Nathen's Miraculous Escape

I wrote most of this between 2006 and 2011 at the University of Oregon, doing a BS in psychology and an M.Ed in couples and family therapy. That means a couple things. 1) A lot of it will be lingo-heavy and on topics that may not interest you. 2) It was written on a tight deadline during a very busy time, so I’m embarrassed of it to some degree. I did put a lot of thinking into this stuff, though, and spend a lot of my time on it, so I think it’s worth posting.

DSM-5 timeline criteria and age criteria outlines. I learned the DSM-IV-TR, so I made these outlines to study the newer criteria.

Susan Johnson’s “Markers” From The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: I created this outline of the categories of moments that therapists are to intervene in as a learning aid and a reference.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder Assessment Handout: This is a very short summary of the paper below. Based on the DSM-IV-TR.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder Assessment: I wrote this paper for my Child Diagnosis class. It gave me some interesting insights into ODD as well as ADHD. If I were you, I’d read my one-page summary first, unless you want to dive right in. Based on the DSM-IV-TR.

Outline of Carl Whitaker’s The Roots of Psychotherapy: A very rough, informal outline of that book.

Intervention at the Level of Systems versus Individuals: I wrote this for my family theory class. I enjoyed doing this thinking but I wish I’d had more time to do it.

Experiential Family Therapy: The Humanistic Family Therapy Model: I wrote this for my family therapy models class. I like this model.

A Critical Review of Edwards “The Effect on Self-Actualization of a Personal Growth Programme Based on Co-Counseling”: Also for my research methods in family therapy class. Co-counseling research conducted in apartheid South Africa?

A Critique of Heron’s “Re-evaluation Counseling: Personal Growth Through Mutual Aid” As a Report of Qualitative Research: This was for my research methods in family therapy class. Heron’s article is not really a qualitative study, but it was the closest I could find on the topic of co-counseling.

Personal Epistemology Essays: This will be a series of eight essays about what I think about truth, human beings, and change. I’m writing one a week for my fall 2009 term, for my Family Theory class.

The Relationship between Clarity of Enunciation and Idea Density: This was my research project for Psycholinguistics, my last undergraduate class. I had an idea that intelligence and enunciation might be correlated. They are not.

Differentiating the Effects of Social and Personal Power: This is my honors thesis. I designed an experiment, ran it on 224 intro psych students, analyzed the data, and wrote it up. This represents over a year of hard work. I do not recommend reading it, however, unless you are designing research on the effects of having social or personal power. If you are, I do recommend reading it–at least the discussion section. There is some good thinking about the problem there. Everyone else, just open it and read a few sentences, to get the flavor, scroll down so you can say “Wow” and then read the poster instead, when I figure out how to post pdfs.

Statement of Purpose: This was my essay for my application to the University of Oregon’s Couples and Family Therapy masters program. Thanks to Nicholas Walker and Amos Blanton for their excellent and sometimes brutal criticism and editing.

The Illusion of Control: This was my third and last paper for Social Psychology. The assignment was to write 3-5 pages about one of a list of psychological phenomena. My professor liked it the least of the three (45/50) but since it was the last paper of the term he didn’t mark it up, so I don’t know what his complaints were. I know what my complaints are but I don’t want to bias your read. I think it’s got a couple good ideas that I could do something with.

Social Psychology Journal: My Changing Biases: This was my second paper for Social Psychology. The assignment was to keep a journal about my observations relating to what we were learning in class and then write a paper about it. This appealed to me because I journal a lot anyway and the topic seemed pretty wide open. I ended up focusing on one topic to make it (hopefully) a more interesting read than a laundry list. My professor liked it, though less than the first paper I gave him, and gave it 48/50. I have his comments in bold and as footnotes at the end. I think this one will be more interesting to non-psych people than the reaction paper above. It’s about racism.

Reaction to “On the Confirmability and Disconfirmability of Trait Concepts”: This is my first paper of my fall 2008 term. It’s a reactions paper to an article from the flagship scientific psychology periodical, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The article is about how easy or difficult it is for people or groups of people to come to be thought of as having or not having a trait. In other words, if people think of you as honest, what did you have to do to be thought of that way, and how did your environment help or hinder you in that? I also write about another article from the same journal about shooter bias, the tendency of people to shoot African Americans more quickly and more often accidentally. Both of these studies are really interesting and disturbing. If you want to read them, email me and I’ll send you the originals. The paper itself I think is decent. It’s a labored-over second draft–I spent about twelve hours on it. My professor really liked it, though. I’ll include his comments in bold, at the bottom.

Applied Data Analysis Homework # 6: I don’t really consider this writing, but I said I’d post it in “A Day In the Life.” The only one of my friends who I can imagine being interested in the content is Ethan Mitchell, and he will most likely just be disapproving that they are still teaching ANOVAs to undergrads. (To be fair, Ethan, a big part of this assignment was to show how analysis of variance could be done as well and better using multiple regression.) This got a 19.5 out of 20 and “great job!” from the TA, Karyn.

Visual Working Memory: Capacity, Resolution, and Expertise: I wrote this for my Cognition class, spring 2008. It’s about how my professor, Dr. Ed Awh, in a journal article, shot down an idea that some other scientists had been excited about: that more complex objects take up more space in our working memories than simple object. It’s interesting to see how politely brutal researchers can be with each other.

Vegetarianism and Reason: A Personal Evolution. I wrote this in 2006 for a research-writing class. It’s pretty good. It suffers from college deadline syndrome, meaning it reaches for stuff that it doesn’t really get to because of limited time and attention. Still, it’s one of the better things I’d written to that point.