I'm a research nerd.
Wanna learn what a nerd I am? As you may know, I'm in a doctoral progam in counseling psychology. I need to write a master's thesis as well as a doctoral dissertation. I've been trying to come up with a really cool thesis idea so that I don't get bored with it as soon as I start researching it. I was originally thinking of doing something with people who are physically sick and how positive thinking or optimism helps them recover. But that seems really complicated and too BIG of an idea for me to actually do. Would I go to a hospital and find sick people, ask them how optimistic they are and then wait and see how long it takes them to get better/die?
Another thing that's interesting to me is Evolutionary Psychology. That's basicaly the idea that everything we do is in order for us to survive and pass on our genes. For example, if you look at something like murder, I think there is a much higher rate of parents murdering step-children than their own children because they (unknowingly) want their own genes to survive. Its not as basic as that, but i think its cool. Anyways! I was looking around on PsychInfo (the search engine) and found a really interesting article: "Does women's hair signal reproductive potential?" Isn't that cool??? What they did was approach random women on the street, ask them if they were in a relationship, about their health, age, and then looked at the length and quality of their hair. They found that women with "better" hair seemed like they would have better reproductive potential, so people would want to date them! Isn't that crazy? Do you think its true? But, with evolutionary psych, you get in to all sorts of questions like, what about seemingly "maladaptive" things like being attracted to people with no hair or ugly hair, and homosexuality isn't taken into account at all. I just really think its interesting to think that we do things based on really really really old evolutionary things deep inside. Crazy.
Another thing that's interesting to me is Evolutionary Psychology. That's basicaly the idea that everything we do is in order for us to survive and pass on our genes. For example, if you look at something like murder, I think there is a much higher rate of parents murdering step-children than their own children because they (unknowingly) want their own genes to survive. Its not as basic as that, but i think its cool. Anyways! I was looking around on PsychInfo (the search engine) and found a really interesting article: "Does women's hair signal reproductive potential?" Isn't that cool??? What they did was approach random women on the street, ask them if they were in a relationship, about their health, age, and then looked at the length and quality of their hair. They found that women with "better" hair seemed like they would have better reproductive potential, so people would want to date them! Isn't that crazy? Do you think its true? But, with evolutionary psych, you get in to all sorts of questions like, what about seemingly "maladaptive" things like being attracted to people with no hair or ugly hair, and homosexuality isn't taken into account at all. I just really think its interesting to think that we do things based on really really really old evolutionary things deep inside. Crazy.