I don't feel like doing much talking today, but an assignment in my psychology class had me explain how the course will help me in my work or home life. Since I talked about my characters and writing the whole time, I thought I should post what I wrote onto here.
Enjoy!
This course has already helped me with a story I'm writing by giving me inspiration, and I expect it will help me later with personality analysis and with theories of emotion.
When reading about the cerebral cortex and its association areas, the story of Gage's personality change after the damage to his frontal lobe caught my attention. One of the protagonists in a story I'm writing receives brain damage in a car accident, though I haven't yet decided where the damage occurs and how it affects her. A personality change could make her interactions with other characters more gripping. Also, the lost ability to recognize faces and aphasia, "an impaired use of language" (Myers, 2011), could both result in an absolutely fascinating character. I know these aren't the only effects of brain damage, and so I'm inspired to do further research on the subject. (As a side note, I know brain damage is a serious and possibly life changing thing. I hope the paragraph above didn't seem callous; I was trying to be objective for this setting.)
The different theories of emotion; the James-Lange theory, the Cannon-Bard theory, and the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory (Myers, 2011); could help me to analyze how a character would react to different events. By creating a realistic reaction in a character, the scene becomes more believable (which is crucial in story-telling). Also, by learning how to analyze personalities, I can create deeper and more developed characters.
References:
Myers, D.G. (2011). Exploring Psychology: Eighth Edition in Modules (8th ed., pp, 56-394). New York, NY: Worth.
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