Researchers of the Berkeley University have created an interactive map that shows 27 distinct types of emotion, in contrast to assumed 6 common ones: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust.
Inthis article by Yasmin Anwar you can find the interactive map, as well as further information on the proceedings of the research.
While this question obviously is not being asked in everyday life, still it can give a good starting point to think about the value of possessions and we define as "mine" and "yours" or "theirs" and "ours". So let me just give this little trail of thoughts, and let you decide where it leads to:
That favorite book/DVD/game that lies there in your shelf...is it really truly yours? Sure you bought it with money, but you didn't really make it by yourself, right? Neither did you produce the money nor the DVD. You worked so you could get the money that has been produced (mainly by machines), to buy something that has been produced (mainly by machines). And if you have the knowledge to make the book? Well, then you still have to get the paper that someone else made. If you can make the paper by yourself too, you still have to cut down the tree, not to mentioned the materials for the needed tools. And before the tree can grow to the size where it can be used to make paper, first has to be planted. And so on. In the end, close to everything that we one we have thanks to the common effort of several people involved.
So when children are starting to learn the conceptions of 'mine' and 'yours', what should they actually be taught? Of course it is accepted that toys they bring from home are theirs, and they can decided who can play with it. On the same time, it is simply assumed and requested that the toys at kindergarten are those of everyone, with no specific child as an owner! Especially at the beginning time, when coming newly into such a group, a child can be confused about it. Everything was their own, so why is it not the way now? Oh it's not mine, then just let me break it, if it's not mine, no one can have it! (Unfortunately, there are even adult who still have this way of thought)
Maybe instead of teaching about ownership and rules concerning it, it would be more important and appropriate to start off with showing and teaching that every living being and object has to be treated with care and respect! If we knew and trusted that the other side also uses our items with care, we might be inclined to share it much easier.
Eventually, such kind of understanding also might help with the discussions about digital ownership, rights to ideas, concepts and inventions, etc.
Whether the new academic year has started for you already, will soon or is already half way through, I wish all students, teachers and educators a successful 'new year'!
Everyday we can learn new things and make new experiences. And as teachers, most importantly, we can also learn from our students, as well as the good and the bad days! Explore something new each day!
You get to know new students, become a good group, with all its ups and downs in between. Then, before you realize it, the time with those students comes to an end.
Next, you get new students, and the 'fight' starts all over again, as a teacher or educator, you grow to love your students, and eventually you have to say 'goodbye'. And on and on.
And yet, it is not only the students that learn something during the time! You yourself do as well, and it's always a joy to see the little kids growing and ready for their next steps of life.
In the end, all those goodbyes don't matter so much, cause you know you have helped built their lives, in one way or other...and eventually you might learn what became of them. And instead of just one or two kids, you can be proud of so many more, more and more!
(Just a little motivational thought for the summer holidays)
A translation of one of the essays that i wrote for my oral exam of my Masters degree:
In science, at first rituals have only been connected with the religious area. But by now there is a number of theories and definitions on what a "ritual" is supposed to be, how they are developed and what usage they might have. David J. Krieger collected some of them in his handbook "Ritualtheorien (ritual theories), written in 1998. The amount of essays ranges from theories of the construction of rituals to visualizing the rituals by means of cultural and social events, for example, soccer play. Still, even today rituals are mainly asssosiated with big events, and less with our daily lives. But even here rituals can surely be found.
To further discuss this, there first has to be shown how rituals can be developed and how theoretical constructions of them are understood. Durkheims theory, that has been shown in the handbook, tells that rituals are ways, to socially appropriate and condition individual perception and behaviour. Rituals are supposed to construct common ideals and therefore to confirm and validate society. Thus, they are used as a mediation device between individuals, to connect them as a group and society. In this, there is a differentiation between three levels: Micro, meso and makrolevel, which all have different functions.
While the macrolevel indeed is connected with "big ceremonies", the mesolevel is directed to the behaviour and conduction and the microlevel is relatead to speech. In daily life, the last two are of meaning, behaviour as well as speech. To conclude, daily rituals can be put into the micro- as well as mesolevel.
But still, through this levels alone, rituals still cannot be defined completely. Before it has been noted that rituals can help to confirm society. But for this confirmation to happen, rituals need to have a symbolic meaning. If rituals are overstepped, be it on purpose or unknowingly, the society and its order is questioned. But whether there is also a practical usage behind rituals, is another matter. This is more likely in daily life than in big events.
Most rituals develop through habit, as well as the opposite, rituals can develop habits. Routiniued daily activities are not neccessarly rituals. But they will be transformed to ritual acts, if they are followed with a certain ritual attitude. Surely in daily life these boundaries are interchangeable, and for a surveillours point of view it will always be hard to determine whether someone is making a ritual or simply a routinized task. It cannot be seen purely on the practical benefit.
If rituals in daily life are developed through socialisation and habitualisation, it is not possible to withdraw from them, be it with interhuman communications or when using objects. Even making coffee in the morning, or the way of greeting when arriving at work already can be rituals. Even if the original meaning behind an action has been lost, it still is possible to continue to conduct a ritual. It is not only the action itself that makes the ritual, but the routinized and ritualised partial steps of a task.
When rituals are developed, they can determine unwritten roules in interhuman behaviours and relationships. Through the internalized knowledge of these rituals the living together between people is made easier. The conduction of rituals does not need to be done consciously, but still rituals can give security and confidence. The breaking of rituals can also disrupt old structures and give possibilities to see new points of views. Therefore rituals are purposeful, but it can be just as important to consciously divert from them.
Rituals are strongly connected with their related cultures. As example, there are different daily rituals in Japan, Germany or America. The rituals of the own culture usually are so internalized that they can be done without thinking, and this is an even stronger impression when being in a different culture. This breaking of habits and knowledge is not only negative: it gives possibility to see and reflect on ones own culture and its daily ritual habits.
Therefore, the knowledge about rituals in day to day life can indeed have a practical usage in (inter)cultural education and the mediation and exchange between cultures.
The original one is in German language, so please bear with writing or grammar mistakes.
I've not been able to write much this past month, so what should be a habit turned out to be impossible for a while, but I will try to keep you posted for at least the monthly news about education, psychology, sociology and so on...
"Studies show that about 40 percent of people's daily activities are performed each day in almost the same situations. Habits emerge through associative learning. "We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response," Wendy Wood explains in her session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention."
This short essay by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology explaines how habits are formed in our minds, why we need them, and how we might be able to change or get new ones.
"A new study of identical twins has found that early reading skill might positively affect later intellectual abilities. The study, in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and King's College London."
In this study they have tested reading skills and intelligence of twins repeatedly in different ages. With this, they've seen a link between good early reading skills and later higher intelligence.
This news is about a study made by the University of Leicester.
"The study found that while developing young readers and skilled adult readers had similar difficulty correctly recognising anagrams that can form another word by switching the order of only the inside letters, both age groups found it equally easy to recognise anagrams when the outside letters also had to be switched around to form another word. This is because the brain has difficulty keeping track of the position of inside letters when recognising words but assigns special importance to the outside letters." "The findings are important for understanding the role of letter position in children’s word recognition, including in dyslexia."
"At least one part of the human brain may be able to process information the same way in older age as it does in the prime of life, according to new research conducted at the University of Adelaide."
"Both younger (aged 18-38 years) and older (55-95 years) adults had the same responses for spatial attention tasks involving touch, sight or sound."
This study shows, that while some cognitive and reaction times are slowed down during the aging process, other types of awareness, e.g. spatial attention tasks are staying more agile even in an old age.
"To better understand problems during pregnancies today, we should look to the experiences of our ancestors, research published in the open access journal BMC Medicine suggests. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could affect pregnancies for generations."
"Gerlinde Metz, senior author of the article, says: "We show that stress across generations becomes powerful enough to shorten pregnancy length in rats and induce hallmark features of human preterm birth. A surprising finding was that mild to moderate stress during pregnancy had a compounding effect across generations. Thus, the effects of stress grew larger with each generation.""
MACH is a new software developed by M.I.T, that is supposed to helf social
anxious people to "perform" better in social interactions, like, for
example, job interviews. It recordes the amount of smiles, the tone and
levels of the voice, the words said, eye contact and so on, and also responds to your expressions. Therefore,
it can provide feedback that you are rather unlikely to get in a face to
face conversation with a real person. Certainly it can need a bit more developing, like making the voice sound more natural, but it's a good idea! Certainly "normally developed" people don't really need such a program, aside from evaluating their way of talking, but for those with low social interaction or for example Aspergers, it could be an engaging way to practice their skills without having to be afraid on the effects on another person.
"But MACH takes a more instructive approach. The idea
sprung from a workshop held by the Asperger’s Association of New
England, where Hoque and fellow researchers were approached by people
seeking a technological solution to their social hardships. “Once I
start talking I don’t know when to stop, and people lose interest, and I
don’t know why,” one person told Hoque. People asked for a tool with
which they could practice human interaction privately—insulated from the
insecurities created in social situations.
The software was built over two years, using more than half a million
lines of code. As a matter of convenience, Hoque’s team used their
immediate surroundings to develop a proof of concept: they tested out
the interaction-training system by conducting trial job interviews with
ninety M.I.T. undergraduates seeking to improve their self-presentation
in front of prospective employers. “In a technical university—where
people are really, really technical—it’s possible that many people would
have social difficulty,” Hoque explained. For on-campus career prep,
“The best thing to do is interact with a human, but that’s limited.”
[...]
While the prototype runs locally on computers, Hoque, who recently
completed his Ph.D. and is now at the University of Rochester, would
like to make it widely available online, which he says would take
between six months and a year for two or three engineers to develop.
He’s now seeking funding, and he said there has been interest from
organizations that support autism research, as well as from private
companies.
Hoque, who has spent more time than anyone interacting with MACH, told me, “I have a love-hate relationship with it. There have been so many conversations at three A.M.
when I’m writing code.” He doesn’t consider this to be genuine
communication, though. “Human communication is so rich and the
technology is not there yet,” he said. “I don’t even look at it as a
person. It’s just software asking me questions. I know it’s a bunch of
lines of code. I might as well just do this with a blank screen.”"
