Psychology of body language

There exist not just a verbal language. Communication is also possible using body language and understanding it can help understand others.

We use our body to send signals unconsciously but revealing true feelings. But now it is also used in different aspects of public life, such as politics or interviews. Body language includes facial expressions, body posture, eye contact and other and is claimed to be influenced by both heredity and environment.

Here are some keys revealing the emotions of people showing specific signals. If a person crosses his/her arms, this means he puts a barrier between you and him/her. On the other hand, if a person is in a friendly mood, this may mean he is contemplative. If person looks at your eyes consistently, it may also have two different meanings. One is a positive attitude and another - a person simply doesn't trust you. In opposite situation, when there is no eye contact, a person may have a negative attitude towards you. If you notice a person gazing to somewhere else while you are speaking and doing such actions as touching ear or scratching chin, you have to know that person shows disbelief. To notice boredom is not a difficult task as well- head tilting or just unfocussed look at a speaker show that. But of course there are exceptions in understanding body language of people- you have to be aware of the fact that people with some certain diseases act in a different way as well as there exist differences among cultures.

People are not always tend to express their feelings, states in words or sometimes just are not capable of doing it. Therefore understanding body language is really beneficial.



References: http://www.lifepositive.com/mind/psychology/body-language/body-language.html , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language

Restatement summary of article "Babies 'show social intelligence' "

Babies are able to make social evaluations in the first months of their life.

There was made an experiment at Yeil university by proffesors. The experiment's purpose was to see if 6-month-year old babies and 10-month-year old babies distinguish behavior of others. The participants of experiment were 12 six-month-year old babies and 16 ten-month-year old babies. There were used techniques of social psychology in this experiment and as for conditions babies were held by their parents. 100% of six-month-year old babies and 87,5% of ten-month-year old babies showed distinguishing bad and good characters by choosing a good one.

The outcome, stated by these researchers, is that the basis of babies' sociality is universal.

The person that have influenced me

As we live in society, it is natural that other people have an influence on us. And I'm not an exception as well. So in this article I'm going to talk about one person who influences me.

That person is my friend Ruta who I met about 4 years ago at school. She's a person that I'm proud of. She's true, sincere, sophisticated and 'deep'. She is the person who is out of superficial world- probably that is one of the main things that I like about her and what I got from her. She barely always tells what she thinks; has a gift to see in people special qualities- usually what others can't see; she looks at the life deeply. For me she is just special.

Personally, I think I've changed as a personality since I've met Ruta. More concret- my attitude to the world, people has changed. Not radically as still me and my friend are different personalities but slightly- for sure. The thing I've noticed that I changed my attitude to parents to better side, especially to my father- Ruta in some way showed me the special part of my father. I'm grateful for it. And just for herself being the person I can rely on and who can tell me the truth even if it may be hurting me.

Despite the fact that she is in the other part of Europe now, I feel this relationship being important to me. As well as her influence, which is not as it was, but still exists

and I want it to continue. Because that influence shows me secret parts of ourselves and the transcendental world.

References: http://www.hickerphoto.com/data/media/146/northern_light_T1481.jpg

Dreaming- does it touch everybody?

A word dream describes a subconscious experience of various sensations that include sounds, images, emotions etc. that appear during sleep, especially REM sleep. I would like to mention a few questions related to dreaming in this article- who dreams and what does affectthe amount of dreams we remember.

Firstly, the question :" Does everyone dream?" occurs. The answer to it is :"Yes". We even dream in the womb. Besides, the length of dreaming varies over our lifetime. As a newborn infant we dream about 80% of our sleep time ( 80% of sleep in the REM state ), later this number shifts- as adults we have 20-25 % of our sleep in REM state and lastly, the amount of REM sleep to old people is 20%. In order to understand it better I will give you an example- if we ( adults ) sleep 8 hours , we dream for an hour and a half each night. For older people, if they sleep 8 hours, dreams take a bit more than an hour. So everybody dreams, just different amount of time. But actually there exist some very rare exceptions - people can loose ability to dream if the area of the brain that controls dreaming is injured.

So as we know that everybody dreams ( without rare exceptions ) , another question emerges to the surface - why do we remember so few of our dreams ? The answer is quite simple- we remember just what was very intense and powerful. Otherwise there isn't impact that makes us to pay attention. Much of our dreams consist of simple daily experience, for example- what we have been doing at work, which is not very terrible nor very great and we don't pay attention to it which leads to the fact that we don't remember our dream. Another factor for remembering dreams is how we wake up. If we wake up from dream naturally, this dream is usually very fresh and recent, usually more dramatic than other dreams ( we dream few times during night ) so we remember it. But as for nowaday society, we tend not to listen to our natural body rythms and we wake up from either the noise of alarm clock, or screaming baby or other factors. In this case we disturb natural rythms and disturb dream, which means we don't remember it.

To sum up, dreams are known to everyone. But some of us remember more of them, some less. That is connected not just with intensity of our dreams ( whether dreams are captivating or not ), but also the quality of our sleep. By listening to natural rythms of our body, we will have a better sleep and will remember the subconscious experience of our sleep time.


References:

http://www.balancedlivingmag.com/images/2005/July-August%2005/dreaming_TOC.jpg

About phobias

Firstly, what is a phobia? It isn't just a simple fear as you may think. A phobia is an excessive and persistent fear of : a situation or an object. The fear is considered excessive because it is out of proportion to the actual level of danger associated with the situation. When an individual with a phobia is exposed to the feared situation, an immediate anxiety response is triggered that can sometimes grow into a great panic attack. So people with phobias avoid the feared situations or objects. Otherwise, they endure a lot of distress.

Phobias vary a lot, but it is distinguished 10 most common phobias.
The first place in this list is taken by arachnophobia, which is a fear of spiders- half of women and 10% of men suffer from it. Though this phobia may look quite funny, the symptoms of it are not funny at all. They are breathlessness, dizziness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking heart palpitations, inability to speak, to think clearly, a fear of dying, loosing psychological control, an enormous detachment from reality, frequent panic attacks.
Social phobia ( a fear of being evaluated negatively in social situations) is frequent as well. Victims of this phobia are afraid to open criticisms, humiliation and they are tend to be unable to speak , sweat and blush in front of others. One more phobia, which is called agoraphobia, has similarities with social phobia. Those who suffer from agoraphobia are generally afraid of being in the centre of attention and usually avoid going to public places and social gatherings. It may sound as a joke, but a famous American actress Kim Basinger, who won an Oscar, suffers from both - social phobia and agoraphobia. When she accepted her Oscar , the words from her didn't come, though she had been practising a response for days.
Aerophobia, a fear that tortures Whoopi Goldberg, is a fear of flying. Acrophobia- a fear of height. Those who suffer from panic attacks in elevators, trains or other confined spaces ( Adolf Hitler was one of them ) are called claustrophobics.
Some strange phobias, such as emetophobia ( a fear of vomit ) or carcinophobia ( a fear of cancer ) also are in the list of 10 most common phobias.
And the last two that go into this list are brontophobia- a fear of lightning and thunder ( logically- these people hate summer ) and necrophobia- a fear of dead and death.

The last point I would like to mention is a way of treating phobias. A superior way is considered to be cognitive behavior therapy ( CBT ) which focusses on slowly and safely exposing a person to a feared situation or stimulus. It involves repeated approaching of fear- provoking situation or object until it no longer produces a strong fear reaction. As for medications, they should be used just in phobic situations in order to allow the person to function in that situation, but not for treating phobias.

This is just a liitle information to get to know deeper what phobias are. As it is seen, phobias are widespread and they have serious effect on our mental health and for this reason they have to be eliminated.


References: http://www.visioncoachingservices.com/pictures/phobia%20woman.jpg

Color psychology

You can identify nearly everything with psychology, even the smallest things of yours that of course mean something more than just "I like it". Psychology of color also exists and can tell a lot interesting about each one of us and our setting.
Red color is known to be the color of love, but actually not just that. As it is also an exiting color, which symbolises action and energy, it is referable to danger and sports car. Interesting fact- red color is found in about 80% flags of various countries.
Blue color is considered to be opposite to red. Therefore blue means calmness and peace and it's used in UN flag.
Free and open color can be named yellow one. It can be considered as a symbolic color of cheerfulness and optimism as it is a color of sun.
If you feel tension, choose laying in a green room, as this color is relaxing one. The main reason for it is simple- it is a color of nature and in nature we always feel cosy and calm.
Color that is used in gangsters' and vampires' clothing. Color that means power and threat. Which one? Of course black.
A lot think that white is an opposite color to black, but according to psychology it is brown ,which is considered to be warm, friendly as it is a color of ground and also weak color. As for white, it is a symbol of purity and strength. That's why it is worn by brides, doctors.
And the last thing about autonomous color, which is grey. It is used by people who don't want to be noticed. There even exists such expression :"to be a grey mouse", which means to be lost among others, remain unnoticed.
So different colors have various meanings and have different affects on us and knowing their meanings we can tailor colors to our needs.

The subfield of psychology that I would choose. Pros & cons of it.

There are 20 subfields in psychology and each of these 20 concentrates on different issues. Therefore there is a wide choice for psychologists to find their way of their carreer.
As for me, I think I would choose cross- cultural psychology as my area of job. The reason for it would be my personal interests and wishes. Specialists of cross-cultural psychology investigate similarities and differences in psychological functioning in various cultures and ethnic groups. While getting involved in this subfield, I would gain great knowledge not just of specific psychology but also of different subjects, such as geography, foreign languages, history, political, economical matters and so forth. For sure it would be useful for me personally not just by expanding my horizons but also by gaining tolerant attitude to other cultures and ethnic groups. And of course researches and analysis of different topics comparing different cultures don't seem to be boring and passive job at all. So this would be the main advantage- the interest.
However, each thing has it's positive and negative sides. I imagine one of the disadvantages could be lack of perspectives while working in this field in Lithuania. And also lack of connection with people as I imagine this would be work of researching, not counceling.
To sum up, I believe this would be a very interesting and wide subfield, but just working abroad, in specialised universities or research centers.