School, School, School

You know what's funny to me? Stress. It has a way of really sharpening your senses. The other day I was starting to stress a little about my thesis and figuring how I was going to turn my topic into a workable project, and while I was sitting in class with the professor that I'm supposed to meet with immediately after class to tell him about what ideas I had come up with over the break (Me+thinking over the Christmas break=just me still, because thinking over the break amounted to ZERO), I came up with what seems like will be a pretty awesome project. It's pretty simple, but I think it has a great twist on the way I want to look at the topic of same-sex sexual harassment. I'm actually really proud of my idea, so much so that I don't think I've come up with anything better since I've been in this Round 2 of grad school, but I can't share it until I carry it out. If you want to ask me privately, that's cool.

You know what else is funny? MBA students. The classes with them are so different. All of the students seem very extroverted, everyone dresses professionally, and everyone has their laptops out. You know what else? We clap at the end of every class. I had never even heard of that before, but of course I joined in while everyone started doing it.

When I'm standing on my own two feet, I feel pretty proud of myself and who I am, but when I'm in my classes with all of these other grad students, I feel like just another face in the crowd. It's hard to tell how tall a sequoia is when it's standing in a forest full of other sequoias, you know what I mean? And not to say that I'm overly impressive, but I feel pretty content with who I am overall, that is, until I get around these other people and I feel like I have do something special to shine, because everyone likes shining, right?

Today I was in my personality class and we were talking about a lot of really abstract ideas, and then I started to piece together therapies, and laughed at myself thinking that I would start analyzing people in that way. But then I realized that I was in a grad school class with one of the country's most prominent psychologists with other clinical and counseling students, and this information and these approaches to therapy actually are seminal to their professional careers as therapists. I just am in the class because I thought it was interesting and like the professor. Maybe I'll try and explain some of what we were talking about in class on here later because it has a lot of gospel application as well.

I have the utmost respect for all of my professors this semester. They are all so knowledgeable and personable, and I love it. I'm pretty sure this will be my favorite semester ever.

Peace, and be blessed, y'all!

What A Lovely Personality You Have!

For one of my classes, the professor asked that we take the Big 5 personality test and then we had a class discussion about the test and it's inclusion as a personnel selection tool. If you have 15 minutes to kill you can take the short by visiting this website here. If you have about 40 minutes to kill, you can also find the longer at the same site. They're both reliable, with the added benefit of the longer one being even more reliable than the shorter one. Just take the shorter one. It's kind of fun.

Extraversion	59
Friendliness	65
Gregariousness	55
Assertiveness	63
ACtivity Level	27
Excitement Seeking	26
Cheerfulness	90
Agreeableness	86
Trust	99
Morality	81
Altruism	89
Cooperation	80
Modesty	5
Sympathy	82
Conscientiousness	90
Self-Efficacy	90
Orderliness	98
Dutifulness	88
Achievement-Striving	26
Self-Discipline	47
Cautiousness	96
Neuroticism	13
Anxiety	2
Anger	8
Depression	9
Self-Consciousness	58
Vulnerability	19
Openness to Experience	48
Imagination	28
Artistic Interests	92
Emotionality	84
Adventurousness	28
Intellect	79
Liberalism	0

So the bolded categories constitute the "Big 5" personality traits. The assumption is that all traits can be collapsed into those five categories. It's on a 0-100 point scale, with near 50 being average, obviously. There are several outcomes that I think are kind of funny - I'm totally immodest. I'm about as far from liberal as can be. I actually kind of think that most of the stuff is pretty on about me. A couple of notes about the scale. The traits are supposed to be stable, meaning that they don't change over time, but people who take these things say that the results do change for them. A lot of it depends on your mood, or your current situation in life. And, this might be more a reflection of how you perceive yourself than what your actual personality is like.

Something interesting you might want to try is take it yourself, and then have someone else that knows you well take it also. That could cause some fights, but it'll be interesting.

In class yesterday my professor asked if we thought that there was a perfect personality. For whatever reason, the discussion kind of went elsewhere, but I thought it was an interesting question. I'm going to have to say no, and this response is informed by my perspective on the gospel...

If salvation were an individual thing, then maybe there would be some kind of perfect personality, but it's not. Salvation comes with husbands and wives, in families, and learning to live peaceably and happily in communities with other people. I think the main benefit to salvation coming that way is that it allows for variety among us as people, to become saved with all of our quirks and idiosyncrasies. When I imagine Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, I actually imagine them with different personalities. Am I alone on that? Where that comes from for me is when I think about people who are super righteous (prophets and apostles, for example), and they all have their distinct personalities, but I would think it safe to assume that they are all going to be exalted. Joseph Smith had his personality that was entirely different than Brigham Young's. Gordon Hinckley was known for his humor and cheer. Anyway, there are a lot of great people in the kingdom of heaven and I'm pretty sure they're not all going to be carbon copies of each other.

My Very Own Research

Yesterday I had a really productive meeting with my committee chair about my thesis. This whole time I've been taking this approach that is pretty consistent with the literature, and trying to look at sexual harassment using written scenarios and then asking participants their thoughts on whether or not the scenario constitutes sexual harassment. This approach is what is being done in the research, but it's also incredibly boring, even more so given that the only reason I've considered studying sexual harassment is because it's one of my professor's interests, and not my own.

Well in the meeting last night, I was giving him some of my ideas about how I wanted to look at things and he ended up asking about behavioral studies looking at sexual harassment, in other words, creating real life scenarios of harassment and then observing behavioral responses. I immediately lit up. I had thought about that approach, but shied away from it because I thought it would be too difficult to carry out logistically, and then also to get that kind of thing approved by the Institutional Review Board at BYU. With that suggestion, I feel like I have new life breathed into me and I have so much more motivation to try and tackle this thesis.

I need to develop an idea and research question, but the basics are this: my interest within sexual harassment is same sex sexual harassment. I'll need to look at more specifically what it is that men find harassing, and what women find harassing, and then try and target those differences and see how that is revealed behaviorally. There are things that guys can do to other guys that would be sexually harassing, but from a women doing the exact same thing, it would probably be flattering.

If you have any ideas about how to carry this out and what things to observe for behaviorally that would manifest a person's inner feelings, I'd love to hear it.

Also, with the dating survey I'm really excited to pursue that topic and see the breakdown on all of the different groups. In less than a week we got over 400 responses just between the three of us asking friends and acquaintances. At church and my ward activity on Saturday, I probably had a dozen or so people approach me about the survey, and through the Facebook messages I sent out, about ten people responded wanting to know how it all turns out. I love the interest it's gotten from everyone, and I think the findings will be really fun to work out.

I'm hoping that this initial survey can serve as a springboard into doing qualitative interviews with people, particularly those over 25, and learn more about their dating experiences in more detail.

What's really fun about all of this is that it reminds me how much I enjoy all this analysis and trying to understand people. Sometimes I still feel inclined toward applying to counseling/clinical psychology programs once I'm done with my thesis, but this research stuff also can be really fun. My friends in the other therapy-based programs insist that I have a great temperament for the practice. I don't know, but it's at least fun having viable interests that can hopefully earn me some scratch while keeping me at least somewhat intrigued.

Police Beat

I sat down to eat my chicken bowl with veggies from Teriyaki Stix and I picked up the Daily Universe and read these gems:

• Sept 11: BYU police received a phone call complaining of a band playing music too loudly at 10:30 p.m. in the Foreign Language Housing. The police arrived and the band was quiet.
• Sept 12: A custodian reported screaming near the MCKB at 4 a.m. The screams were later discovered to have come from a female student sprayed by a sidewalk sprinkler.
• Sept 13: Police responded to a call reporting suspicious characters at the OIT construction site on the south end of campus. Upon arrival, the suspect were discovered to be construction workers.
• Sept 14: Concerned resident reported a suspicious male student in Helaman Halls at 1:30 a.m. The student was knocking on ground level windows of John Hall and then holding a cardboard mask up to the windows. When the police had arrived, the suspect fled.

Tell me you don't miss reading those. Very high on the unintentional comedy scale.

What's Ethical?

In my social psychology class yesterday we had a really interesting discussion on ethics in research. We talked about some controversial studies that have occurred throughout the years, probably the most infamous of which are the Milgram studies performed in the 1960s. I won't give a lot of background, but the link is there for your information.

In short, the studies were performed looking at how obedient people will be to authority figures, even while causing another person severe pain. The premise for the experiment coming from how people could carry out the atrocities under the Nazi regime during WWII. Even within the immediate vicinity of the person being "electrocuted," people still administered shocks that were equivalent to fatal levels of voltage.

I kind of love the experiment. Yeah, it sounds terrible, but the interesting part about our discussion yesterday was how my professor was talking about how people respond to being deceived for the purposes of research. In his years and years of experience, he had only one adverse reaction and from the sound of it, it was actually the girl's problem and not the experiment. He said that 98% of the time, following debriefing people have little more to say than, "okay, do you think you can fool my roommate too?"

In the Milgram experiment, he followed up with psychological evaluations 6 and 18 months following the experiment and nobody had any lingering effects. In fact, more than 94% responded after the experiment that they were glad to participate and contribute to scientific findings, and that they would participate again knowing full well the intent of the experiment.

My professor also shared a story about how as a grad student he went to go observe a person undergo electroconvulsive therapy to treat a severe case of depression. Prior to the treatments, the elderly woman was catatonic; she would just curl up in a ball in her bed and moan all day long. When Dr. Ridge had seen her it was following a couple of sessions and she was chatty and for the most part pretty positive just before receiving the treatment. He watched as they placed the electrodes on her skull, and her body stiffen as they passed electricity through her brain. It didn't last more than a few minutes.

Apparently the woman had undergone treatment using many different methods including medications, counseling, everything else. In these severe cases, however, they have found that treatment to be effective without really knowing why. And his observation of the woman seemed to confirm what the therapist had said.

When he returned to school and was talking to his advisor about it, the teacher asked the student if he thought it was right that they should administer that kind of treatment. Dr. Ridge had responded 'yes' because the effects were so obviously in the positive, to which his advisor replied, "maybe so, but if they had strapped her down to a chair and beat her with a whip, would it be right to do it, even if it worked?"

Sometimes we get so caught up in the end result that we don't realize that maybe the methods to arrive at that point are entirely too inhumane. It's an interesting question when you consider punishment, or larger issues like war.