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Apr. 9th, 2005 @ 01:57 am "Al-Musharaka" is active
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Dylan: "Tom Thumb's Blues"
Check it out, Psych 214 folks: students.edu.ac.ma/course/view.php?id=131
What other topics do you want to discuss on Moodle?
d2
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Apr. 9th, 2005 @ 01:55 am Tell me, tell me what you're after
Current Music: Pumpkins: "Siva"
I just want to get there faster.
What's it like to be really listening to music? Give me an example.
d2
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Apr. 4th, 2005 @ 03:45 pm The "substance" issue
Current Music: Closing Time (Cohen's "Future")
What do you know, and what did you think about what you knew, about alcohol when you were 10? 12? 15? 18? About (which?) drugs?
What happened (good and bad)to folks you knew well, as a result (or at least a correlate) of drug/alcohol use?
d2
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Mar. 29th, 2005 @ 07:42 pm Justin!
I'd like to hear from both classes about Justinspace.
What's going on here that we might study or explain in terms of one or more of the ideas discussed in Psychology of Adolescence"? What parts of Justinspace are most intersting/revealing/disturbing to you?
For Psych 314i: Start at the vita, or jump right in with some searches. Bookmark the interesting pages, and comment on why you found them interesting and what we might learn from LIWC analysis of them.
Here's another Justin persona: just in teractive
The "Dark Night" film is downloadable by right-clicking here.
The San Francisco Chronicle covered Justin's January retirement from links.net in a piece titled "Time to get a life -- pioneer blogger Justin Hall bows out at 31."
d2
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Mar. 19th, 2005 @ 08:10 am P314i: Monday's LIWC lab
You, talented young Bi-Co social science alum, have been hired the summer after graduation to work with a small tech firm in California to study the "virtual economies" developing in online role-playing settings such as EverQuest and Second Life. You decide to treat the player motivation dimensions described by Yee (2001, 2002) in his research on EverQuest and other "massively multiplayer on-line role-paying games" (MMORPGs) as levels of an independent variable (along with gender) to be applied to LIWC scores for psychologically interesting features of the language used by players in various motivational categories, in Yee (2005). That is, you want to write a discussion of the ways language is used by persons heavily engaged in online role-playing but quite different from each other in the Achievement, Social, and Immersion components of their motivations for being so. You
• prepare a list of text files by pasting male and female responses illustrating several motivational types from Yee’s data,
• select interesting categories for inclusion as you load these files to LIWC,
• output your results to Excel format, import this to SPSS, and run appropriate correlations, anovas and/or crosstabs, then
• post and comment on your results here in LJ.

These three essential resources are linked to the Adolescence lab syllabus:

Yee, N. (2001). The Norrathian Scrolls: A Study of EverQuest. Retrieved from www.nickyee.com March 19, 2005.
Yee, N. (2002). Facets: 5 Motivation Factors for Why People Play MMORPG's. Retrieved from www.nickyee.com March 19, 2005.
Yee, N. (2005). The Daedalus Project: MMORPG Research, Cyberculture, MMORPG Psychology. Motivations Profile Browser. Retrieved from www.nickyee.com March 19, 2005.
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Mar. 18th, 2005 @ 05:06 pm The "creation" of the "sexual" in early "adolescence"
Current Music: A3: "Old Purple Tin"
What is Gagnon really saying about the form, content, and emotional connotations of youthful sexuality?
How does he explain the male-female differences in reported masturbation, intercourse, and experience of orgasm?
Do you see the gender differences Gagnon suggests in this passage?

The two genders share the experience of transition from childhood, but the early outcomes of these transitions serve to further estrange each gender from the existential character of the other's sexual experience. For males early adolescence is commonly characterized by the onset of overt sexual activity which is conducted in the context of secrecy experienced in tension with the public masculine striving associated with homosociality. In contrast, among females overt sexual activity is infrequent; they, like males, live in a world dominated by their own gender, but it is a more public world designed to promote future heterosociality. Within two years after puberty most males have had their commitment to sexuality reinforced by orgasm, commonly through masturbation, though there is some social class variation in the early onset of heterosexual contacts to orgasm. These sexual experiences occur nearly universally in situations of secrecy, with their most public affirmation in the context of male peers, the secret society of the male alliance.

What are the most important differences in the erotic lives of teenage girls and boys, in your experience?
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Mar. 13th, 2005 @ 07:01 am Ask me what I learned last week in Morocco, and how it relates to Psych 214/314?
Current Music: Oh Mercy: "Most of the Time"
Imagine that you are trying to understand some aspect of life for youth in an Arab/Muslim society and that you have an opportunity to ask your age mates there which films and other media best seem to them to illustrate important themes or problems or aspirations of their own culture. You have three tools at your disposal:

• a survey instrument that lets you agree on topics to be investigated with all of those in the project both here and abroad and to easily collect and share data on the Web;
• a threaded discussion tool that lets you easily respond to questions posed by your instructors and each other regarding your use of popular media; and
• both text and audio chat tools allowing you to easily engage in real-time discussion about details of a scene in a film, a particular couplet in the lyrics of a popular song, or special paragraph in a novel.

Now imagine that you are developing a 10 page final course project explaining in terms of the concepts of the psychology of adolescence you have learned about this semester, in which you discuss the role of popular media in today's youth in at least two different settings and advance your own informed opinion about how the psychology of adolescence needs to be revised or expanded to include these new effects.
What would someone from a very different culture, neighborhood, or PSU than yours need to know about you to understand your own tastes, what do you need to learn from them to understand theirs? Can you make yourselves understood and get the information you need with the tools described above? Do you want to? Then let's get started.

d2
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Mar. 2nd, 2005 @ 09:24 pm P214b: Midcourse review
With reference to tomorrow's P214 class, I need to
• remind them where "adolescence" came from, in the last century
• review why it was interesting to consider a very different cultural example -- Sidi Kacem Zawiya -- as we got our minds around the parameters of youth and "adolescence"
• summarize the last couple of glasses' discussion of "social class," and "race," in American youth culture today
• explain how the topics to be covered after break fit into the general scheme of things, and
• tell them what work is going to be expected of them between now and the end of the semester
Of what good is a theory of youth and adolescence? What more would we have to learn about the actual experience of young people in the world today to decide whether there is such a thing as a unified youthful experience having something to do with the concept of "adolescence" as described by 20th-century American psychology? What part of this new picture of youth in the early 21st century would you yourself like to paint? What can we learn from the diversity of PSU's in the class, as documented in my Live Journal? What particular populations would you yourself like to study in the last half of the class? Black/Latino/Asian neighborhoods in the United States? Someplace in the EU? Another Arab country (there seems to be something interesting going on in Lebanon, right now, and I know some people at the American University of Beirut with whom we might be in touch)?
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Feb. 28th, 2005 @ 07:24 pm The social class issue, in the Bi-Co, now
I've been thinking a lot about the "Rhoads Halloween Party Incident" of Fall, 2003.
What do you all know about it? What happened? Why did it happen? What did it mean? How do you feel about it?
What does this have to do with Psychology 214? With social class?
d2
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Feb. 23rd, 2005 @ 07:44 pm Fun things to do for P214 (before April 29)
Current Mood: quizzical
Current Music: "The Babysitter's Here"
Found this in my diary for February eighth. It may of some help as decide how to spend our time after Break:

  • Add a few new accounts to the NPR "Flirting" piece.
  • Make up a "Film Preference Scale" to major the amount of "formal operations" involved in appreciation of various movies.
  • Collect some blog entries and/or some IM conversations from kids of different ages and social backgrounds, code them for content, and try to explain the differences.
  • Find blogs with autobiographical content illustrating how "adolescents" somewhere outside the USA are experiencing their youth.
  • Get into a discussion of the "veil" with some Muslim youth, on the Web and note any significant differences in how they understand and resolve this issue.
  • Write and defend a new drug policy for the United States based on what you now know about "adolescence."
  • Find half a dozen folks who all identify the same music as a favorite on their facebook profile, interview them (email's fine) concerning the particular lyrics and sounds they've liked best, and summarize your findings in light of our discussions (forthcoming) of new media and youth.
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    Feb. 17th, 2005 @ 07:13 am The Psych 314i survey
    My young colleagues in the Adolescence lab are about to complete their first survey on youthful experiences and attitudes. We're looking for volunteers willing to take 8-12 minutes to complete a questionnaire linked here. Help us out? Early returns will begin to be analyzed by the lab class on Monday, February 21.
    Questions/concerns about the survey?
    If you took it:
  • What important aspects of your own personality are untapped by these survey questions (e.g., the other important aspects of your life, the experiences that really define you, the stories you never tell anyone)?
  • How could one learn more about you in relation to the topics addressed by our survey through study of your presence on blogs, web discussions, IM, role-playing games, etc?
  • How would you describe yourself to yourself?

    d2
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    Feb. 14th, 2005 @ 07:02 pm Memes and PSUs
    Current Mood: recumbent
    Current Music: Paxton: When Princes Meet
    P214, Let's learn to use the term "meme":

    A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

    What "units of cultural information" were ambient in your PSU? That is, what was being asked of you at "Hakima's" or "Abdelaziz's" age, in your 'hood?

    God and the Devil are in the details, and little things about how gender and power and desire are negotiated in the neighborhoods that produced us may be revealing of larger cultural issues. For youn Noura, it seemed to have a lot to do with voyeurism in the bath and bedroom, and anxiety about the intentions of grown men.

    How about we each write a couple pages of description of ourPSUs/neighboroods? How did each shape significant moments of our coming of age?

    Let's consider sexuality, for example. As we discussed our draft survey last week, the lab class seemed to feel we could get away with asking "How old were you when you had your first sexual experience?" They also seem to feel that we'd have little idea in what that "sexual experience" consisted. On the other hand I think the class agreed with my intuition that it would be awkward to ask people to respond to a detailed question, or to complete a checklist. What if we simply asked "Please describe that experience briefly, if you wish." Those data would be a nonrandom sample, of course, since many folks will feel sensitive about divulging such information -- and there may be reason to doubt the motives of some of those who are most forthcoming -- but it will surely be of interest to describe and discuss the kinds of experiences that are described. It's not unreasonable that we could develop a simple typology and compare those who fall in the different types on the basis of our other quantitative measures.

    Oh, and "Happy Valentine's Day"? What was that about, when we were very young?

    d2
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    Feb. 9th, 2005 @ 08:34 pm "Thirteen"
    Current Mood: old-feeling
    I'd seen this a couple of years ago, and I got it again from NetFlix with my Psychology of Adolescence class in mind. Last night I tried to watch it:

    Now, about 13 …
    8:21 PM: Yes, this will be interesting, and I could invite students to compare this with MSCL. I think they may take to the blog movie review project.
    8:46 PM: I hate the first two minutes of “Thirteen.” I’d have to start showing it after that. It’s so scary, the hitting...
    9:48 PM: Had all I can stand of “Thirteen,” as Evan Rachel Wood gets ready to cut herself.

    The contrast between the Evie/Tracy and the Raeanne/Angela relationships is worth making, and there are interesting mother-daugher issues in both. But the edginess of Catherine Hardwicke's direction of Nikki Reed's script (Reed was 13 when she wrote it) is hard to bear, unsettling.
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    Feb. 7th, 2005 @ 10:17 pm My So-Called Life
    The first two DVDs of the 1994 TV hit "My So-Called Life" are on reserve.
    This show meant a lot to me, while it was airing back in 1994, and I guess it still does. The writing's very good, thanks to Winnie Holzman, and some of the acting is stunning.
    Among the issues raised for me:
  • mother-daughter and negotiations, girlfriends (see Atwood's Cat's Eye on "Daughers")
  • some tender consideration of young love
  • complex negotiations and betrayals
  • a memorable moment in English class
  • a letter and its consequences
    Were we ever so innocent?
    Who/what moves you here? How true are these scenes to your experience?
    What sense can you make of adolescence so described? Is this kind of adolescence inevitable? Adaptive, in terms of adult roles?
    Could you do voice-overs for Ricky, or for Sharon? Brian?
    What film moments do you like better than these? Why?
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    Jan. 29th, 2005 @ 01:42 pm Halfaouine: A Boy of the Terraces
    Please try to see the film Halfaouine (the Arabic title translates "Bird of the Roof") before class on Tuesday, February 1. There is a videotape on reserve at Magill library, and I hope that by Monday or Tuesday there will also be a DVD. You will want to have seen the film when you write your first essay, due by class time February 8. The half-dozen of us who saw the film on Friday had a brief but, I think, interesting discussion. There were questions about the way Noura’s treatment by his mother and female relatives on the one hand and his male cousins and the adult male merchants in the neighborhood on the other both stimulated his erotic interest and frightened and confused him about the implications of adult heterosexuality. What aspects of the film's portrayal of gender relations, masculinity, and femininity were most intriguing/perplexing/attractive/repellent to you? Key elements of Noura's experience seem to be portrayed as fantasy, and dream, or hallucination. What is it that so frightens him? What is the role of his little brother is circumcision in the context of the film? What is suggested about the contrast between the attractive divorced aunt and the unattractive unwed one? How does the film want us to react to the young women on the street as they are flirted with or ogled by males? There are several scenes and verbal references suggesting possession by evil spirits. What questions do you have about this? Are such issues completely alien to our own culture?
    P214 commenters: please add your first name and last initial if you have no Live Journal of your own.
    DougD
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    Jan. 26th, 2005 @ 02:48 pm Zawiya on my mind
    Now that you have read this introductory treatment of coming-of-age in Zawiya, Morocco, in the early 1980s let's ask ourselves how it fits with the notions of adolescence in the mostly American communities of the 1990s that shaped your own personality. Seen from this perspective, Zawiya differs in time, in socioeconomic status, in ethnicity language and religion, indeed in many of the obvious ways most of us would describe our own teen years. Despite this, the authors seem convinced that the young people of Zawiya can be understood on the basis of a series of short descriptions of their social setting, their family dynamics, their experiences with friends, and their issues regarding education, intimacy, career, and core values. If we could finesse issues of language (a Star Fleet Universal Translator, a babelfish) and basic customs regarding greetings, food, etc., would you expect to be comfortable on a Spring Break visit to one of the families of Zawiya? Why or why not? At this point, what else would you need to know to be ready for such a visit? What aspects of the picture offered of Zawiya and its people are now most perplexing or puzzling? In what ways do the concepts of your training to date in the social sciences -- psychology, history, sociology, economics -- seem helpful to you in understanding one or another aspect of the lives of these young people?

    On what specific topics would you feel you needed more discussion, more reading, or more experience to be comfortable either visiting Zawiya or writing about one of the people you have encountered in the pages of Adolescence in a Moroccan Town?
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    Nov. 25th, 2004 @ 08:08 am "True Colors"
    Current Mood: Thanksgiving, turkey-stuffing
    Current Music: Dylan (the old stuff)
    Last weekend at Stanford I watched the film "Cantina Crawl VIII."
    http://swvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Movies.List&category_select_id=3
    It's in quicktime format. I'd like to discuss it in class next Tuesday.

    Essay questions (just kidding): How close are these dancers' controlling humans to being there on the dance floor when they create these video clips? Is this kind of real-time interaction in VR about to become a lot more "real"? What technological advances will bring that on?

    d2
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    Nov. 22nd, 2004 @ 07:57 pm Back from Frisco
    Current Music: Ani DiFranco, "Fuel"
    Bought myself a couple of extra hours by getting an earlier MSP-PHL flght.

    I wonder what the class has been up to. Have they tried a MMORPG? Have they found anything to interest them in my Webster's column?
    Can they imagine having a real relationship with a virtual character?

    At the Middle East Studies Association meeting I saw some old friends who share an interest in Morocco, met some colleagues who may want to join Al-Musharaka, heard a thought-provoking panel on the anthropology of post-war Iraq (depressing).
    Got "Eternal Sunshine" from NetFlix to see again. Tomorrow night with S?

    So, what's new on my friends LJs?
    I guess I'd have been notified if any of them had commented on this blog.

    Other d2 blogs:
  • memex
  • class notes
  • al-musharaka
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    Nov. 17th, 2004 @ 11:07 pm Erotica and the Internet
    It's no secret that much of the information that whizzes about the Net is titillating to someone. I suspect much of the common activity of older children and young adults on-line has to do with sexy pictures and words. This seems a daunting kind of fiction to write in our public setting, but you may want to satisfy your curiosity about what erotic fiction is being published daily in cyberspace, as you think about how fiction is changing in an AIM world. You might start with the FAQ and the dated archive page at alt.sex.stories.moderated.
    Caveat lector!
    I would be interested in hearing from those of you who do browse this literature how you think the availability and the particular content of Net erotica is changing personality and social behavior.
    Freud thought the flavor of our adult sensual lives was set in the first several years of life. He had (IMHO) no real theory of personality change in adolescence and adulthood. He did think that having to work to find a "love object," a partner to our desire, made us grow up and helps keep us sane, as we repeatedly shape our wishes to what the real world will provide. What if our fantasies could be fulfilled, at little cost to us and none to anyone else? What would happen to our notions of morality? To our interest in and skill at maintaining our culture?
    See:
    Davis, D.A. (1997). A glossary of Freudian terminology.
    Davis, D.A. (n.d.) Notes on Harry Stack Sullivan.
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    Nov. 11th, 2004 @ 08:45 pm The practice "Big Five" personality inventory
    Current Mood: pedagogical
    is available at
    www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/blog_writing/wrpr115_04_5-50.html
    and you may view the raw data here. When there are ten responses I'll run some descriptive statistics and link them here.
    If you're impatient about your results, you can add every fifth item in the questionnaire to yield five totals:
  • Emotional Stability
  • Extraversion
  • Openness
  • Agreeableness
  • Conscientiousness
    The five factor personality measure is simply presented at www.personalityresearch.org/bigfive.html. The Costa & McCrae descriptions of the factors are the most widely used at present.
    Could this become a campus craze? Tell your friends.

    d2
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