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PSYCHOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS IN REALITY

I.

EMOTION AND CULTURE

It has been found that people in different cultures can identify the six basic
emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. These types
of emotions are independent from culture and language. Therefore, the
physiological indicators of emotion are similar in people from different
cultures.
However, in everyday life, information from people's environments
influences their understanding of what a facial expression means. People
from different cultural backgrounds allocate their attention very differently .
This means that different cultures may interpret the same social context in
very different ways.
For example:
In the United States, male friends usually do not embrace and kiss
each other as a form of greeting. Such behavior would make most
American men uncomfortable or even angry. In many European
countries, however, acquaintances normally embrace and kiss each
other on both cheeks, and avoiding this greeting would seem
unfriendly.
In some Asian cultures, it is appropriate for people who attend a
funeral to show extreme grief. The relatives of the deceased mourn
with loud harrowing cries of anguish as they follow the coffin to the
cemetery. A funeral without cries is regarded disrespectful to the dead.
In others, it is appropriate to appear stoic. Giving loud cry is seen
impolite to the dead and the bereaved family.
In conclusion, culture dictates how positive and negative emotions should be

experienced and combined, and may also guide how people choose to
regulate their emotions which ultimately influences an individual's
emotional experience.
II.

MEMORY DISTORTION SOURCE AMNESIA

Memories arent exact records of events. Instead, memories are

reconstructedinmanydifferentwaysaftereventshappen,whichmeansthey
canbedistortedbyseveralfactors.Amongall,anotablefactorissource
amnesia.

After we encode memories, the brain does not simply gather and
stockpile information as a computer. Facts are stored first in the
hippocampus. But the information does not rest there. Every time we
recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is
also reprocessed. Because of this continuous reconstruction as well as
reproduction, the frailest parts of a memory is its source. That explains
why people often dont accurately remember the origin of information.
For example:
After witnessing a car crash on the freeway, Minh later tells friends
many details about what he saw. It turns out, however, that there is no
way he could have actually seen some of the details he described and
that he is, in fact, just reporting details he heard on TV about the
accident. He isnt deliberately lying. He just may not be able to
remember where all the different pieces of information came from.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can lead people to forget

whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a
disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
With time, this misremembering gets worse. A false statement from an
unreliable source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during
the months it takes to reprocess memories.
Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way
our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. As a result, we

tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount
statements that contradict it.
III.

PERCEPTUAL CONSTANCY

An important ability that helps people make sense of the world is perceptual
constancy. Perceptual constancy is the ability to recognize that an object
remains the same even when it produces different images on the retina.
For example:
When a man watches his wife walk away from him, her image on his
retina gets smaller and smaller, but he doesnt assume shes shrinking.
When a woman holds a book in front of her face, its image is a
rectangle.However,whensheputsitdownonthetable,itsimageisa
trapezoid.Yetsheknowsitsthesamebook.
Eventhoughtheimageofthewifeandthebookchangesinsizeandshape,
you have enough experiences with them to know that their actual size
remainsconstant.Youareabletoperceivethesizeasstableeventhoughthe
featurescontinuallychangeinyourfieldofvision.Itisperceptualconstancy
thatallowsyoutoidentifyobjectsunderdifferentconditions,whichappear
tobeconsideredwhenyoumentallyreconstructimagesoftheseobjects.
Inconclusion,perceptualconstancydescribesthefactthat,despitevariable
sensory input, perceptual representations typically correspond to stable
propertiesofobjects.Thatis, the object appears to remain the same color,
size and shape despite changes in the illumination condition, perspective and
the relative distance.