Part of the appeal of psychology is that many of the theories and ideas studied by psychologists have direct applications to your life. The purpose of the Portfolio assignment is to have you examine the media and your experience in an attempt to connect these sources to the material covered in the textbook.
To complete the assignment, you will be required to find 10 examples of psychological principles, theories, or findings. Five of these examples should come from a media source (e.g., T.V.; Movies; advertisements; comic strips; song lyrics; newspaper or magazine articles; etc.). Each of these 5 entries should list the media source (and include a copy of it if possible) and explain how this example is relevant to a psychological principle, theory, or finding. I do limit the types of examples you may use in three important ways.
First, you may only use a specific type of source for two entries at the most (i.e., you could only use 2 examples from song lyrics; 2 examples from t.v. shows, 2 from magazines, etc.).
Second, you may only use a given psychological principle twice (i.e., you could only use 2 examples of cognitive dissonance; 2 examples of the Big 5 model of personality; 2 examples of Schachter’s 2 factor theory of emotion, etc.)
Third, magazine articles, newspaper articles, or t.v. news items directly concerning psychology are not acceptable. For example, Newsweek recently ran a cover story on the social psychology of happiness, and the Discovery Channel recently had a program on the social psychology of prejudice. These types of stories are off-limits. I want you to look at the everyday information you are exposed to and try to interpret it in psychological terms on your own. Using a story that is specifically about a psychological principle would not provide you with the experience I would like you to have.
The other 5 examples for your portfolio can come from your own life. In these, I’d like you to describe an event that happened to you (or that you witnessed) and interpret it through a psychological principle, theory, or finding from your textbook.
Three sample Portfolio items are included at the bottom to give you a better idea of what you will need to do for this assignment.
Note that there are 3 components to a good Portfolio entry:
- 1) a description of the example in enough detail that I will be able to understand what you are attempting to understand;
- 2) a brief description of the psychological principle being addressed by the example (a very good way to ensure that you do this well is to quote a definition of the principle from the textbook, and tell me what chapter and section of the text this appears on); and
- 3) an integration of the first two components, so that it becomes clear how your example ties into the appropriate principle, theory, or finding.
In my experience, the integration of the example and the psychological principle is the most difficult aspect for students. My advice is to not assume that I will understand the connection without you telling me precisely how your example relates to the principle in question.
Note: It is best to simply collect these examples as you move through your daily routine. Keep your mind open to the possibility that something that happens to you today may be relevant for your psychology Portfolio. If you wait until the end of the semester and then seek out examples to complete this assignment, these examples are more likely to be bad fits that are less relevant to the psychological principles covered in your textbook.
Also: When you are done with the assignment and want to turn it in, submit it through Blackboard…be sure it is in MS Word format.
Example 1: Personal example – I have a cousin who has suffered from depression. He often slept long hours, didn’t feel like getting out of the house, and suffered from a number of other depressive symptoms. Last year his doctor prescribed the drug Prozac, and he has improved since then. Prozac is a drug that works by altering the functioning of the neurotransmitter Serotonin (see chapter 16, pp. 623-624). It does this by blocking the reuptake of Serotonin back into the firing cell. This allows more Serotonin to stay in the synapse, thus increasing its positive effects on mood. Prozac is the world’s most widely prescribed psychiatric drug and has been shown to have benefits for people suffering from both depression and anxiety disorders.
Example 2: Media example – In one episode of “Cheers”, the patrons of the bar get fed up with the know-it-all tendencies of the mailman, Cliff. Dr. Frasier Crane is enlisted to help stop Cliff from constantly throwing out pieces of useless trivia. To do this, Frasier connects Cliff to an electrode and gives him an electric shock each time he blurts out some trivial piece of information. Eventually, Cliff does reduce the number of trivial comments, but with some unpleasant side effects. This is an example of the learning principle called punishment (Chapter 7, pp. 273-274). Punishment is an attempt to decrease the frequency of behaviors. The example from Cheers is clearly an example of punishment. The goal of Dr. Crane was to decrease the frequency of the unwanted behavior of Cliff’s trivial statements. The electric shock is an aversive stimulus that was given immediately following Cliff’s statements. This did indeed suppress Cliff’s tendency to make such statements. But, as Chapter 7 points out, there may be unwanted side effects to the use of punishment.
Example 3: Personal example – When my nephew moved away from home to go to college, he was under a lot of stress. It was his first time living away from his parents, he had a new roommate he didn’t know well, he was in an environment with which he was unfamiliar, and he was separated from all his high school friends. During his first semester of college, he came down with 3 colds and went to the student health center 4 times. This example demonstrates the connection between stress and illness (Chapter 12). Stress is defined as “the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging” (p. 441-442). In this example, it is likely that my nephew’s new environment at college was both challenging and threatening. He was living in a new place, with new people, doing new things. Such a situation would be very likely to lead to increased arousal, and questions about his ability to cope. These stressful disruptions have been shown to be related to an increase in illness. One reason for this is that stress can lead to the suppression of the immune system (pp. 446-447). The immune system is the part of our body that is designed to fight off and kill invading bacteria and viruses. If stress leads this system to be less effective, then it is clear that we will be more susceptible to a wide variety of illnesses when we are stressed.
Try to model your journal entries after those presented here. Again, note how I first provided a description of the example, a definition of a concept from the text, and a formal description of how the example connects to the text material. You should try to structure your entries in the same way.
