Chandler and Automatic Negative Thought

Cognitive-behavior therapy is a popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior). In lame-mans terms, they can train you to think about things in a new way.

Automatic negative thought is when people think bad thoughts about themselves. With cognitive- behavior therapy they would try to retrain your thoughts.

Chandler's Technique to Quit Smoking

In the clip above Chandler uses an audio tape to help him stop smoking. He smokes because he gets stressed and doesn't think very highly of himself. The tape helps him think more positively and helps him to quit smoking. This is a form of cognitive- behavior therapy because it gets him to change his self defeating thinking and to change his behavior.

* Information from book and lecture notes

Joey Uses Operant Conditioning Punishment on Chandler

Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which behavior is strengthened if followed by reinforcer or diminished by a punisher. This theory was founded by B.F. Skinner.

Learning is a relatively permanent change in an organism's behavior due to experience.

Punishment is an event that decreases the behavior that follows it.

All of the terms above have to do with the following Friends clip: Chandler in the Box

Chandler kisses Joey's current girlfriend and joey decides to punish him by making him sit in a box for 3 hours. So he can think about what he did, to show how much Joey's friendship means to him, and because it is physically painful. Joey wants Chandler to learn that you shouldn't mess with your friends girlfriend.

This would be a positive form of punishment because Joey is giving Chandler something bad, making him sit in a box.

*Definitions from book.

Phoebe's Perceptual Tattoo

Phoebe's Tattoo

It's a little bit of a stretch but in this clip Phoebe gets a tattoo. She says it's of the earth when you are looking at from a great distance, but everyone else says it's just a dot on ink.

Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.

We talked in class about how perception is subjective. In class we looked at different images that showed multiple images and people usually saw one image or the other and not both until we were told what else was present in the picture.

Phoebe sees the earth but everyone else sees a dot. Now she is just trying to make it seem like she did get a tattoo and didn't chicken out but This clip does remind me of they images we saw in class.

Ross's Belief Perseverance on Evolution

I'm using the same clip from a previous post because it applies to many ideas. The following clips are when Ross and Phoebe argue about evolution. Before I talked about Ross and Phoebe's biopsychosocial approach but this time I'm looking at Ross's cognitive thinking. Specifically how Ross forms his judgment on the issue.

Ross and Phoebe Argue about Evolution

First Ross is overconfident. Overconfidence is a tendency to be more confident than correct or to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. With a topic like evolution, that people all have a strong feeling about either for or against, it's easy for someone to get overly emotional on their view.

Another thing is that Ross loses his belief perseverance in the following clip. Belief perseverance is clinging to one's initial conception after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. Phoebe convinces Ross that science has been wrong in the past and that their is a chance they are wrong this time. She couldn't believe that she got him cave on his beliefs even the slightest.

Phoebe Gets Ross to Cave

Phoebe's Chicken Pox Sensation

Sensation is detecting stimulus from the environment. The main senses are vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, motion, and balance. Touch is the first sense that is developed in the fetus and the last sense to leave us when we die. Touch is broken down into the feel of heat, cold, pressure, and pain.

Phoebe Gets Chicken Pox

In this scene from Friends Phoebe gets chicken pox for the first time and she passes it on to her friend. All they can think about is scratching the itchy spots. Phoebe's touch sensations are definitely in hyper drive. Especially the pain sensory.

Phoebe is also experiencing selective attention. Which means that her focus of conscious awareness a particular stimulus. The only stimulus that Phoebe can focus on is the itching and pain.

The pain circuit is when sensory receptors respond to potentially damaging stimuli by sending an impulse to the spinal cord, which passes the message to the brain, which interprets the signal as pain.

*Information obtained from lecture and the book.

How the "Friends" Characters Solve Problems

One important part of our cognitive thinking is how we choose to solve problems. In class we talked about four different types of thinking people use when problem solving.

1. Algorithm- step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution. It is usually the long way out, there are less errors which means their more likely to succeed, but it takes time. 
2. Heuristic- a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently. Usually speedier, a short way, takes less time, but more error prone. 
3. Insight- a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem, a new way of thinking.
4. Intuition- a person's gut reaction. 

Monica 

• Monica usually uses a algorithm approach to problem solving. She likes to think things through before she commits. Since she is a chef and is usually following a recipe, she follows a list of directions to solve problems as well, so that quality transfers over. Also, I does take her a lot of time to come to a decision. Monica likes to get looks of people's thoughts on ideas before she decides what to do. But in her relationships she tends to throw herself into love, for example when she went back to richard after they broke up, so this would be when she uses intuition and just follows her heart, without analyzing the problem.

Chandler

• Chandler is a algorithm problem solver. His problem sometimes is that he over analyzes issues and doesn't always think rationally. Like Monica his job also influences his cognitive thinking. He works with numbers at his work and is supposed to be able to see the big picture and research effectively to reach the most accurate result.

Ross

• Ross would like Monica use more of a algorithmic approach to problem solving. Which makes sense because they are brother and sister. He doesn't like to be wrong so he really thinks through things. He does have a lot of success because of it. He thinks of effective solutions to problems. He also uses trial and error to find out the best solution to his problem.

Rachel

• Rachel is usually a heuristic problem solver. She likes to spend as little and time and energy on issues as she can. But issues that are really important to her she like to get everyones opinion on what they think she should do first but ultimately she relies on her intuition to make the final call.

Joey

• Joey definitely just goes with his gut reaction on most things in his life, intuition. Most problems he doesn't think through at all, he just does something or he doesn't realize there is a problem is time to fix it. When Joey gets in a big pickle he usually uses heuristic cognitive thinking. He is definitely always looking for the short way that takes less time and effort on his part. 

Phoebe

• Phoebe is very unique in her cognitive thinking and can be difficult to predict. I would say that Phoebe likes to use new insight to solve problems. She has a very open mind and always thinks of new ridiculous ideas. In lecture we learned that this would mean that Phoebe has a right temporal lobe that has frequent in-flex activity. 

*lecture notes and our text book were used to create the four types of problem solving definitions.

Nurture Contribution to Gender Identity

One is the biggest controversies in psychology is the nature vs. nurture issue which is over the relative contributions of biology and experience. I believe that gender identity is something that the environment usually shows children. An example is that people automatically associate pink with girls and boy with boys. Below is an example from Friends that shows parents trying to influence their children toward a certain gender stereotype.

Ross with G.I. Joe

In this clip from Friends, Ross is trying to get Ben to play with a G.I. Joe instead of playing with a barbie doll. Ben's moms, Susan and Carol, gave him a barbie to play with because he picked it out at the store and wanted it. Ross has a problem with that because he doesn't think boys should be playing with barbies. Ross tries to force Ben to play with G.I. Joe, he wants him interested in manly things.

Rachel and Phoebe don't think that Ben playing with a barbie doll is a big deal either, they think it is perfectly fine. Carol, Susan, and them give Ross a hard time for making a huge deal about it.