Psychology Techniques Mentioned in

Flowers for Algernon

• Rorschach Test

• Subliminal Messages

• Hypnosis/Sleep Learning

• Mazes

• IQ Tests

The Rorschach Test

• The test takes its name from that of its creator, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach.

• The theory behind the test is that the test taker's spontaneous responses reveal deep secrets or significant information about the taker's personality or innermost thoughts.

• In a national survey in the U.S., the Rorschach was ranked eighth among psychological tests used in outpatient mental health facilities.

Administering the Test

• The test giver will rarely if ever give you any guidance; they will instead tell you that you're free to do whatever you like with the card (flip it, tilt it, lay it down, etc).

• In the standard test protocol you are given the cards one at a time in a specific order, and the psychologist is supposed to place them directly in your hands facing "up" and in a particular orientation.

• During the test the psychiatrist will record everything you say; some use a tape recorder so they can extract more detailed notes later.They also record movements (flipping cards over, etc.).

• The time it takes you to provide a verbal response is carefully noted, along with any other secondary comments you may make.

Good Answers And Bad Answers

• According to some psychologists, stating "This is a..." constitutes a "bad" response. You are supposed to know that the cards don't actually represent any recognizable figures, so saying something like "This looks like ..." is considered a more "healthy" response.

• Some psychologists feel that you should see a limited range of shapes or "items" in each particular card. Seeing radically different things than the typical responses or claiming to see nothing at all will definitely be held against you in terms of Rorschach scoring.

• "Movement- and color-based responses were of paramount importance in Rorschach's system of weighing personality. He believed that test takers who offer a high number of movement ("M") responses are turned inward or "introspective"; intelligent and creative, they are nonetheless awkward and socially inept. In contrast, subjects who favor color ("C") responses are "extra sensitive," or clever in company but restless and impulsive.

• Overly-sexualized answers will, as you might suspect, be generally scored against you. Taking an excessively long time to answer or answering immediately (not taking any time to ponder the card at all) will virtually always count against you.

Sample Rorschach Images

This is a black and white card, often described as looking like a mask or the face of a fox or wolf.

This is a card with black and red ink, often described as people dancing or touching hands with

each other.

This is a card with black and red ink, frequently visualized as two

people facing each other or sometimes a butterfly or moth.

A card with only black ink formed in a triangle-shaped blot. The two

lower corners are often described as shoes or boots.

Another card with only black ink. The vast majority of test subjects will see a bat- or bird-like figure. This is by far the most common

response.

This is the last Rorschach card and certainly the most colorful,

consisting of blue, gray, pink, green, orange and yellow inks. It's

a very complex mish-mash of shapes with lots of "activity" and plenty of places to "see" things.

• After studying 300 mental patients and 100 control subjects, in 1921 Rorschach wrote his book, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test (after experimenting with several hundred inkblots, he selected a set of ten for their diagnostic value),but he died the following year.

• The Exner scoring system, also known as the

Rorschach Comprehensive System is the current method for interpreting the Rorschach test. It was developed in the 1960s by Dr. John E. Exner, as a more rigorous system of analysis.

Subliminal Images and Hidden Messages

• A subliminal message is a message that is hidden in a manner that should hide it from conscious perception. It's then supposed to be perceived by the unconscious.

• Subliminal messaging has long been used within advertising. It has actually been legally banned from use within TV commercials – you are not allowed to flash images or text too fast for the eye to see, or play sounds subliminally, this is basically due to its manipulative power.

• Some extraordinary claims have been made concerning the power of subliminal perception. Perhaps the most widely known claim was made in 1957 by James Vicary, a market researcher. He claimed that over a six-week period, 45,699 patrons at a movie theater in New Jersey were shown two advertising messages, Eat Popcorn and Drink Coca-Cola, while they watched the film. According to Vicary, a message was flashed for 3/1000 of a second once every five seconds. The duration of the messages was so short that they were never consciously perceived. Vicary claimed that over the six-week period the sales of popcorn rose 57.7% and the sales of Coca-Cola rose 18.1%.

Subliminal Examples

Look at the "S" skittle next to the word "eXplosion". What does the

word turn into now?

• Check out the palm trees on the far right of the image... notice anything odd about the palm leaves?

Commercial Subliminal Adds

Kentucky Fried Chicken Commercial video

video

McDonalds on Food Network Show

Just click on words “video” to sea the videos.

Political Adds• The Bush presidential campaign was accused of dirty

tricks after it was discovered that the word "rats" appeared subliminally in a Republican political broadcast targeting Democratic health care proposals. The offending word, in large white capital letters, flashes against a black background for a thirtieth of a second as a woman narrator criticized Vice President Al Gore's plan for government funding of prescriptions.

• George W Bush ridiculed this as a "bizarre and weird" accusation that his campaign was trying to use such underhand techniques to discredit his

opponent. However, he soon announced that the $2.5m advertising campaign would be withdrawn.

Subliminal Learning Technique for Multiplication Tables

video

Sleep Learning

• Sleep-learning attempts to convey information to a sleeping person, typically by playing a sound recording to them while they sleep.

• “Electroencephalography” was studied by Charles W. Simon and William H. Emmons in 1956.

Learn/Sleep Techniques

• The most common approaches to sleep learning involve audio recordings. These gently repeat certain information or affirmations during the course of the night. Some of these tapes/CDs on the market contain simple statements, others include hypnotic inductions. Some recordings also include music or binaural beats, others have the information encoded subliminally.

Current Products

• Use your brain's full potential

• Learn Chinese while you sleep

• Self Hypnosis techniques

• Time article on new product

Sample of Sleep Memory Audio

video

Mazes in Psychology

• Mazes are often used in psychology experiments to study spatial navigation and learning. Such experiments typically use rats or mice.

• Trial and error learning in humans can be studied by giving humans a task that is analogous to that faced by white rats in mazes.

The Barnes Maze

• This consists of a circular table with 20 circular holes around the circumference of the table. Under each hole is a slot for a box, called the drop box. The goal of the maze is to reach the drop box, which is a box that can be reached through one of the holes in the top of the table.

• Exposure on the surface of the table serves as negative reinforcement, motivating the test subject to seek shelter. The only shelter available is the drop box. In order to accustom the test subject to the maze, it is guided into the drop box by a sheltering hand. After four to five runs, a normal test subject can quickly make a beeline for the drop hole.

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Morris Water Navigation

• This is a behavioral procedure designed to test spatial memory. It is commonly used today to explore the role of the hippocampus (A ridge in the floor of each lateral ventricle of the brain that consists mainly of gray matter

and has a central role in memory processes). in the formation of spatial memories.

• In the typical experiment, a mouse is placed into a small pool of water—back-end first to avoid stress, and facing the pool-side to avoid bias—which contains an platform hidden a few millimeters below the water surface.

• Visual cues, such as colored shapes, are placed around the pool in plain sight of the animal. When released, the rat swims around the pool in search of an safety while various parameters are recorded, including the time spent in each quadrant of the pool, the time taken to reach the platform and total distance traveled.

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Radial Arm Maze

• The was designed to measure spatial learning and memory. The original apparatus consists of eight equidistantly-spaced arms, each about 4 feet long, and all radiating from a small circular central platform.

• At the end of each arm there is a food site, the contents of which are not visible from the central platform. The design ensures that, after checking for food at the end of each arm, the rat is always forced to return to the central platform before making another choice. As a result, the rat always has eight possible options.

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IQ Tests

• An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several different standardized tests designed to assess intelligence.

• IQ scores are used in many contexts: as predictors of educational achievement or special needs, by social scientists who study the distribution of IQ scores in populations and the relationships between IQ score and other variables, and as predictors of job performance and income.

General Intelligence Factor

• Some scientists found that schoolchildren's grades across seemingly unrelated subjects were positively correlated, and proposed that these correlations reflected the influence of a dominant factor, which they termed g for "general" intelligence.

• They developed a model where all variation in intelligence test scores can be explained by two factors. The first is the factor specific to an individual mental task: the individual abilities that would make a person more skilled at one cognitive task than another. The second is g, a general factor that governs performance on all cognitive tasks.

Flynn Effect

• Since the twentieth century, IQ scores have increased at an average rate of around three IQ points per decade in most parts of the world. This phenomenon has been named the Flynn effect named after and James R. Flynn. Attempted explanations have included improved nutrition, a trend towards smaller families, better education, greater environmental complexity, and controlled breeding. Some researchers believe that modern education has become more geared toward IQ tests, thus rendering higher scores, but not necessarily higher intelligence

Sample IQ Questions

Verbal

• 1. Rearrange the following letters to make a word and choose the category in which it fits.

RAPETEKA• A. city

B. fruitC. birdD. vegetable

Correct answer: bird (parakeet)

Mathmatical

• 1. Which number should come next in this series?

25,24,22,19,15• A. 4

B. 5C. 10D. 14

Correct answer: C

Explanation: The pattern decreases progressively: -1, -2, -3, -4, -5

Spatial

• 1. Which diagram results from folding the diagram?

• Correct answer: A

Visual

Pick the piece that's missing from the diagram below

Correct answer:

Classification

1. Which word does not belong?

apple, marmalade, orange, cherry, grape

A. appleB. marmalade

C. orangeD. cherryE. grape

Correct answer: B

Logic

• 1. At the end of a banquet 10 people shake hands with each other. How many handshakes will there be in total?

A. 100B. 20C. 45D. 50

Correct answer: C

Pattern Recognition

Find the picture that follows logically from the diagrams.

Correct answer: A

Terman's classification

I.Q. Range (16SD) Intelligence Classification

164 and over Genius or near genius

148 - 164 Very superior intelligence

132 - 148 Superior intelligence

113 - 132 Above average intelligence

84 - 113 Normal or average intelligence

68 - 84 Dullness

52 - 68 Borderline deficiency

Below 52 Definite feeble-mindedness

Wechsler's classification

Wechsler's classification

I.Q. Range (15SD) Intelligence Classification Percent Included

128 and over Very superior 2.2

114 - 127 Superior 6.7

111 - 113 Bright normal 16.1

91 - 110 Average 50

80 - 90 Dull normal 16.1

66 - 79 Borderline 6.7

65 and below Defective 2.2

Brain vs. Intelligence

• In 2004, Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and colleagues at University of California, Irvine used MRI to obtain structural images of the brain in 47 normal adults who also took standard IQ tests.

• The study demonstrated that general human intelligence appears to be based on the volume and location of gray matter tissue in the brain, and also demonstrated that, of the brain's gray matter, only about 6 percent appeared to be related to IQ.

• A study involving 307 children (age between six to nineteen) measuring the size of brain structures using MRI and measuring verbal and non-verbal abilities has been conducted (Shaw et al. 2006). The study has indicated that there is a relationship between IQ and the structure of the cortex—the characteristic change being the group with the superior IQ scores starts with thinner cortex in the early age then becomes thicker than average by the late teens.

Although the IQ tests were given to many students from the 1940s to

the 1960s, they are now rarely given unless administered by a psychologist testing for mental

disabilities or mental giftedness.