Psychology in News, Free Research Paper Sample

The media is known to manipulate stories to suit the interests of their audience. In doing so, they often disregard the facts and instead fabricate the news to attract more users. The subscribers are too caught up in the propaganda of the media that they fail to question the integrity of the source of the news. Today, popular media such as the newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV are notorious for manipulating information to suit the demands of the consumers of their services. Still, the audience has an alternative to draw useful information from reliable sources such as scholarly articles including journals and books. It is advisable that the seeker of the knowledge should first refer to relevant sources before concluding a contentious issue. In that sense, this article will attempt to critically analyze how psychological matters are presented in the popular media. The paper will identify five media objects and then relate them to other five-course texts on the same issue. We will carry out our study on the following topics; personality, psychological disorders, the brain, behavior, sensation, and perception.

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Personality

Under personality, the item is drawn from a blog by Rachel Cooper, Ph.D. on September 2, 2014. This blog by the title "How Reliable is the DSM-5?" discusses the dependability of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) regarding the psychological assessment of personality disorders. The link to this piece is https://www.madinamerica.com/2014/09/how-reliable-is-the-dsm-5/ . We will compare this item by another academic source from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) to gauge its authenticity. This alternative article goes by the title 'Psychological Assessment with DSM-5 Alternative Model for Personality Disorders: Tradition and Innovation.' According to Cooper, only just below half of the physicians in the United States had adopted the use of the technique. Those who had not yet incorporated this approach into their system were doubtful of its reliability. The author asserts that even though the issue of credibility has been core to the extent of adopting the method, the American Psychology Association recommends its use in the study of personality disorders. However, some members are still doubtful of its workability. Hence, do not approve its application. The academic article states that the DSM-5 provides for an empirically based, scientific approach to the evaluation of personality disorders, as well as diagnosis of the same.

Cooper further highlights that the central idea behind the reliability of the model lies in the fact that the symptoms of the disorder should determine the type of diagnosis carried out by the clinician. However, the professional article mentions that the severity and style of personality dysfunction are assessed together through rankings for the overall level of character impairment and specific irrational personality traits. From the illustration, we can identify the first discrepancy concerning the chosen item. It fails to provide a compelling argument to support the case. Instead, the points are choppy and unconvincing. According to the course text, it is the ratings for the general degree of personality sickness and unusual personality trait that conclude on the results produced by the analysis. Conversely, Cooper mentions the symptoms as the primary determinant of the severity of the deficiency. Still, both works agree that a reliable classification should produce consistent results regardless of the expert conducting the assessment. For example, the results achieved by a psychiatrist in the USA should be consistent with those obtained by another in South Africa.

Both works also mention other extant DSM categories such as DSM-I, DSM-II, and DSM-III. Cooper introduces DSM-III first, highlighting on its fundamental concepts and its connection with the DSM-V alternative model. However, the link is not as vivid as that of the peer-reviewed article. Cooper asserts that with the DSM-III, clinicians could now be able to give the same diagnosis to patients regardless of the professional conducting the evaluation. She further says that as DSM-III, and its successors, demonstrated acceptable values of kappa, the problem of reliability was assumed to have been solved. However, unlike the professional article, Cooper's blog fails to show the association between these successors such as the DSM-5, with the DSM-III. Thus, she leaves the readers in limbo. Conversely, the article from the UMUC catalog provides a clear connection between the alternative models of the DSM. In the article, it is mentioned that when tests are performed based on the diagnostic rules for DSM-V Personality Disorders, the findings should show a viable correspondence between DSM-IV and DSM-V than observed between DSM-II and DSM-III-R.

Psychological Disorders

This section attempts to understand mental disorders in holocaust survivors' children. The item is drawn from a blog by Vicki Larson on the 'Huffpost.' The article 'How the Holocaust Lives on for Survivors' Children' dates Jun 16, 2012. The link to the media object is https://www.huffingtonpost.com/vickilarson/holocaust b 1420373.html .We will relate this post to a professional article from the UMUC library titled 'A Question of Who, Not If Psychological Disorders in Holocaust Survivors' Children.' Larson begins by asking a rhetorical question on whether an action that occurred six-plus decades ago can have impacts today. She answers by stating that it depends on what it is. It is from there that she begins by talking about the Holocaust Remembrance Day. The author proceeds by giving an estimate of the number of the Second Generation Holocaust Survivors in America, about 200,000. Up to there, Larson has not touched on the primary theme, "psychological disorders in Holocaust survivors' children." All that information is irrelevant and deviates from the topic.

The UMUC article, however, takes a different approach. The article is straight to the point and starts by mentioning the duration in which studies on the effects of the Holocaust on the subsequent compeers have taken place. The article identifies some long-term effects of the Holocaust according to studies by personalities like Solomon and Felsen. According to the professional article, diagnosis show pathological effects on some second generation victims, whereas, others had no signs of psychological impairment. Conversely, studies on an Israeli population by Schwartz, Dohrenwend, and Levav did not show raised tariffs of extant psychiatrist syndromes amongst second-generation Holocaust stayers. The researchers employed the revised version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia. In another study, researchers used the World Mental Health Survey Composite Irrational Diagnostic Interview to study the impacts of the impacts of the Holocaust on the offspring of the survivors. A comparative study was conducted on the Holocaust survivors' children and those of Europe-born blood relation who did not live in Nazi-occupied zones. The research found no statistical differences regarding the outcomes.

That said, Larson's blog pinpoints some approaches employed by Holocaust survivors to protect their children from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). For instance, they married other survivors to free themselves from having the burden to share their experiences with others. Such parents view keeping silent as the best option to protect their children from feeling sympathy for them. They are determined to start a new life and prove that there is still something worth living for, and that is their children. On the other hand, some survivors prefer sharing their experiences with their children, mainly to correct them when they misbehave. Some parents would use phrases like "I passed through a lot so that you can have a better life," or "You do not know what suffering is." However, other second-generation victims like Larson have had to fill in the gaps themselves to understand what their parents might have gone through since they are unwilling to speak about their encounters with the Nazis. Similarly, the professional article identifies some of the post-trauma adaptational strategies employed by Holocaust survivors to free their offspring of the burden of feeling sympathy for them. They include overprotectiveness, emotional detachment, valuing Jewish culture, the conspiracy of silence within the family, as well as intolerance of weakness.

That said, the UMUC article asserts that the nature of the parent(s) coping style determined the child's reparative adaptational impacts. The offspring are vulnerable to severe reparative implications in case the response of the parent(s) to own trauma is intense. Still, the studies fail to show whether parental styles would show self-determining factors or be incorporated by the additional proximal belongings of partakers' reparative alteration influences. The article further highlights on some of the common pathological effects exhibited by the second generation Holocaust survivors. They include PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The outcome of their research shows that GAD was more dominant than PTSD amongst survivors' offspring. The offspring were exposed to these traumas by their parents through tales of the experiences. The parents themselves experience severe trauma as a result of their Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences.

Behavior

Under behavior, we will refer to a post on Facebook dated 27th January 2016 by NOFAS Alabama regarding smoking in pregnant women. The link to the post is https://www.facebook.com/NofasOfAlabama/posts/251053595068650 .We will relate the content of this post to the ideas of experts in the scholarly article titled 'Preventing Alcohol-Exposed Pregnancies among Women of Childbearing Age: The Necessity of a Preconceptional Approach.' That said, the content of the post refers to studies by various organizations concerned with a healthy lifestyle for pregnant women. One such organization is the Circle of Hope (COH), which spreads the message of recovery, healing, and prevention of alcoholism in birth mothers. Another Australian study is also incorporated into the content of the post. It is titled 'Risky Drinking Patterns Are Being Continued into Pregnancy: A Prospective Cohort Study.' The primary aim of the study is to describe the characteristics of women that indulge in risky drinking before pregnancy and how she adapts to the addiction during pregnancy. According to the research, over a third of women continued with binge alcohol consumption during pregnancy, suggesting the need to address the issue of alcohol consumption before pregnancy.

The academic text indicates that nine out of ten women are aware of the adverse consequences of drinking during pregnancy. Still, many women of childbearing age today continue to indulge in heavy drinking of alcohol. Unlike the content of the Facebook post, this peer-reviewed article gives us estimates of the number of pregnancies unprotected to points of liquor acknowledged to have adverse effects on fetal development. For example, in 1995, roughly 175, 000 pregnancies were bared to severe levels of liquor content. Both the articles agree on the fact that indulging in binge drinking could have long-term effects on the child's behavior in the coming years. According to the post, a Danish study indicates that the infants exposed to one or two spree drinking were likely to experience short-term memory loss, and display unethical behavior at age seven.

From the peer-reviewed article, we are reminded that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is one of the leading preventable causes of mental retardation in the US. This deficiency is most prevalent midst the teenagers whose mommies were substantial...