Week 4, Post 2

I really enjoyed watching the Discovering Psychology video this week. While I thought that last week’s video was interesting, the topics covered in this segment sparked more interest from me. In fact, my psychology professor from last semester showed my class quite a few segments from this exact video. While it was enjoyable to be able to see Jean Piaget’s volume conservation and Renee Baillargeon’s object permanence experiments again, I was glad to see some new experiments that I had not previously learned about. Steven Suomi’s research, for example, was new information to me. As we learned, Suomi studied the behaviors of monkeys that were normal and those that were genetically modified to be shy. He observed that the shy monkeys would stay nearby their mothers, while the other monkeys would explore their surroundings. This can be compared to the findings of Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiment that we read about in our textbook this week. Suomi also observed that having a good support system allowed the shy monkeys to wander away from their mothers, but if the support system was taken away, the monkeys reverted back to their original ways. Scientists, researchers, and theorists can use this information to their advantage in the study of human behaviors.