FNBE0413 Cheah Teck Wei 0315215 PSYC0103

1 st OCT 2013

It was the first class for my Social Psychology (PSYC0103) module and I’ve got to

know my lecturer of this module which is Ms Pang Chia Yee. As it was our first class, she

briefly explained to us about what is this module about, the assignments and quizzes.

Through her concise and clear briefing, I could understand and keep in mind that what would

happen and I would learn throughout the module, how the quizzes would be taken and so on.

After that, we had a short lecture and there’s an interesting thing – a class experiment!

Ms Pang gave us a very famous experiment which is “The Shyness Scale” by Cheek

& Buss, 1981 which was to test our level of shyness. The experiment was carried out by each

of us answering a couple of questions with multiple choices which has a score of 0-4. Each

question has to be answered from your mind without deceiving. After answering all the

questions, we’ll have to reverse all the score we had, as example, 0 will be equal to 4, 1 will

be equal to 3 and so follow by others. Then, we’ll sum up the scores and find out the shyness

level of ourselves. As if your score is lesser than 8, that means you are less shy than others; in

another way round, if your score is higher than 20, you are more shy than others. I’ve got a

score of 16 which indicates that I’m moderately shy. As we were curious about why reversing

our scores, Ms Pang told us that most of the time we thought ourselves was right, but actually

we’re wrong. I am quite satisfied with the result I have because I think it was right.

This module was really interesting for me, I like and wanted to observe and explore more

about Social Psychology, and also what I am.

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FNBE0413 Cheah Teck Wei 0315215 PSYC0103

8 th OCT 2013

In today’s class, there is a topic that gave me a huge resonance about our act in daily

life which it did happened. The topic was “Self-Knowledge” as known as “Know Thyself”

which is knowing ourselves. To get to know ourselves, firstly is explaining our behaviour

such as why did we choose Taylor’s University, why did you fall in love with that special

someone and so on. But then, actually most of our self-explanations were wrong as we’re

often being influenced by other people or media. For example, why am I choosing Taylor’s to

pursue my study? Honestly the first reason that I had chosen Taylor’s was because of its fame

as people told me that architecture in Taylor’s were good, and also the environment of

Taylor’s. So, my decision was actually influenced by other factors. Then, we predict our

behaviours. There’s a research which carried out by University of Waterloo students which is

predicting whether their roommates’ romance will survive. They actually got a conclusion

which is “If you are in love and want to know whether it will last, don’t listen to your heart,

ask your roommate.” Why? This is similar to a quote “Love is blind”, when we are in love,

our mind were affected by the love and happiness we’re having with our couple hence

causing us neglecting some negative parts in the relationship; in another way round, our

roommate (or another else) were not in the relationship so that they could look into the matter

in a more calm and logical way, pointing out what may be wrong.

Besides that, we’re also always overestimating things, a very clear example of mine

was, I always thought that the project could be done in a week, but when I started doing it, it

often cost me more than a week. Lastly, it was predicting our feelings. As we know that the

word “predicting” means “we think that”, which is an unconfirmed fact. This prediction

could lead to many of our life’s decision as that was how we chosen to be. For example, you

predict that the food of a restaurant you never tried before whether it’s delicious or not before

you try it, as if you predict that it would not be delicious you would not even try it.

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FNBE0413 Cheah Teck Wei 0315215 PSYC0103

12 th NOV 2013

The main topic of today’s class is about “Visuals”, which is a topic which is a little bit

less related to social psychology. But still, it’s a very interesting topic to learn. Starting with a

short introduction to structure of our human eyes, and proceeding to our main topic – The

effect of colour and The Visual System, Perceptual Process. I’ve got more interest on the

effect of colour as it could help me in my architecture course as well where the usage of

colours in a drawing is important to create attention and so on. In this topic, I’ve known that

colour is not only red, white, blue, black, green and etcetera; they are also feelings and

moods. From the results of experiment from University of Illinois, every colour brings a

feeling such as “Black and Grey are bad; White, Blue and Green are good; Yellow, White

and Grey are weak; Red and Black are strong; Black and Grey are passive; last but not least

Red is active.”

I have strong agreement of the result of this experiment especially on the result of Red

colour which is strong and active. This is because in a picture with items with different

colour, I tend to focus on the item in red more compared to other items in different colour.

Besides, red colour is also believed that it could raise the arousal and brain activity such as a

food in red or full of colours is way more attractive than a food in black or other colour in

dim. Moreover, the common game among us, which is the dart game also practices the same

concept which is the bull’s eye (which is the central point) is red in colour where people tend

to focus on it more. In addition, I had also heard that a bedroom should not be painted in red,

this is also because of the theory I had learnt earlier that red colour increases the arousal and

brain activity as known as making you active and causing insomnia.

In this class I have found out that many things that I didn’t notice in my daily life is so

close to visual concepts, besides increasing my knowledge I had also learnt some additional

skills to apply on my drawings while taking my architecture studies.

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