Alright. So, I love psychology. Truly and honestly, I do. However, my current psych class is requiring me to trade in the lovely functions breathing, eating, and sleeping in order to sit in the library and search for research articles 24/7. Aside from the obvious side effects (starvation, suffocation, excessive drooling, loss of fine-motor function, and slurred speech), this state of living has two effects on me.
1. I feel smart. As I scroll through pages of articles in PsychINFO, I am extremely impressed with my ability to understand 1 out of every 20 articles and decipher the foreign language of psychology research jargon.
2. I feel like an idiot. The other 19 articles with the undecipherable language turn into a cesspool of shiz that I sit in and twiddle my thumbs. Frick.
I've spent the last few hours reading article abstracts trying to find something that relates to the experiment I'm currently working on with my class. I've included some random excerpts from those abstracts. Skim the following lines cautiously - don't look too intently or you'll run the risk of turning into a zombie-like organism somewhat resembling me.
"Linear regression of the mass of food hoarded on body weight with a negative slope (b) adequately depicted the rat's hoarding behavior: mass hoarded = a + b (body wt). The slope of this function decreased with increasing cost of food procurement."
"In this study, the benzodiazepine agonist midazolam was found to control instrumental action in a similar manner. Midazolam (1 mg/kg) increased rewarded instrumental performance in rats trained undeprived but only elevated performance in extinction when rats were reexposed to the instrumental outcome under midazolam before the test."
"The present experiment arranged a series of inverted U-shaped feedback functions relating reinforcer rate to response rate to test whether responding was consistent with an optimization account or with a one-to-one relation of response rate to reinforcer rate such as linear system theory's rate equation or Herrnstein's hyperbola."
I'm really tempted to cite these with proper APA formatting...even posting these quotes for the purpose of blogging feels like plagiarism.
Here's the deal: If you are interested in reading the whole article, then let me know and I'll get you the actual reference information.
Otherwise - let's both go and enjoy life. Capeesh?
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1 comment:
I need a Heidi hug. :( I'm feeling stressed and tired and freaked out about tonight.
Good luck with the Let's Talk. I know you will do so awesome. :)
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