Day of Scholarship

On the day of scholarship I went to four sessions, but I'm only going to talk about 3. The first session I went to was "Police Suicide an Evolutionary Perspective," by far the most interesting session of the 4. In this session he applied the theory of suicide, hypothesized by Decatanazaro, to the suicides of police. Decatanazaro says that you will commit suicide if we are not reproductively successful in heterosexual relationships, or you perceive yourself to be a hinderance on the genetic success of your relatives. Christopher DeSantis the person speaking in the session explained that he found police have many marital problems as a result of their jobs. They have a high incidence of divorce and because of their status in society they have an us versus them mentality. They tend to abuse alcohol, which applies to the theory because it affects family relationships. Plus, their position requires to make split second decisions, which they can be scrutinized for, this also places a burden on the family because the name is now associated with the wrong decision. 

The second session I sat through was " Hip Hop and Identity: Examining African American Teens." I didn't find this to apply to our class or interesting, so I'm not going to write about it.

The third session was "Encouraging Communication in a course on Consciousness," which applied to our class because she talked about her class where she required her students to post, our class does this as well. She started by giving a little background on the psychology course she teaches. Also, she described two problems she has in her class, everyone comes from different majors, and only 2 or 3 people get involved in class discussions consistently. For her class she decided to give them online homework, requiring 2 posts per week on a set of questions she posted, and 3 entries per week for journals on their own lives. I think she felt this would increase class discussion, but it didn't turn out that way. In the end of the semester she took an anonymous poll in class to see why there wasn't as much class discussion as she had hoped.  People were dissatisfied with limited topics and felt journal entries were to much and uncomfortable to write. This semester she made journal entries optional and added more topics. So far there has been more class discussion, but she doesn't attribute it to the changes. She feels it just has to do with the group of students this semester.

The last session I sat through was about the Institutional Review Board, "Its Role and Function." This pertained to me because I plan on getting my doctorates and will have to do studies that they will be approving. Their main objective is to protect the rights of the subjects you will be using for testing, and to promote research investigations designed to develop or contribute to knowledge populations. The speaker went through the different parts of the proposal, emphasizing that the goal of the researcher is to maximize the possibility of compensation, while minimizing the risk. How much risk and benefit are involved in the study play a major role in the approval of the proposal.