Psychology Paper

Understanding Psychology and its Relation in my Life

Taking psychology this quarter has really opened my mind up about what psychology is and how it impacts everyone’s life. It has given me an understanding on the behavior and mental processes that a person uses to think and act about an event or just in general. I never realized exactly how much psychology is present in everyone. It explains certain behaviors, thought processes, and reasons people act the way they do. From all the concepts I could have used I feel more related to three in general: Memory, Motivation, and Stress Management. The process of each of these concepts will help me understand and use that knowledge to try to improve when it comes to my life and my career.

Memory is something we use every day to do even the smallest tasks and I have noticed that it is one of the things I have the most trouble with. Everyone tells me how awful my memory is. You can imagine how interested I was to find out how to improve my memory and have some understanding about what keeps me from being able to remember certain things. The first step of memory is encoding. This breaks down the information into a process that our mind understands. After the memories are encoded they are stored and then retrieved. You have to use recall and recognition to retrieve the information and this is where I think I have trouble with. In my job now I use my short term memory to remember things such as account numbers and customers in order to key in their information before forgetting. Learning about the memory has made me conclude that I forget due to the decaying theory or interference. Decaying is just forgetting things over time just like things fading. Interference is when the memories are impaired by other information taking its place in the brain. I did learn, however, that I can try to recall specific things by relating it to something I am familiar with or by putting the information in context and organizing the...