Assignment 4 required me to take a questionnaire to determine my scores for the different styles of love categories. After taking the Styles of Love Questionnaire, I scored each of the six sections and proceeded to complete the assignment. I had never heard about the Styles of Love before so taking the questionnaire was an interesting experience overall. I did some additional research to understand the different styles of love a little better because I had never heard of those terms before prior to taking this course.
As someone who has been in a relationship for almost 4 years, I feel as though this material is personally relevant to me. After taking the questionnaire, it made me realize a lot about myself and how the styles of love are incorporated into my relationship. For example, my lowest score was Agape and in my relationship I love hard and I do everything I can to help my significant other succeed and become better.
Being in a relationship requires a lot of hard work and dedication to your significant other. Speaking from my own personal experience, I have learned and applied these different styles of love to my relationship to see how it could be improved. In a relationship, there has to be compromise along with other things to make the relationship work. Love has to come from both ends or it simply won’t work. Learning as much as you can about love and how your significant other functions is important in a relationship.
The picture above is a picture of my significant other and I, on our 2 year anniversary. I chose this picture because I wanted to show my relationship during a time where we were still figuring some things out. We were still new in our relationship and things were a little rough. We have come a long way since this picture and my styles of love questionnaire was influenced by my relationship.
Assignment Takeaway 3
Assignment 3 required me to assess how I felt about a very problematic video from many years ago. Although the video is old, the blatant racism and lack of respect for people of color is so relevant today still. The assignment wanted me to discuss whether I thought that his racial slurs were meant to just hurt the man he was talking to or was it his way of showing a deep seated hatred for Black people. In my opinion, I think he was blatantly being racist. There is no reason to repeatedly shout out racial slurs and try to apologize later and cover it up to be just a way to hurt someone.
This assignment was beyond eye-opening to me, on top of everything else going on in the world. As an African-American woman, it was hard to watch the video that was required for this assignment. Hearing a white man shout and call a Black man a racial slur with little to no consequences was very disheartening. The material in this assignment was personally relevant to me because of my ethnicity and the state of the world right now. There is so much going on, racially, around the United States. Seeing this video reminded me of the time that my parents talked to me and my brother about the racial tension/racism that we may experience in the world regardless of if we’re minding our business or someone starts with us first. There will be minimal consequences for the person who isn’t Black, no matter what.
I remember when I was at work one day and I had a customer come through the drive-thru, very upset for some reason. I proceeded to talk to him and ask him for his method of payment and when he handed me the card, he said, “Here n-word.” I was very taken aback and shocked that he called me that to my face for no reason. He had absolutely no reason to call me a racial slur. I was very polite to him, as I should’ve been because I was at work.
This image is very relevant to the video of Richards being incredibly racist to a Black audience member. I chose this image because Richards is a great example of having White privilege. He suffered very minimal consequences/fallout. He went on a major talk show and “apologized” and claimed that he isn’t racist. It even went as far as Jerry Seinfeld commenting on it and saying it was just a mistake.
Assignment Takeaway 2
Assignment 2 was all about me, it made me think about how I looked at myself and how I thought certain pictures represent me. The assignment required me to choose a variety of photos that I believe represent me in some way. I learned that photographs hold a bigger significance than I thought in how I look at myself and also how other people perceive me. They provide evidence about who we were and who we are now. The concept of self-presentation, self-esteem, and identities is relevant to me because all of those topics discussed throughout the chapter, and the assignment relate to me on an everyday basis. I think about how I go out into the world, how I present myself on social media, etc. Some may say it is self to think about yourself all the time but it’s more common in today’s society to worry about how other people see you.
In high school, I took various art classes but one, in particular, photography, specifically always talked about identity and how we would photograph ourselves in different ways and it could represent so many things about us in that one photograph. I like taking pictures, but I find that pictures that other people take of me I like a little less than the pictures I take of myself. Last weekend, my boyfriend and I went out for dinner for Valentine’s Day and we dressed up a little to take some pictures. I took some selfies of us and I took so many pictures of him, but when he took the pictures of me, I thought I looked awkward and uncomfortable. He thought the pictures were nice but I didn’t like them that much.
I chose to use this image because I feel as though it shows the important features that make up “The-Self.” All the concepts shown in the image, relate to how we, as humans, see ourselves. It simplifies the way that some people start from their own perspective.
Assignment Takeaway 1
Assignment 1 taught me a lot about what people do to make decisions. A Heuristic is essentially a mental shortcut that assists people in problem-solving and decision making. People use heuristics all the time without realizing that there’s an actual name for it, and there are different types of heuristics. The assignment essentially asked for definitions, examples, and how each heuristic (representative, availability, anchoring & adjustment, and status quo) could lead to errors. When I talk to people and when I’m thinking about decisions, my mind always comes back to learning about the different types of heuristics.
Heuristics is relevant to me because a couple days after I read the sections on the different types of heuristics, I trained somebody at my job and we were talking of course and I was getting to know her. After a few minutes we stopped talking about our personal lives and I started to show her some of the tasks she has to do. While she was doing the tasks, I started to notice little things about her. In my head, I started to put her into the category of a person who has never worked before based on how she carried out the tasks. I realized what I was doing and I laughed to myself and thought about representative heuristics. Heuristics can easily be applied to something I learned in high school. My psychology teacher in high school talked about mental shortcuts in one of his lessons but he never used the word heuristics. He talked about how mistakes/errors could be made by not thinking things through and using mental shortcuts all the time to make decisions.
This image describes heuristics in a very simple way. This sign sums up the entire definition of heuristic. Short cuts are a way of life for some people. People rely heavily on short cuts as a way to make their lives easier.
