How to get a B.A. in Psychology in 5 minutes

I was inspired by the article by Stephen Walt about "How to Get a B.A. in International Relations in 5 Minutes", where he presented 'all you really need to know about the fascinating world of International Relations', and decided to do one for my own major, Psychology.

As a psychology student, I get asked some of these questions often: "So what do you study in Psychology?" "Can you read minds?" "Do I have a mental illness?"

Most people have no clue about what Psychology undergraduates actually learn, and the only things they know about Psychology are the random articles that surface on social media, with the most common topic being 'What Psychology says about being happy' (examples: 1, 2, 3).

While learning about happiness is a good thing, 95% of a degree in Psychology isn't about Positive Psychology. In this article, I'll present what I believe to be the key ideas in Psychology, and are the things that we will remember in 5-10 years time after we have graduated.

I have structured this article according to the 5 general domains of Psychology: Abnormal, Biological, Cognitive, Social, Developmental, providing the gist of each domain. Assuming you don't read too slowly, you should be able to finish this in 5 minutes!

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Most university Psychology degrees are structured to capture the five general domains of Psychology as mentioned above, with more advanced courses branching off into each of these categories (e.g. Intro to Abnormal Psychology -> Therapies). There is also the general Research Methods (e.g. the scientific method - hypothesis testing, statistics, etc) courses which I will not elaborate on.

Abnormal Psychology
"What is abnormal is arbitrary and is constantly evolving"

The introductory course in Abnormal Psychology typically exposes you to a wide range of mental disorders (e.g. mood disorders (such as depression, bipolar, etc), anxiety disorders, etc) and their diagnoses/symptoms/basic treatments. More advanced courses delve into different areas such as therapies, counselling, assessment, which generally revolve around assessing, diagnosing, and treating a mental disorder.

Because everyone has problems

Learning about all these is largely memory work, but I have two main takeaways from Abnormal Psychology:

What is abnormal is arbitrary
One of the leading manuals of Abnormal Psychology is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). To put it very simply, it is a manual of what symptoms comprise each mental disorder, almost like a checklist of sorts (note that the recent trend is a shift away from dichotomies to continuums), that aids mental health professionals in making a diagnosis.
The strange thing about the DSM is that it is arbitrary - a group of experienced researchers/clinicians just came together and agreed upon what should be in the manual. This is why DSM constantly draws flak for being arbitrary, culturally-insensitive (though there are vast improvements in the recent editions), and even being driven by the pharmaceutical industry.

Hopefully your psychiatrist is less random than this.

What is abnormal constantly evolves
Because of the arbitrary nature of the DSM, it is also constantly evolving, depending on current research/clinical findings. This could mean what was previously classified as a mental disorder is now no longer considered one, or the emergence of new mental disorders (e.g. Internet Gaming Disorder in the DSM-V).

To wrap up this section, I return to the seemingly simple layman question: "Do I have X disorder?"
A well-educated Psychology student should be able to tell you that this is no simple question due to its many layers of complexity : Are you basing your assessment on clinical findings or arbitrary guidelines? How do the symptoms each vary on a continuum? Even if the client fails to meet the criteria for diagnosis, does that mean he doesn't need treatment? Which treatment should you use?
No single article will do this topic justice, and the simplified answer may be "It depends on the judgment of your mental health professional". Treatment-wise, the current trend is patient-centric treatment - the patient's needs and preferences come first, and a large goal is to let the patient be actively involved in the treatment process (versus in the past where the doctor is seen as the authoritarian figure and focused on physical symptoms and patients were passive).


Biological Psychology
"The brain is a complex system"

Given the current trends, this domain is more accurately termed 'neuroscience' or 'neuropsychology'. This field is interested in studying the specific workings of the human brain and investigating correlations between physiological (more specifically, of the brain) and behavioral changes.

Nice one, brain.

The most interesting thing I remember from Biological Psychology is learning about how we may get addicted to caffeine. While this article explains it more in detail,(or an even more 'sciencey' peer-reviewed article) here is my 30-second, simplified explanation of it:

• Caffeine belongs to a group of drugs that influence our brain (known as psychoactive drugs). When we consume caffeine, certain sites in the brain are activated by caffeine, which lead to the increase in energy we feel (thus caffeine is known as a stimulant). After repeated consumption, greater amounts of caffeine are required to activate the same sites, as they get used to the previous strength and need a larger 'kick' to be activated (this is known as tolerance).
• Because our body always tries to achieve balance or a neutral state (homeostasis) these sites may react in a way to produce an effect opposite to the effects of caffeine (i.e. make us feel lethargic). This explains the 'caffeine crash' some of us experience after caffeine has left our system (the lethargic effect is still firing away while there's no more caffeine to counterbalance this), and also explains caffeine withdrawal, when someone who regularly consumes caffeine stops consuming it and feels horrible (the lethargic effect kicks in but no caffeine is being supplied. In a sense, he is doubly lethargic now, with normal lethargy + no-caffeine lethargy combined).

This is only one sample of a complex neurological process (already one of the simplest) that you may learn in this field. I've also left out the more technical jargon such as brain receptors, action potential, neurotransmitters, etc.

Cognitive Psychology
"Remember what memory is and you'll have a foothold in all things within Cognitive Psychology"

If Biological Psychology can be analogous to identifying the different parts of a computer and learning what they do, Cognitive Psychology is learning computing language and understanding how things in the CPU combine to do what they do. The computer metaphor is commonly employed (as I will later on) to explain concepts in this domain. The big question in Cognitive Psychology is "How does our brain process information?"

This field covers an array of mental processes such as attention, reading processes, problem solving, thinking, but what may interest most people is memory. Memory is somewhat the 'anchor' of everything in Cognitive Psychology - it is virtually impossible to discuss any concept in Cognitive Psychology without some reference to memory - thus my focus on memory in this section.

I can't remember the point of this comic.

Here's my 1 minute crash course on memory (possibly oversimplified):
There are 3 types of memory, long-term (LT), short-term (ST) and working memory.

• As the name implies, long-term memory refers to information that is stored for longer periods in our brain, such as memories of events we've experienced (also known as episodic knowledge), factual knowledge/concepts (e.g. everything I'm writing here), set patterns of doing things (also known as behavioral schemas; e.g. morning routine : get out of bed, wash your face, brush your teeth), etc etc. Think of LT memory as things being stored (or encoded) on a hard drive.
• The opposite would be short-term memory, phenomena that we only hold for very short time (seconds). If we don't commit things in the ST memory to our LT memory, they are forgotten/lost. For instance, if you hear or see the number 21837, there are the few seconds that follows where the audio/visual imprint stays in your ST memory and you can recite it easily. But if you don't commit it to LT memory, you may not be able to recite it later on.
• The two big differences between ST and LT memory are capacity and time. LT memory lasts longer and has (arguably) unlimited capacity; ST memory is brief and has very limited capacity (e.g. most people find it difficult to memorize more than 7-9 numbers)
• The working memory is where the magic happens. If ST memory is a book and LT memory is the library, working memory is the librarian who takes the book and stores it in the right place in the library. The working memory is responsible for the integrating and manipulating of information, and when we say we are directing our attention to a task, it more or less means we are employing our working memory to perform that task.
• To give an example of all three systems working in tandem: Our friend asks us "Hey, where did you leave your keys?" - the ST memory holds on to this verbal utterance for the working memory to interpret what it means, then decide on the next step - which is to retrieve from our LT memory when we last had our keys.

There are a whole lot of other exciting cognitive concepts that I wish I had the luxury of space to elaborate on here, such as spreading activation, learning and conditioning, and metacognition, but I will conclude this section for now and move on to the ever-popular realm of Social Psychology.

Social Psychology

"Humans are irrational beings"

Social Psychology is the study of how our thoughts, beliefs and actions influence/are influenced by other's (or our own) thoughts, beliefs and actions. Most laymen like Social Psychology as it is easily relatable and observable in our everyday lives, versus something like the blood-brain barrier.

In fact, social psychologists basically observe everyday occurrences, give them a fancy term, and try to explain it. Note that even though they are everyday occurrences, they may often be counterintuitive. One of the most famous examples is the bystander effect. When you someone on the street is in need of help, is it more likely he receives help when more people are around? While common sense says 'Yes', studies have repeatedly shown that the more people are around, the less likely anyone is to help at all.

He's probably been dead for a week.

Why is this so? Researchers argue that this is due to diffusion of responsibility, where it's easier to think 'Someone else will help him' when there are more people around versus when you're the only person there. This phenomenon has been observed in real-life scenarios, such as the tragic case of Yue Yue, the two-year-old girl who was run over not once but TWICE and no less than 18 passers-by walked past but offered no help.

The realm of Social Psychology is so large that is hard to decide which to share here - attitudes, persuasion, group dynamics, and unconscious thought are all fascinating issues. After some consideration, I'll elaborate on one of the most influential concepts in Social Psychology - cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) states that we don't like to have conflicting cognitions (thoughts/beliefs). When we do have conflicting cognitions, we experience cognitive dissonance, or an uneasiness in our minds, and we try to resolve this in often strange and irrational ways. For example, researchers had participants perform extremely boring and tedious tasks, such as drawing circles for an hour. After this, they were told to persuade a second participant (actually an actor) that the task was interesting and engaging. One group of participants were then paid $1 for their efforts; another group was paid $20. Who do you think would like the tasks more? Those who were paid more right?

Writing with this pencil is a pointless task.

Wrong. It was found that the $1 group rated the boring tasks as more interesting than the $20 group! This is because those in the $1 group had the conflicting thoughts of 'I told someone the tasks were interesting' and 'I found the tasks really boring', and in order to resolve this conflict, they modified their own attitudes to favor the tasks more. The $20 group was able to resolve this conflict by justifying their persuasion of someone else with the large amount of money they received.

The main thrust of CDT (i.e. we try to reduce cognitive dissonance) can be seen in our lives without us realising it: for example, when you're choosing between a $5 Giordano shirt or a $50 H&M shirt. When you eventually buy the H&M one, you may subsequently believe you like it more (even if you don't), simply to rationalize the hefty price you've paid. 

While this theory has been challenged by some other alternatives (e.g. self-perception theory, balance theory), it remains largely influential in explaining many phenomena, such as the fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, and other cognitive biases (for a longer list, click here). Regardless of which theory you subscribe to, the bottom line remains - we often behave in irrational ways to protect ourselves, whether it is to reduce cognitive dissonance or to protect our self-concepts.

Developmental Psychology
"Early influences have a huge impact"

This field teaches about how humans change over time, typically with a focus on toddlers, children, and adolescents. You may learn about how we acquire each of our core skills (e.g. language, cognition, social skills, etc) at each stage of development.

'Hi! I am here because people love babies!'

Laymen may be most interested in the development of babies - at what age are they able to crawl, walk, babble (i.e. say 'ba ba ba' or 'ma ma' - monosyllabic sounds), talk, have theory of mind, etc. But personally, my main takeaway from this field is that early influences have a huge impact on the rest of our lives.

Research has shown that there are sensitive periods of development - periods in which you need to be exposed to or acquire a particular ability - after which it becomes more difficult to learn that skill. A simple example is language - it's easier to acquire a language(s) up till about 6 years old, after which learning a language is generally slower and more difficult.

'What happens if you deprive me of vision?'

There are also critical periods - if deprived of learning that ability during the critical period, subsequent attempts will only result in impaired acquisition. A simple but chilling example is vision - researchers deprived a kitten of vision by sewing one eye shut. When it became an adult cat, this eye was unsewn, but visual acuity was never able to develop to normal levels. Sewing an adult cat's eye shut and later unsewing it had no such permanent effect on the cat's vision.

The concept of sensitive periods lead to certain scary possibilities - research on antisocial children have found certain correlations with a lack of parental warmth in early childhood. It is hypothesized that this is because the child was deprived of loving, social contact during certain sensitive periods of social skills acquisition. (Note that such hypotheses are only made based on observations of antisocial kids - reverse engineering the problem in a sense - thus we cannot make a causal conclusion).

Developmental Psychology has made me appreciate the value of exposing my future children to a wide range of stimulating activities to facilitate development, and to provide parental care and warmth from young, as early influences do have a huge impact.

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I have chosen to avoid some of the more well-known ideas such as Freud and Positive Psychology and instead focus on what people may not have heard of before. This is only a snippet of the large world of Psychology, and if you truly want to learn more, perhaps you should pursue an undergraduate (and further) education in Psychology.

UK Grad Trip - Thoughts

Unlike my US trip, I won't be blogging in a chronological order, but just in a thematic way. Will just blog whatever random thoughts come to mind.

Seven
When I first asked the group whether anyone was interested in going on a grad trip back in end-2013, I had only expected the 5 of us - Wilbur, Nella, Amelia, Gerald, and me. The gf was tentatively involved in other plans, and honestly I didn't know where I wanted to go and wanted someone else to make the decisions.

Fastforward a few months, the group had expanded to 7 to include my gf and Rhoda, and plans were on the way. Air tickets were booked. Accommodations were booked. Oh crap. I was really going to travel with 7 people.

Travelling in such a big group has pros and cons. The most obvious con of decision-making being difficult was actually manifested in quite a different way. Instead of having too many conflicting ideas (which I had prepared for by just splitting up and going off with the gf), we had too little ideas - almost everyone in the group was a 'anything' person.

E.g. "Where do you guys want to go?"
'Anything!'
"Do you want to go to this place?"
'Anything!'
"Should we eat at that restaurant?"
'Anything!'
"Can you climb on the top of the building and jump off while yelling 'I am superman'?"
'Anything!'

Ok the last one was nonsense. But this was really pretty much the whole trip, which got really frustrating as I am personally also an 'Anything' person so nothing would be planned till the very last minute, when I can't take it anymore and I would just pen down a list of activities and assume everyone wants to do that.

Another con of 7 people is that it takes time to move. Getting ready was surprisingly quick, mainly due to the girls waking up ridiculously early (good as we leave relatively on time, bad as it wakes me up when they move around and make noise if we're in the same apartment). The problem was moving on from each place we went to. Some will be ready to go but others will want to see a bit more or buy a few more things, which resulted in a lot of delay. I think if I went alone with the gf we would have covered easily twice the number of places.

Planning
I made the mistake of not being involved in planning until much later. I saw that there were a few others more keen than me and they seemed to be brimming with ideas, plus I was involved in some other activities, so I was quite lacklustre in the stages of planning leading up to our trip.

This was a mistake as it resulted in, on hindsight, some poor decisions, such as spending an entire week in London (I think 3 days was enough to cover everything), not going to Paris or somewhere outside of UK, going to South Downs (we effectively only went to ONE place), buying the London Pass (I think we only used 50 pounds worth at most. It cost 100+ pounds).

I'm not saying that if I had been more vocal initially we would have avoided these mistakes. After all, hindsight is only 20/20. But I definitely would have pushed for going out of UK more, and not going to South Downs, or at least planning our time there better.

Musicals/Plays
Before the trip, the most anticipated moment was when we watched Les Miserables in London. The rest of the itinerary didn't seem that exciting or interesting to me (museums and shitz), but I thought I would really enjoy musicals and even made plans to watch several more such as Phantom and Mathilda.

In the end, we did watch Phantom as well but not Mathilda. And while I really did enjoy the performances - they were splendid songs, music, emotional singers, etc - I couldn't quite reconcile spending such a large amount of money simply to watch it. I paid 69pounds (about 150$ after booking costs) for Les Miserables... it was good but I couldn't stop thinking how expensive it was and how I was better able to follow the movie version (storyline-wise) which cost only $10.

I came to the conclusion that musicals were great for a first-time experience for me, but I wouldn't be SUPER keen to go again (definitely will not go for the same show-_- I dont' understand how some people are willing to watch the same musical again)

Food
I claim to live by the phrase: "Some people eat to live. I live to eat". I love food. I would gladly pay abit more to eat better food. I wouldn't call myself a foodie, and I'm not into fine dining at all. But I do love good food.

In the UK, the cheapest meal costs about 3 pounds, and is a pathetic meat sandwich or something. The average meal costs 6-8 pounds, while if you eat at restaurants it may be 8-15 pounds. (just double everything for SGD).

With such hefty prices, I was actually quite deterred to try anything special/new, and simply went for the cheaper options often. Furthermore, the food wasn't exactly special - fish and chips, burgers, sandwiches, english breakfast etc were things I actually eat quite often back in Singapore. Thus I didn't really enjoy myself, cuisine-wise, in UK, as compared to when I was in Japan.


Money
I think I really need to let myself go money-wise if I want to enjoy holidays. I came back from the trip with 25% of my money left, as I was constantly scrooge-ing and saving over there. On hindsight I think I would have enjoyed myself more if I had just assumed this was 'holiday money' and I was going to spend it all, and just ... spend.

In Psychology, we learn about a concept called hedonic treadmill. The gist of it is that we, as human beings, are great at adapting to our current situations, whether good or bad. Thus when we experience good (or bad) things, we adapt to them, and the happiness ( or sorrow) it brings us diminishes over time, and then it affects us less than before.

A simple example would be if I used to earn $100 a month, then a $10 meal seems like a big deal to me. But later if I earn $10000 a month, I get used to $10 meals, and I would start to desire $20, $50 meals, etc. Thus, it's like we're on a treadmill - we keep moving forward but never actually move in terms of our happiness - we just adapt, and our happiness returns to a baseline.

I bring this up as I think it's hard for me to adapt to a more well-off situation (i.e. now, when I am working). I was raised to be frugal, to save, to scrimp and save. It's hard to shake off 24 years of frugality and start spending more freely simply because I earn more money now. I wonder if Psychology will be right or I will be an exception.


What I Liked
I was fairly neutral about almost every part of the trip, apart from a couple of highlights - watching my first musical (Les Mis), making an impromptu trip down to Loughborough to eat soemin's yummy cooking and to spend a day with bestie, and the Emirates stadium tour.

Thinking about it, this was on in London! What about the first 7 days? Well, two reasons why they may have not been so enjoyable :
1) I'm a checklist kind of traveller - I like going to major attractions and checking them off my list (e.g. in the States I visited Empire state building, golden gate bridge, Grand Canyon, etc). If I had planned it myself, I would only have gone to London and perhaps spend the rest of the time bouncing around Europe. Or at least go around UK, instead of staying just in England.
2) SH had a tooth infection in the first half of the trip which really worried me sick. The thought of her possibly suffering some sort of permanent disability really broke my heart - everytime I looked at her and see her struggle to smile with her swollen cheek, I'm not sure if the pain was greater for her or for me. Thank God that she is better now and has sought appropriate treatment. I pray that she will recover fully!

Of course, the culture immersion was great - this is something I'll always enjoy about travelling even if I'm physically drained from the activity. English people are really nice and friendly! Literally every single person we asked for directions was patient, friendly, and remarkably detailed. Some even chatted with us briefly. They are like less forward Americans, but just as friendly! Of course, the British accent is awesome :D

The service staff were also very very polite and nice - it reminded me of Japan, but in a different way. Japan's service staff is more of a subservient kind of nice, while the English staff were more genuine and warm.

Key lessons
I guess some things I learnt from this trip were: travel in as small a group as possible; be proactive in planning of the trip (unless it's SH planning it... lol. I enjoyed our Japan trip despite planning virtually nothing. Maybe it's just the company); don't be afraid to spend - it's a holiday!

Types of puzzles in a puzzle room.

I have gone for about 9 escape rooms from different companies now. There are several categories that puzzles fall into. There can and is usually overlap between categories.

A.1) Search
The simplest and sometimes the most boring types of puzzles are those that need you to find -something- that is taped to a wall, under a box, behind a cabinet or something like that. I won't even call these puzzles.
Some examples would be hidden keys, hidden clues, etc.

While these are the most necessary puzzles to have (since escape rooms ARE about finding clues), I don't like it when they form the crux of a particular stage (e.g. need to find an obscure hidden object to unlock next lock).

Rather, having easy-to-locate but difficult to figure out HOW to use it type Search puzzles are probably the best and most fulfilling (since you feel like you're using your brains primarily to solve, not your ability to play hide and seek with hidden objects)


Tips for New Puzzle Solvers: Have 1 (or 2) dedicated 'Seekers' who have keen eyes to search everywhere for any useful clues once you begin or when moving to a new zone. It's not just a matter of looking, you may have to interact with the environment (e.g. touch or pull or push something to reveal something hidden, etc).

A.2) Search and Combine
These are an extension of Search type puzzles, where you have to find more than 1 object and use them together to get past something.

To use a fictional example so as not to spoil any of the existing puzzles (You will figure out what this means when you see it), a Search and Combine can be something like I found Object A, and I find Object B, I need to use them together to get more clues. Xcape has quite a few of such puzzles, and The Escape Artist has utilized some of such puzzles in their Prinsep Street branch.

B) Riddle
Riddles are straightforward (but not necessarily easy) - they are simply an IQ-like puzzle on a piece of paper (or papers) that requires you to solve something on them. They can be in the form of logic puzzles, math-like puzzles, or literal riddles. These are arguably The Escape Artist's specialty - they have more riddles than other escape companies and their riddles are good and challenging. Their original branch (Bukit Timah) with only singular rooms utilized mostly Riddle puzzles.

These are usually fun, but having too many is also detrimental as if puzzle-goers are stuck at a particular riddle it can be frustrating (more so than being stuck at the next category of puzzles).

Tips for New Puzzle Solvers: Keep track of every clue you see that you have not used. You may have to come back to it in a subsequent area. If there is no obvious method to solve the Riddle, it's probably a Multi-staged Riddle and you need to utilize a clue from somewhere else.

C) Multi-staged Riddle
This category is slightly different from the previous one. Normal Riddle puzzles can be solved by just looking at deducing from the piece of paper that the puzzle is on. Multistaged Riddle puzzles require you to find clues from elsewhere (can be same area, or maybe previous areas) to solve it.

These are arguably one of the more fun categories, as it feels more challenging when it really isn't, and is just about knowing you have to use a particular object (should not be too randomly connected) to solve the main puzzle.
Later puzzles in a room are usually multistaged puzzles as they require you to go back to something you've seen earlier to get clues to solve them.


Tips for New Puzzle Solvers: Keep track of every clue you see that you have not used. You may have to come back to it in a subsequent area.

D) Props-based Puzzles
This involves special locks (not all locks are number or key locks! :)) or special puzzle boxes or other props that you have to figure out how to use. I won't elaborate so as not to spoil the surprise and fun of figuring out how to open a particular lock. There are some very creative locks out there :)

These are very fun to have, but of course, should not be repeated across rooms as the novelty wears off immediately.

Tips for New Puzzle Solvers: Veteran puzzle solvers will have no problem recognizing particular locks, but first time solvers just need to figure out how a particular lock works.