Personality and Skinner's Behaviorism

This post is meant as a sequel to the previous post, B.F. Skinner and Radical Behaviorism. Here I continue exploring the thought of B.F. Skinner and how it relates to modern psychology. I highly recommend reading the previous post before this one. 

We all have a unique personality, and many have a desire to understand their personality. This is evident due to the abundance of personality tests available on the internet, but is personality something that can be quantified and explained scientifically? The answer is a resounding yes, but without understanding how actual personality psychologists go about doing this, it may not be very clear.

The first question concerning personality is, what is it? Personality is generally agreed to be a consistent pattern of tendencies to behave in certain ways, to feel certain a way, and to think a certain way. A trait is a particular facet of personality. In 1931 psychologist Gordon Allport published a landmark paper titled '"What is a Trait of Personality?" In it, he outlined some of the features of what a personality trait is. To summarize, a trait is not just a label for a pattern of behavior set by the history of situations an individual has been in, but refers to something real in an individual. Traits then are not merely habits, but are more general. Traits also determine behavior. Allport wrote that, "It is not the stimulus that is the crucial determinant in behavior that expresses personality; it is the trait itself that is decisive. Once formed a trait seems to have the capacity of directing response to stimuli into characteristic channels."¹

 B.F. Skinner himself wrote about traits, stating that "A common and unchanging property of the behavior of all members of a species would not usefully be referred to as a trait at all. It is only because people differ from moment to moment or from person to person that trait-names arise."²  Skinner even acknowledged the validity of studying individual differences, writing that "Traits which can be reduced to inventories of behavior, to the relative strengths of parts of a repertoire, or to the speed with which behavioral processes take place have acceptable scientific dimensions, and their relation to a functional analysis is clear."³

Skinner also wrote of personality tests that they are, "a convenient opportunity to observe behavior—to survey or sample our dependent variable. The score may be used to predict some aspect of the larger universe of behavior from which the test is drawn. Thus a test of mechanical ability, or intelligence, or extroversion may enable us to predict success or failure in a job in which these traits are important."⁴

So far, it sounds like Skinner would accept the modern trait theorist approach, but there are a few key differences in his view on traits and that of the trait theorists. Skinner noted that we use traits to describe behavior. Taking the legend of Narcissus for example, he wrote, "we invent the adjective 'narcissistic,' and then the noun 'narcissism'; and finally we assert that the thing presumably referred to by the noun is the cause of the behavior with which we began."⁵

So, what then is a trait? Is it a description of a consistent patterns of behavior as Skinner holds, or is it something with causal force as Allport maintains? Calling a trait a particular determinant of consistent patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling really only describes the effects of whatever it is that determines behavior. Everyone has a unique brain which is built by their genetic inheritance and life experiences. The brain is what thinks, feels, and makes decisions which results in behavior. If someone has a genetic predisposition for anxiety and depression, they will likely test very high in neuroticism on a scale such as the Big Five. At the same time someone may have no genetic predisposition to depression, but instead may have had traumatic life experiences causing the epigenetic regulation of genes which regulate the production of neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin to malfunction. In one case, the problem is in the genes. In the other, in the environment. In both cases the end result is a high level of neuroticism. It can be difficult to identify a trait with a specific aspect of an individual's neuroanatomy, but not impossible. Skinner was uninterested in wasting too much time sorting out details when variables external to an individual are easily available for analysis.

Skinner wrote that, "The process of looking inside the organism for an explanation of behavior has tended to obscure the variables which are immediately available for a scientific analysis. These variables lie outside the organism,  in its immediate environment and  in its environmental history."⁶ This describes the situationist perspective, although my many situationists put more emphasis on current demands of a situation rather than the history of reinforcment. The other perspective is the person perspective, that it is the unique qualities of an individuality which more strongly determine behavior. This particular incarnation of the nature-nurture dispute is known as the person situation debate.⁷

So, which is it? Regardless of an individual's unique characteristics, a sufficiently powerful environment may change his or her behavior to act in ways which are unusual. Perhaps one of the more dramatic examples in the history of psychology is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Phillip Zimbardo in 1971. In the experiment, volunteers played the role of prisoners or guards, and in a matter of a couple of days, the individuals had slipped into the guard or prisoner roles. Even though the participants could withdraw at any time, most did not even consider this. There was no reason to infer this would happen, as each participant had no history of mental illness, no criminal record, and had no anomalous results on the personality tests. Yet, if one reads Phillip Zimbardo's account of the experiment in The Lucifer Effect, one notices that each individual morphed into their altered personality at a different rate. Although Zimbardo seems to consider the situation the more powerful determinant of behavior in the book, the fact that each individual changed at different rates seems to confirm the idea that our individual characteristics shape our behavior. Of course you can overcome personality with enough time, but the fact that each individual is different causes that to happen at different rates and this indicates that outside of unusual circumstances such as the prison experiment, our unique characteristics strongly shape our behavior. In a sense the debate, much like the nature-nurture debate in general, is a false dichotomy because the environment and the individual interact in complex and varying ways, such as the effects the environment can have on the expression of genes.⁸ ⁹

The tools of behaviorism are immensely useful for understanding behavior, and have had many practical applications in therapy. Speech therapy techniques based on B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior have helped many autistic children learn to express themselves, while behavioral modification approaches based on the principles of operant conditioning have helped many people with behavioral disorders learn to get along in life. ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² However, acknowledging each individual's uniqueness can allow for better designed schedules of reinforcement in such therapeutic settings. In addition, understanding personality not to be some metaphysical entity or property in some supposed mental inner world, but rather as a description of neurological characteristics which drive the consistent patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling, allows for a deeper understanding of every person's uniqueness.

References:

¹ Allport, G. W. (1931). What is a trait of personality? The Jorunal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 25(4), 368-372.
² Science and Human Behavior, pg 195
³ Science and Human Behavior, pg 197
⁴ Science and Human Behavior, pg 199
⁵ Science and Human Behavior, pg 202
⁶ Science and Human Behavior, pg 31
⁷ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-situation_debate
⁸ Beach, R., Brody, G. H., Lei, M. K., Simons, R. L., Philibert, R. A., Gibbons, F. X., et al. (2013). Impact of Child Sex Abuse on Adult Psychopathology: A Genetically and Epigenetically Informed Investigation. Journal of Family Psychology, 27(1), 3-11.
⁹ Champagne, F. A., & Rissman, E. F. (2011). Behavioral Epigenetics: A new frontier in the study of hormones and behavior. Hormones and Behavior, 59, 277-278.
¹⁰ https://lighthouseautismcenter.com/what-is-verbal-behavior-therapy/
¹¹ http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/verbal-behavior-therapy
¹² http://www.spectrum-behavioral.com/WhitePapers/behavioraltherapy.aspx

Appendix:


HEXACO (Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openess to experience)

Big Five/OCEAN (Openess, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) Version 1 ; Version 2

Avoid typological tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Those tests are designed via an approach called typology which posits that there are a fixed number of personality types. The MBTI for instance posists 16 different types of personality.  Trait tests such as the ones listed above are much more precise and flexible. For example, The MBTI might say you are extraverted, but not how extraverted. In the end it fails to be as informative.  

B.F. Skinner and Radical Behaviorism

There is much incorrect information about B.F. Skinner out there on the web, and even sometimes in psychology classrooms. In my previous blog, I gave a quick overview of his views, called radical behaviorism. Some of the things I said about B.F. Skinner are not quite accurate, and although I am not a radical behaviorist, it is only right that I set the record straight. Skinner has been the subject of much criticism, including Noam Chomsky's famous review of Verbal Behavior which helped launch cognitive psychology and Steven Pinker who dismisses radical behaviorism as a "blank slate" philosophy. He has also been heavily criticized by Daniel Dennett as a "greedy reductionist" who desired to reduce everything about human behavior to conditioning (for the record, Dan Dennett is a reductionist but uses the term greedy reductionism to describe the tendency of some to try and oversimplify a phenomenon). To what extent are these claims true?

It is true that B.F. Skinner did not consider emotions as something necessary for explaining behavior. Emotions are merely a byproduct of conditioning, and in order to understand the cause of someone's seemingly emotional behavior what we really must understand are the contingencies which led to the behavior in a situation. This was most eloquently put when he wrote that:

 As long as we conceive of the problem of emotion as one of inner states, we are not likely to advance a practical technology. It does not help in the solution of a practical problem to be told that some feature of a man's behavior is due to frustration or anxiety; we also need to be told how the frustration or anxiety has been induced and how it may be altered.¹

Skinner did concede that sometimes emotion could be used as an explanation for something, with the example he gave being the development of ulcers under stress. He wrote that:

A chronic emotional condition sometimes leads to certain forms of illness. For example, a man whose business is failing may be subject to a long series of circumstances which generate a chronic condition of frustration or anxiety. Part of the total emotion may be reflex responses in the alimentary tract, as a result of which the man may become physically ill—he may develop ulcers, for example. Here it is legitimate to attribute the illness to an "emotion" as a cause, because we define the emotion as a pattern of behavior. We might in the same way attribute a cracked skull to emotion if the injury was suffered as the result of reckless behavior. But this is very different from arguing that emotional behavior is due to an emotion. A man does not neglect his business because of anxiety or worry.²

This is actually a very important point that he makes about the scientific analysis of emotions. To what does the term "emotion" actually refer? In order to study anything, an operational definition must be provided for the abstract concept. Skinner is defining emotion as the byproduct of the stimulus-response contingencies which control behavior. So, when Skinner stated that ,"We don't say that the human subject gambles to punish himself as the Freudians might say or gambles because it feels exciting when he does so, nothing of the sort, people gamble because of the schedule of reinforcement that follows³," he did not mean that the gambler does not feel excitement from the gambling, but rather that the excitement is a byproduct of the reinforcement.

It may sound strange, but operational definitions can be rather specific. A neuroscientist might operationally define emotions as certain neurochemical and physiological states. Skinner conceived of psychology as being a separate science from neuroscience however, not to mention that in his life time advanced methods for studying the brain such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging had not yet been developed. He optimistically wrote that, "Eventually a science of the nervous system based upon direct observation rather than inference will describe the neural states and events which immediately precede instances of behavior.⁴"

So, it seems that Skinner's lack of much use for neuroscience stemmed more from the fact that it was so new as to not offer much insight about behavior, while the methods of behavioral analysis could show what environmental factors interact with whatever mediating neural processes there which result in behavior. However, those neurological facts are mere details. What is important are those environmental factors. He wrote that, "we do not have and may never have this sort of neurological information at the moment it is needed in order to predict a specific instance of behavior.⁵" He also praised Ivan Pavlov, saying that his greatest "achievement was the discovery, not of neural processes, but of important quantitative relations which permit us, regardless of neurological hypotheses, to give a direct account of behavior in the field of the conditioned reflex.⁶" Skinner was a practical man who wanted to understand how behavior originates and how it could be changed without having to wait around for the brain to be understood in order to do so.

Skinner has also sometimes been accused of ignoring the rest of biology and has been strongly associated with the concept of "the blank slate." Skinner was the subject of much criticism by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate (which entirely misrepresents behaviorism and mostly serves to perpetuate myths about behaviorism; an analysis of this can be read here) for this reason. Skinner did not believe that we (or animals for that matter) lacked innate behaviors. One example is when Skinner referred to innate navigational instincts in animals; "But the journey of the eel from the Nile River to the Sargasso Sea, a quarter of the way around the earth, is a much more complex example of innate behavior and is much harder to explain in "cognitive" terms.⁷" Nor did Skinner deny how powerful evolution was in shaping our behavior, stating that "Anyone who has seen a slip of a plant grow into a complete plant will have no difficulty in accepting the role of natural selection in the origin of behavior, no matter how complex.⁸"  Skinner also stated from observing the offspring of rats who were good at navigating mazes being particularly talented at maze navigation, "from the observed facts alone, it was impossible to tell whether the difference was due to operant conditioning, following some such procedure as just described, or whether it was genetic.⁹" It is true that Skinner preferred explaining things in terms of operant learning due to the fact that such hypotheses are more readily testable. He stated that "Contingencies of reinforcement which shape ontogenic behavior can be arranged and studied in the laboratory. Most of the contingencies of survival responsible for phylogenic behavior observed in the field are merely inferred.¹⁰"

It is likely that Skinner would be critical of the modern field of evolutionary psychology were he currently alive, but mostly because of its strong association with computational theories in cognitive psychology. There is no clash between the study of operant conditioning and other forms of stimulus learning and sociobiological studies of phylogenetic behavior.

So, if Radical Behaviorism is not the dogmatic embrace of the blank slate, the attempt to reduce all human behavior to operant conditioning, or the denial of emotions, then what is it? Radical behaviorism is simply the systematic attempt to explain all behavior with the principles of conditioning that can be explained this way without using neurological or mentalistic terms. Radical behaviorism differs from the methodological behaviorism of John Watson because Watson's behaviorism treated the mind as an entity unreachable to science. Implicit in this is dualism, the thesis that the mind is fundamentally of a different substance and class of existence of the body, whereas Skinner was a materialist and thought that what we call thinking cannot be something unreachable to science. Skinner goes into detail about the differences between his and Watson's behaviorism in About Behaviorism. Skinner also differs from the proto-cognitivism of Edward Tolman, or the "drive theories" of Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence in that these forms of behaviorism posited hypothetical mediating structures that shaped behavior, whereas Radical Behaviorism sought to avoid them and focus only on the ways the environment shaped the behavior.

from other applications of behaviorist methods in that it is very strict about not referring to mentalistic terms, unlike the theories of other behaviorists like Clark Spence and Kenneth Hull, or the early cognitive theories of Edward Tolman. It also was unconcerned with neurology, unlike the behaviorist and neuroscientist Karl Lashley. In truth, radical behaviorism is not all that radical, but is just a pragmatic program for analyzing behavior without having to wait around for the nervous system to be figured out.

In conclusion, many of the claims about B.F. Skinner are exaggerated or a inaccurate. This is true for some of the statements in the previous blog post. It has been shown that Skinner did not deny the existence of emotions, innate or "phylogenic" behavior, or that the brain was important for the execution of behavior. Although it is impossible to know for sure, if Skinner were alive today, it is possible that he would have ended up embracing neuroscience, while being an active critic of the computational theory of mind and concepts such as the language of thought associated with it. He might even go so far as to welcome the lines of research known as embodied and embodied cognitive science (while likely rejecting the cognitive label).


Postscript note:

While modern psychology has moved past this paradigm, there is much to be learned from the approach that seems to have been forgotten. One thing that is not a myth is that it IS true that he thought the principles of operant conditioning could be used to create a modern utopia, which was expressed in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. At root, the book defends the idea that the principles of conditioning are so powerful that in order to make the world a better place you cannot merely express ideas in an eloquent speech to "change the minds and hearts of men and women rather than the world in which they live. ¹¹" Perhaps he does take it to a bit of an absurd extreme, but hey, no one is perfect. The biggest flaw in Skinner's approach is that it seems ill equipped to explain phenomena of a more cognitive nature, such as hallucinations for Schizophrenics. While the psychiatric models based on behaviorism for therapy are extremely effective, there's nothing you can do to condition away hallucinating pink elephants. It is only through studying neuroscience that we will learn the causes of such problems and learn ways to treat them, but given what I presented in this blog, I don't think Skinner would necessarily disagree. A neuroscientific understanding of behavior and "the mind" is a natural step forward from behaviorism that avoids the mentalism that Skinner critiqued. Just as well, while I share some of Skinner's concerns about cognitive psychology, I would not go so far as to say that “Cognitive science is the creation science of psychology.¹²" Traditional cognitive psychology treats mental functions as software which can be studied separately from the hardware of the brain, but as Patricia Churchland has put it, "The hardware-software distinction as applied to the brain is dualism in yet another disguise.¹³" Of course, many cognitive psychologists are not dualists, but nevertheless, it is doubtful that such methodological dualism will be helpful in the long run as, "the respective sciences of behavior and physiology will move forward most rapidly if their domains are correctly defined and analyzed.¹⁴" The black box has been opened, and there's no turning back now, but we must make sure our theories are truly scientific.

Bibliography and Notes:

¹ Science and Human Behavior, pg 167
²ibid, pg 168
³ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acDLluyl3tE
⁴ Science and Human Behavior, pg 28
⁵ ibid
⁶ ibid, pg 64
⁷  Skinner, B.F. (1984). The evolution of behavior. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of behavior, 41(2), 217-221.
⁸  ibid
⁹ Skinner, B. (1975). The shaping of phylogenic behavior. Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, 35, 409-415.
¹⁰ ibid
 ¹¹ Skinner, B. (1977). Why I am not a cognitive psychologist. Behaviorism, 5(2), 1-10.
¹² Skinner, B. (1990). Can psychology be a science of mind?. American Psychologist, 45(11), 1206-1210.
¹³ Neurophilosophy, pg 408
¹⁴ Skinner, B. (1977). Why I am not a cognitive psychologist. Behaviorism, 5(2), 1-10

An update and a look back.

Hello all,

I'm almost done with my bachelor degree, which will be a bachelors in science with a major in experimental psychology and minor in philosophy. I am hoping to move onto graduate school to get a doctorate in neuroscience. I'm in my last full semester of undergrad school, and only need two classes in the summer and I am done. I wanted to take the time to look back on all that I have learned. I want to look at the things which have shaped my opinions, and walk my readers through my journey. This will be lengthy, but if you read my blog, you likely are used to long posts by now.

When I first got into psychology, I spent some time exploring the major perspectives in the field. At first, I was very fond of behaviorism as a methodology and to an extent, even the radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. I also was rather fond of evolutionary psychology. To me, even though evolutionary psychology referred to innate and internal states, it could be reconciled with a behavioristic point of view in that an "instinct" could be thought of as merely a predisposition to respond to certain discriminative stimuli in a particular way. In retrospect, such thinking made me most similar to the ideas of Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence.

For those not in the know, behaviorism is both a methodology and a perspective in psychology. It started in the 1910s with John B. Watson (who by the way was born not far from where I live) when he published an article titled "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It". It set forth a strict and rigorous methodology for psychology that focused only on the relationship between an organism and the environment. Watson argued that we cannot ever be in contact with another person's internal mental states, but we can figure out how a person or animal behaves. This point of view was in stark contrast to the psychoanalytic point of view popularized by Freud and Jung which focused on the mind. The psychoanalytic point of view also was not a scientific theory. That is, it was not in the business of finding things out about the mind, but rather, Freud conceived of it based on his patients and introspection about himself. Critics of Freudian psychology such as philosopher of science Karl Popper rightly point out that it is untestable. So, unlike psychoanalysis and introspective schools of psychology, the behaviorsit methodology was very consistent, strong, and worked wonderfully. This was known as methodological behaviorism. B.F. Skinner later formulated a philosophy of psychology known as radical behaviorism. It is called radical because it makes the startling assertion that there are no internal mediating states between the organism and the environment. That is, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and so forth, play no role in behavior. They have been eliminated. This will figure in later when I discuss the views of certain philosophers of mind. This was summarized best when B.F. Skinner stated, "We don't say that the human subject gambles to punish himself as the Freudians might say or gambles because it feels exciting when he does so, nothing of the sort, people gamble because of the schedule of reinforcement that follows." (this can be heard around 2:28 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acDLluyl3tE)

But back to my views. I wouldn't call myself a behaviorist anymore, although there are still psychologists in the field of applied behavioral analysis that would, but I owe a lot to my previous commitment to behaviorism. It equipped me with rigorous expectations for what a psychological theory should be, which keeps me from really preferring cognitivist models of thought. Behaviorism largely was overturned after the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 60s, so that by the 80s and 90s cognitivism had become the dominant approach to experimental psychology. The revolution occurred due to the influence of information theory and linguistics on psychology. The linguist Noam Chomsky argued strongly against Skinner's theory of language (I won't go into detail, but you can read of it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Psychology). To the cognitivists, the mind was conceived of as information processing. It was software which ran on the hardware of the brain. As such, psychology as a whole shifted from focusing on the relation between the organism and environment to conceiving of models of information processing which accurately describe and predict behavior. It is worth noting two things. First of all, most behaviorists were not radical behaviorists, and most even did not perfectly abstain from incorporating internal drives, states, etc, into their explanations (such as Hull and Spence as well as Edward Tolman, who was a precursor thinker to cognitivist theories). Secondly, as one might expect, B.F. Skinner rejected cognitivism as nonsense, writing that "cognitive science is the creation science of psychology."

Why might I not care for cognitivism? First of all, while I agree that thought is information processing, I do not conceive of it as being information processing in the sense of symbolic operations in a computer. The brain is giant meta-network of neural networks, each running in parallel to each other. So, when it comes to modeling cognition, I prefer theoretical models that mirror the architecture of the brain on a neural level. For this, connectionist models, particularly parallel distributed processing, come in handy. These simply model thought and memory as being the activation of various model neurons in a network. While still theoretical, at least they resemble the brain. Detailed information can be found here and here.

I also rather like the theory of embodied simulation. Traditional Chomskyian linguistics and cognitive psychology based on the symbolic computational theory of mind have long struggled to integrate semantics. One solution has been to abandon this strict computational approach which posits a "language of thought" and instead look at what the brain is doing when it is comprehending a sentence. As discussed in the book Louder than Words: How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin Bergen, it has been found that when the brain is comprehending language, it is simulating sentences. That is, if you were told "I was playing baseball", the brain would run a simulation of that person playing baseball. The theory has its limits since it likely cannot explain more abstract semantics such as the things being discussed here, but the evidence shows that "embodied simulation" is something that the brain does. Perhaps for more abstract semantics connectionist theories would be better able to explain it.

As I mentioned earlier, I want to go into the field of neuroscience. I want to understand how the brain carries out all those intermediate processes Skinner thought did not exist. The behaviorists conceived of the mind as a black box, but we now have wonderful technology such as fMRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging that let us see exactly where certain mental processes are happening. There are also advanced mathematical techniques that allow EEG data to be localized to certain parts of the brain. But that begs the question, is the mind really the same thing as the brain? I've explored this issue in a previous post, although I do not necessarily commit myself to functionalism anymore (mainly due to the limited conception of mental states as being the intermediate between stimulus and response; not all thought is in response to a stimulus and not all thought results in a response).  So, I will henceforth presume that the mind and brain are identical. This is the metaphysical position known as physicalism or materialism, that matter is all that exists. I want to touch on a particular brand of materialism known as eliminative materialism, or eliminativism for short. This is the viewpoint, largely defended by Patricia and Paul Churchland but also by Richard Rorty and Paul Feyrabend, that intentional states such as beliefs and desires do not exist. The idea is that once we have a complete understanding of neuroscience we might find that our "folk psychology" concepts of beliefs and desires and things like that may have no role in our neuropsychological explanations. This means that they will not reduce neatly down to certain brain states, but will be eliminated entirely. Sound familiar? It's because it's a redux of radical behaviorism. This time, instead of focusing on the relationship between the organism and the environment (known as a stimulus response model) it focuses on the brain. This point of view has been most clearly and fully expressed in the book Neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland. Another motivation for her advocating eliminativism is that she criticizes the symbolic computational theory of mind, which she calls functionalist psychology in the book, which would posit that a belief might be represented in the brain as a sentence in a symbolic language of thought. She and I both reject the language of thought hypothesis and the computational approach to psychology, and as it happens, she is a supporter of connectionism. Hence, if sentential representations of beliefs do not exist, perhaps they do not at all. However, I cannot really say that I am an eliminativist, even though she and I have much in common and she is one of my favorite philosophers of mind, mostly for the reason that she is actively involved in neuroscience. Just because we cannot explain how a belief or intention exists in the brain now doesn't mean we never will. We likely just do not have a clear definition compatible with modern neuroscience yet. Neuroscience is young, so making long term predictions like beliefs and intentional states will be eliminated, seems a bit presumptuous to me.

I also am rather interested in behavioral genetics and neuro-epigenetics. One thing outside of cognitive topics that I am immensely interested in is personality. In fact, I am currently doing research in the field of personality psychology. I'm interested in what it is that makes people unique. The old nature vs. nurture debate is settled, we know it's both. But how does the environment interact with the mind-brain? How does the way the body is innately wired up by genes determine how it interacts with the environment? These are questions fundamental to the study of personality, so understanding not just how the brain works and behavioral principles but the cellular mechanisms which enable all of this to happen is also important.

Since I am listing all the things I am interested in, I may as well add that I am a voracious reader on the topic of evolution. Some of my favorite books which tie in evolutionary biology to behavioral studies are Moral Origins by Christopher Boehm and Good Natured by Frans De Waal. I think it is important to place all of this neuroscience and psychology in the grander perspective of evolution, which is after all how all of this came about in the first place.

In summary, as I look back on the last few years of my life, I can see how much I have learned. I first entered psychology after leaving my computer technology major, and came to it with an open mind and a lot of interest. I latched onto behaviorism  but have since moved onto a more neuroscientific perspective. I've studied philosophy of mind intensely  and often think about the relationship between philosophy of mind and neuropsychology. I'm interested in big questions, such as what the mind is and what personality is, which are things I could not have begun to think about in any serious detail just a couple of years ago. There is much yet to be learned, and new findings happen every day. Psychology has become ever more intertwined with neuroscience, cellular biology, and evolutionary biology. I hope for a successful future, and while I have to credit myself for my dedication, I have had wonderful professors who have given me guidance and encouragement and a wonderful education. I'm forever in their debt.

An Update

It has been a while since I have posted, mostly because I have been busy with schooling. This semester I am tutoring research methods as well as conducting research as a research assistant.


Stay tuned, I will update more when I have the time.