2 Understanding the importance of thinking skills
Diagrams, mind-maps, tables, graphs, time lines, flow charts, sequence diagrams, decision trees: all can be used to organise thought. This unit will introduce you to a variety of thinking skills. Asking and answering questions is at the heart of high-quality thinking. Questions naturally arise from the desire to know and learn about things and may be the starting point for a journey of understanding.
6.9 Finishing
Effective communication is the key to a successful presentation. This unit will provide you with a systematic approach to develop the necessary skills. It is important to understand that effective presentation skills can be practised and learned. It is the content of your presentation, and the simple delivery of clear and reasoned arguments, which will help you to achieve your objectives.
Learning outcomes By the end of this study unit you will be able to: demonstrate an understanding of fundamental aspects of the theory and methodology underpinning phenomenological psychology; critique simplistic mind–body, individual–social and agency–structure dualisms and appreciate how the body, self and society are interconnected; describe how phenomenological psychologists conceptualise the body. Except fo Introduction The body has traditionally been treated as a biological object in psychology. However, some psychologists believe there is more to our bodies than that as they recognise that it is through the body that we relate to other people and the world about us. This unit explores one particular theoretical perspective on embodiment: the phenomenological psychological perspective. This is an approach to psychology that acknowledges the social nature of embodiment, placing embodied experience centre sta Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licencelicence. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: The content acknowledged below is Prop Further reading Styles, E.A. (1997) The Psychology of Attention, Hove, Psychology Press. A very readable textbook, which covers and extends the topics introduced in this unit. Pashler, H. (ed.) (1998) Attention, Hove, Psychology Press. An edited book, with contributors from North America and the UK. Topics are dealt with in rather more depth than in the Styles book. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see Author(s): 5.4 Summary of Section 5 Many familiar themes have re-emerged in this section, together with the recognition that attention is involved in the assembly of remembered material as well as of current perceptions. Attention is associated with the generation of perceptual objects. In addition to being an essential part of external stimulus processing, attention influences remembered experiences. ERP data show that cortical signals derived from una 5.3 Event-related potentials When a sense organ (eye, ear, etc.) receives a stimulus, the event eventually causes neurons to ‘fire’ (i.e. produce electrical discharges) in the receiving area of the brain. The information is sent on from these first sites to other brain areas. With appropriate apparatus and techniques it is possible to record the electrical signals, using electrodes attached to the scalp. The electrical potentials recorded are called event-related potentials (ERPs), since they dependably f 5.1 Introduction Modern techniques for revealing where and when different parts of the brain become active have recently provided a window on the processes of attention. For example, one of these brain-scanning techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has been used to show the behaviour of an area of the brain that responds to speech. It turns out also to become activated in a person viewing lips making speech movements in the absence of sound. For this to happen there must be connecti 4.4 Summary of Section 4 We have seen that attentive processes will ‘work hard’ to unite information into a coherent whole. Even spatially separate visual and auditory stimuli can be joined if they appear to be synchronous (the ventriloquism effect). When stimuli are not synchronous the system attempts to order the segments of the stimuli independently, resulting in distraction and lost information. It is a ‘bottleneck’ in t 4.1 Introduction The above account of having attention taken away from the intended target reminds us that, while it may be advantageous from a survival point of view to have attention captured by novel events, these events are actually distractions from the current object of attention. Those who have to work in open-plan offices, or try to study while others watch TV, will know how distracting extraneous material can be. Some try to escape by wearing headphones, hoping that music will be less distracting, bu 3.5 Summary of Section 3 When consciously perceiving complex material, such as when looking for a particular letter of a particular colour: Perception requires attention. The attention has to be focused upon one item at a time, thus … processing is serial. Some parallel processing may take place, but… it is detected indirectly, such as by the influence of one word upon another. 3.1 Introduction The binding of features emerges as being a very significant process when displays are brief, because there is so little time in which to unite them. With normal viewing, such as when you examine the letters and words on this page, it is not obvious to introspection that binding is taking place. However, if, as explained above, it is a necessary precursor to conscious awareness, the process must also occur when we examine long-lived visual displays. Researchers have attempted to demonstrate th 2.6 Summary of Section 2 The results of the visual attention experiments we have considered can be interpreted as follows. Attention can be directed selectively towards different areas of the visual field, without the need to re-focus. The inability to report much detail from brief, masked visual displays appears to be linked to the need to assemble the various information components. The visual information is captured in parallel, but assemb 2.5 Masking and attention Before I summarise the material in this section, and we move on to consider attentional processes with clearly-seen displays, it would be appropriate to consider the relevance of the masking studies to the issue of attention. We began the whole subject by enquiring about the fate of material which was, in principle, available for processing, but happened not to be at the focus of attention. Somehow we have moved into a different enquiry, concerning the fate of material that a participant was Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: understand different cognitive psychological aproaches used to examine such forms of attention as attention to regions of space, attention to objects and attention for action; summarise the different cognitive psychological approaches undera fairly abstract definition of the term; know how ideas about attention have changed and diversified over the last fifty years and how well they have stood up to ex Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence
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Section 1.3 Case Study: extracted from Faludy, T. and Faludy, A. (1996) A Little Edge of Darkness, Jessi Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: Non-Violent Communication Acknowledgements The content of this unit was developed by Volker Patent, Faculty of Social Science at the Open University. The work was funded by the Higher Education Academy and the content is released under the Creative Commons Licence. The Open University gratefully acknowledges the Higher Education Academy (HEA) Psychology Network for its financial support to the development of SPSS which forms part of the Op
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This speech is about what non-violent communication is and how it works. This was done after the massacre in Tucson and relates to that event, but the methods can be used by any teacher to help diffuse hostility and bring all views into the picture. It is 3:30 minutes long.
