what makes your methods better?

An example of this memory bias in full effect can be seen during medical malpractice trials. The plaintiffs in such trials are often favored due to hindsight bias. There’s a 1976 Californian case were a man disclosed threats made against a woman named Tatiana Tarasoff to his therapist. The therapist notified the police, but not Ms. Tarasoff, who was subsequently murdered. A case study found that those who, 20 years later, knew about the murder after the man spoke to his therapist were likely to put some degree of blame on said therapist for the outcome despite the notification she gave police.

The Bizarreness Effect: Once you have read and understood what the bizarreness effect is, I am sure you, just like me, will say: “Ah, I do that!” The bizarreness effect is the tendency to recollect strange and uncommon information as opposed to more common or ordinary material. This is just like when someone reads odd facts about the human body, for example. Such as that our bodies are made up of mostly empty space and would fit into a cube less than 1/500th of a centimeter per side (click HERE). I bet most of us will remember this and go tell our friends, that’s "normal". The problem with this particular memory bias occurs when it interferes with our logical reasoning due to placing higher stock in the strange things we read or see. 

Illusion of Truth Effect: In general, people tend to identify statements they have heard previously as being more truthful, irrespective of the validity of the statement. This is termed the illusion of truth effect. A lot of nonsense gets spread around and handed down over the ages, and the internet makes the spread of misinformation so much easier. This can range from the relatively harmless such as the old wives tale that eating carrots improves your vision (it doesn’t, but the Vitamin A can help maintain healthy eyes, click HERE) to pseudoscience (the teaching of Creationism as a science, click HERE) to all the way to the extremely dangerous.
An example of something many people hear frequently that has led to the spread of dangerous misinformation is that vaccines contain deadly mercury (click HERE). Due to the illusion of truth effect causing a public outcry in this particular case, thiomerosol (the type of molecular mercury compound found in some vaccines to prevent microbe growth) has been removed from many vaccines despite the lack of evidence that it is harmful. In fact, removing it may be a worse option and at great cost to the companies who have to reformulate their products. See how dangerous this memory bias/error can be! 
Thus, it is our responsibility to keep these and the other memory biases in mind. Like when we are reading over critical literature/reports or talking to colleagues who, just like us and everyone else, could be mistaken due to a memory bias. Let's strive to live - through consciousness, honesty and alertness - ...

Ivonne

“Sensation refers to the process of sensing our environment through touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell.  This information is sent to our brains in raw form where perception comes into play.  Perception is the way we interpret these sensations and therefore make sense of everything around us.”

I will write about one individual who perceives something a certain way, different from how the individual perceived it not long ago. This person had a firm perception of how something is (a thoroughly researched, thought, evaluated, discussed … belief), yet perceives it differently at this moment in time.

This person, a language scholar who considered himself a “pure” Spanish speaker, denounced Spanglish. He thought of it as corrupting and endangering the “real” Spanish language. He even perceived the word “Spanglish” as a rather derogatory and patronizing word because to him it seemed like a “bastardized language”. 

After taking the time to read the history and listen to the stories from Spanglish speakers themselves (among diverse communities), this person came to perceive Spanglish to have a culture of its own. He now thinks that, just as Spanish helps individuals identify with their Spanish identity, Spanglish is slowly becoming the poignant realization of the Hispanic-American's identity within the United States of America. Meeting individuals of Hispanic descent just like him, but living in the USA, made this person understand how living in two very "different worlds" requires a new sense of cultural and lingual identity of that particular experience.

This person came to perceive that for Spanglish speakers it’s not about necessarily assimilating Spanish to English (and have it lose its purity), but that for them Spanglish is a need; it is about acculturating and accommodating. He now understands why within many Latino communities the term Spanglish is used in a positive and proud connotation by political leaders, and that it is used by Linguists promoting its use in literary writing.


 Ivonne

Free Will versus Determinism

This past February 13th I proposed myself to go to work and teach my Psychology class; and was quite happy getting ready to do so. Now, when I was about to leave my apartment, there was a snow storm outside that did not allow me to leave. I wanted to go teach my class, of course, but I couldn't, even though I wanted to. My will was restricted by external causes.

Another morning there was no storm to impede me from leaving my residence and the transportation was working fine. I was feeling okay but not as good as usual and thought about calling in sick. I could have decided not to go to work and exercise my free will, yet my sense of duty didn't allow me to. Was my will determined by my sense of duty this second time around?


Ivonne
(using a Psychology professor's example)




Research and Experiment Proposal

Questions of interest: Why do people remember the things they remember (and forget the things they forget)?

Hypothesis: People remember the things they remember (and forget the things they forget) due to the intensity of the experience.

Operational definition: intensity = the degree of energy an experience takes from the person and the impact on his/her being - emotional and physical. (It’s easier to see the intensity and the impact of an experience when it leaves a physical scar. In addition to the pain being present, the scar remains. Now, compare this with trying to remember the color of the shirt the deli's clerk wore two weeks ago.)

Archival research, survey research and case studies.

Experimental manipulation: The intensity of the experience.

Experimental group: Group exposed to experiences with diverse degree of intensity.

Control group: Group not exposed to average intense experiences.

Independent variable: The intensity of the experience.

Dependent variable: Remembrance of the experience.

Replication: Should be replicated with different age groups.

Informed consent: Needed.

Placebo: n/a



Ivonne


Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)