ATA5:

The fifth assignment required us to do five nice things for people over the span of a week, then describe our acts of kindness, our reactions, and the other people’s reactions. I learned that acts of kindness not only make those subject to them happier, but also those who do them. I felt a lot happier at the end of this experience. These results were not surprising to me, as I learned prosocial behavior is beneficial to one’s well-being and happiness in my positive psychology class. The assignment itself was personally relevant because it directly influenced my personal life in its requirements, but I will continue to carry out more acts of kindness after learning how beneficial they were after this assignment. For example, I will buy more small gifts for my boyfriend. My love language is gift-giving, so this will be beneficial in multiple ways. I chose this image because it shows gift-giving. It was one of the acts of kindness I did and would like to do more of.

ATA4:

The fourth assignment required us to complete the Styles of Love Questionnaire and explain why we agree or disagree with our scores. I learned that what I suspected about my style of love was true: it is largely rooted in attraction and insecurity, and less in unconditional love and care. I learned I should be more forgiving and less demanding of my partner in order for my relationship to survive. It reminded me of what I learned in my positive psychology class, which is that when we place our expectations very high, we are often setting ourselves up to be dissatisfied. For example, I should put in place more realistic expectations of my partner of how much attention he can give me. I believe this will increase my well-being and improve our relationship. I chose this image because it depicts the styles of love discussed in our assignments in a very visually-appealing way.

ATA3:

The third assignment required us to react to Michael Richard’s racial tirade and discuss whether the tirade was racist and what Richard’s intent was. I learned that people’s racial stereotypes and prejudices can reside deep down, so much so the individuals are not even aware of them until they come out in some way. I also learned there is a lot of controversy as to what is considered prejudiced or racist. The concepts of race and stereotypes remind me of schemas, which we learned about in chapter two. Stereotypes are types of schemas in a way. This assignment and module were relevant to me because I work with children of different races and cultures and I sometimes catch myself treating these groups differently. When I do this, I ask myself why, and try to fix it. This module gave me more insight into my thinking regarding stereotypes and prejudice. I chose this image because it shows the hands of people of different backgrounds all wearing the same wristband, showing they are a part of the same group. It was very symbolic to me because you could say that wearing a wristband in this situation is like being a human. We are all apart of that group: being human.

ATA1:

The first assignment required us to describe the types of heuristics we learned about and provide original examples for each. Producing my own examples for each heuristic really made me think about them more and solidified my understanding of them all. Reviewing how heuristics can lead to incorrect inferences reminds me of the fundamental attribution error in chapter three, which can also lead to incorrect inferences. Heuristics are relevant to everyone because we all use them in our daily lives. For me, specifically, I tend to rely on availability heuristics, which can cause me to focus on the negative too much. I chose this image as a representative image because it serves as a reminder for me to not take all heuristics at face value because they can lead to inference errors and negative thinking.