Lifespan Growth & Development - PSY 1100
This course fulfills a program elective for my psychology degree. I went into this class thinking it would be a great followup to the human biology course I just completed last semester and it turns out this course would have made an even better companion course to human biology.
Professor Fields helped make this course enjoyable with her fun personality and attentive teaching style. The use of Pearson materials helps solidify the objectives of the course and also helped keep me on track through out the semester.
Reflection:
As I registered for and prepared for this course I found that I was excited to learn about the development of the mind, thought processes and emotions. What I was not prepared for as I did not expect it was to also cover the physical aspects of development. Just last semester (Fall 2013) I finished BIO 1090 – Human Biology and in that course I thought we had covered pretty much all aspects of the physical development but to my enlightenment came Psych 1100 with a whole new look at the physical development.
Each chapter in this course covered three broad topics: physical development, cognitive development and emotional development. I am not sure why, probably because I previously took it for granted, but prior to this course it had not occurred to me that emotional development would be so related to the physical development. It made sense that cognitively as we grow and the brain grew that cognition also develops but I had failed to connect the psychological aspects of emotions.
As my goal currently is to eventually become a marriage and family therapist much of this content was excellent in helping to prepare me to understand more of what each individual patient is experiencing, what is important to each of them and how they are viewing their circumstances. To this point one of the things that has always stood out to me and was reiterated in this course was that there are emotions which we can control, that we choose to feel. These emotions, for the most part, are learned and called sociomoral emotions.
Another aspect of this course that stood out to me was most illustrated by the virtual child we raised. For this simulated parenthood I chose to involve my wife in our decisions (I am not sure how much she really appreciated it but I felt it was important) as we raised our virtual daughter. Throughout the simulation there were a number of situations where there was some less than ideal behavior occurring at school and through some minor, seemingly unrelated, adjustments or activities at home the behavior was corrected. This principle that some things are connected so activities or principles which may not seem to be connected on the surface became really apparent and was extremely eye opening to parenting styles.
This brings me to something else that I found extremely beneficial, the discussions of parenting styles. My thoughts have always been that as parents we can set a high level of expectations which should elicit good behavior. Again from my thoughts, I think due mainly for taking my own upbringing for granted, I considered the occurrence of a high level of affection to go without saying. As I discovered in this course there are several parenting styles and not all of them marry a high level of expectations with a high level of affection, though it still appears that this combination yields the best results.
Only one moment from this course did I instantly want to forget or claw my eyes out, there was a single video which contained actual footage of a live birth. While this miracle is beautiful to the parents and possible to the staff involved I personally found it, violating. There was one section during which I turned to my wife and questioned our desire to have children. In chapters two and three the text goes into some detail on the possible complications and adverse conditions which caused me some mild concern.
Ultimately I really enjoyed this course and believe that I will be able to use this information throughout my life if not throughout my career. I feel that some of my classmates took aspects of this course, like the virtual simulations, a little too personally. For incoming student to this course I would urge them to remember that this course especially the simulations do not control for everything. There will always be actual conditions which cannot be easily considered in simulations and the variables may have wide sweeping effects on the real life results.
Below you will find my signature assignment from this course, a cultural comparison and ideal world situation of the use of sociomoral emotions in parenting. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed learning.
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Sociomoral Emotions in Parenting.pdf Size : 231.959 Kb Type : pdf |
