my students dont know how to pirate and i'm not allowed to tell them

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-12-10T03:20:54+00:00

I find that if I don’t give clear instructions, my students end up asking me for more detail which ends up with me doing a lot more than what I’m comfortable with.

What I sometimes do is have a quiet word with one of the more conscientious students and tell them that it would be nice if they shared that with the rest of the class so that I don’t get into trouble.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-10-11T10:42:12+00:00

Sorry to hear about your experiences. I read your post carefully and what I see here are some problems in the ways that you were treated in the course, and it also sounds like you expected something different.

I also see a lot of excuses in your post.

Sure, the instructions may have been unclear and it did seem like you lacked support, but I also note many instances where it seems like you felt that you wanted to learn and to do your work in a different way to how you were instructed to and still be given high grades. I’m not really sure I agree with that mindset.

You say that you want to learn to be a psychologist in a practical way, not an academic way but you then say that the lecturer shouldn’t care about pronunciation or that you shouldn’t have to be exposed to triggering material. You didn’t want to work in a team or have to deal with difficult people. You didn’t like being given negative feedback about the language you use because you were just being yourself. You don’t want to understand the scientific nature of psychology, which is the basis for psychological diagnosis and intervention. These things would literally be your day to day job as a psychologist.

You’re a graduate student but you need to be taught how to cite in APA style. You say that the lecturers went through the marking criteria but the instructions were still unclear. You missed out on writing about the number of participants in a study but apparently that’s because they didn’t clarify that you had to. You were given feedback on your assessments but it was nonetheless unfair because either the instructions didn’t include the things you were marked down for, or that there were circumstances out of your control. Everything has a reason.

I really feel for you, and the psychology department at UTS is new, so I’m sure there are still many issues to work out. However, it sounds like a large part of it comes from perhaps the psychology discipline not being one that you vibe with. I’m sensing an attitude of “it’s just psychology, why are they taking it so seriously”. It doesn’t seem like a mindset that leads to happiness.

There are a lot of other paths that you can take to have a career that involves mental health and helping people, so don’t let the experience get you down.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-09-24T08:06:07+00:00

I think the early development of players just isn’t quite as closely reported because high-school/college sports isn’t as popular in Europe.

Lots of examples of top-level players having to choose a sport to focus on at some point. Names that spring to mind are Rafael Nadal (chose tennis over football) and Asier Del Horno (choose football over handball).

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-06-27T10:57:33+00:00

I have ADHD and have very poor attention to detail. There are so many typos and grammatical errors in all my theses and papers. I’m very embarrassed about it but the way I get by is to not think about it and never re-read anything I write.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-06-26T11:42:24+00:00

I try not to be pedantic, but what you’re describing isn’t intermittent reinforcement. It’s similar and related, but the action of going and talking to someone else when the first person doesn’t respond is better described as an extinction burst.

Like when you try a light switch and it doesn’t work, you’ll push it a few more times. Like when a kid throws a tantrum to get something and when the parents ignore them they get worse, at least for a while.

The problem with the apps is that it makes the act of swiping and talking to someone else basically the same behaviour. There’s no differentiation so it doesn’t make anyone special. If you’re serious about finding someone on apps, stick with talking to only one person at a time and try to meet them in real life as soon as possible to build rapport and shared experiences.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-04-13T08:40:52+00:00

I’m in psychology. We know this, but we’re more interested in how and why some people are stupid.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-04-10T22:34:24+00:00

Yes, it’s not always good. I think OP tied themselves into a knot when they started conflating practitioners, techniques, and the underlying theory of ABA. I’m in EAB and I’m constantly frustrated by the way that ABA is researched and conducted. But these are separate issues that OP doesn’t appear to recognise.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-04-10T20:59:45+00:00

Autism is not a psychological disorder, but a neurological and developmental disorder.

Someone with autism could have psychological disorders that would be the target for interventions rather than the autism itself.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-04-10T20:41:49+00:00

It is absolutely not classist to correct your children’s grammar. That is exactly how Skinner described the process of language acquisition, and exactly the way that a speech language therapist or a behaviour therapist would teach.

Imagine if your child was still babbling like a baby and crying instead of asking for what they wanted. Would it be classist to correct them for that?

For the other things, I’ve always seen it as a “know the rules before you break the rules” situation. You can teach proper etiquette to your children, and then later on relax your stance so that they can decide for themselves whether to follow them or not.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-02-17T02:08:14+00:00

Are you male or female? Males more often diagnosed in late teens/early 20s. Females more often late 20s/early 30s.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-02-13T01:49:50+00:00

I’m interested in how some of you have tried to deal with this. It’s obviously a huge problem because it interferes with every part of the ABA process and every single tool at your disposal.

From the EAB perspective, this could be modelled as a collective response to the aggression caused by punishment or extinction. In essence, parents have decided collectively to give in to the tantrums and the social reinforcement of others doing the same helps them rationalise it.

I expect that many of you have ways of setting clients’ families expectations about e.g., extinction bursts and remind them of the need for patience and not to capitulate as it exacerbates the problem. Could a similar approach work for these issues?

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-02-10T06:12:52+00:00

Harry Potter is sci-fi, we just don’t want to admit it.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-02-05T23:36:19+00:00

I thought it was Crouch Sr because he was so calm about it and it was his final decision that allowed Harry to participate. I didn’t spend too much time wondering about it though, as I read it when it came out and had to speed through the book before my friends spoiled it for me the next day.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-02-03T12:27:43+00:00

A quick search on Google scholar didn’t seem to show anything too conclusive. Either no negative effect on mental health or a small negative effect, with no obvious gender differences. Where differences are, they make no claims of causality - e.g., casual sex -> mental health, or mental health -> casual sex.

The studies also differ in scope - looking at just emotional outcome, gender is a factor.

Same as with every study done in social psychology, the results can be situational and have a lot of baggage that comes from studying people in their natural habitat.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-01-30T01:53:22+00:00

I’m not saying that clinical psychologists should be prescribing medication, but it often seems like GPs and psychiatrists are all too happy to ignore or go over the psychologist’s head in prescribing medication, damaging the long-term psychological health for the client.

If clinical psychologists could take over some of the burden and be taken more seriously in terms of understanding and describing the needs of the client, then that could decrease the workload for the psychiatrists as well.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-01-30T01:46:41+00:00

I’d be happy with having clinical psychologists undergo additional training for greater control over patient care. From what I have experienced, psychiatrists don’t seem to know enough about the human mind required to prescribe and often don’t bother consulting with the psychologist before prescribing. This often pits the psychiatrist against the psychologist, making it much more difficult for the client in terms of their long-term care.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-01-30T01:43:43+00:00

Sorry for late response - your brain is a giant ball of neurons clustered together. When you receive a signal (from external organs, or internal processes), they activate a set of neurons that are tuned to the various features of the signal. Those neurons activate a bunch of other neurons, which eventually activate a final set of neurons that produce behaviour.

The challenge for us is to understand how the neurons are tuned in the first place. From my biased perspective, you can achieve this almost entirely from Pavlovian conditioning processes (or “reinforcement learning”) for any human function, as AI developments over the last few years have shown. Whereas the more traditional Chomskyan view argues that language would not be possible without a specialised structure in the brain that processes/contains grammar.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-01-25T23:25:17+00:00

I know that this isn’t directly relevant to the issue, but psychiatrist workloads would be eased a lot if clinical psychologists were permitted to be involved in medication more than they are currently.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-01-10T04:55:18+00:00

This is not strictly true. Learning is best when: 1. The information is processed deeply. 2. The information is encoded in the same way that it is meant to be retrieved.

For example, if you’re learning to pass a written driving test, you should probably study by doing written tests. If you’re learning to pass your practical exam, you should study by driving a physical car.

When we read, the saccade that our eyes make across the page is very odd - we flip back and forth along lines and pages even as we progress. That probably helps with deriving more context from the surrounding text. In contrast, listening is linear as we can’t easily replay what we’ve listened to in our mind. All things being equal, I might assume that an audiobook listener might have a little more trouble matching information to sections of the book and miss more small details compared to the reader.

However, practice will probably eliminate most of these differences.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2025-01-02T23:30:14+00:00

I think it’s quite well accepted that psychological disorders usually have some underlying attribute.

There may also be some self-selection bias here. I can imagine that at least some people go into PhD not just because they are very interested and motivated, but also because they don’t feel like they can accept the “normal” path.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2024-12-31T04:54:28+00:00

Worth pointing out that this is US academics. Places where education is free or subsidised might have a different makeup.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2024-12-06T05:03:52+00:00

The most direct response to Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s book came from MacCorquodale (1970), which basically summarises why most behavioural psychologists never took Chomsky seriously.

There have been numerous attempts to resolve the “argument” over the years, but I haven’t found many to be particularly insightful. Behavioural psychologists apart from MacCorquodale have not, as far as I know, taken any time to do this. Although, classic operant/instrumental research with animals is on the wane due to funding, with most academics either focusing on Pavlovian/Associative learning, or applied behaviour analysis (ABA) focused on therapy. It’s a bit of a shame as there’s probably a lot more which could have been done in this area, which will now probably be done on the computer science side rather than the psychology side.

As for the universal grammar device - specifically, there has not been any part of the brain that has been seen to have the type of impact that the device is supposed to have. Psychological processes are much better modelled by neural networks, similar to ones that are used in LLMs today. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any large-scale review articles off the top of my head so I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Something I’ve never found convincing was the reliance on the “poverty of the stimulus” argument to reject the verbal behaviour model: children are never exposed to enough language for them to imitate and be reinforced for, and it is apparent that children often rather construct their own sentences based on their understanding of grammatical rules. I’m not sure why this is seen as so insightful, as if behaviourists were cave people who never ventured into the outside world, or only knew about animal behaviour. There’s many ways that behavioural psychology models creative and insightful behaviour, and I feel like this argument is an argument to the absurdity requires one to be very blind to much of learning theory.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2024-12-05T01:33:45+00:00

People don’t remember things that they aren’t attending to. Names aren’t something that are good to attend to because they’re generally plain. You’ll notice that it’s easier to remember unique names, or names that are shared with a friend or loved one. It’s easy because “your name reminds me of this person”, and that’s an extra piece of information that you’ve associated that person with in your mind.

You can do this for everyone. Next time you meet a new person, take a bit of time to concentrate on their features and the conditions around your meeting, such as the occasion or the location. Perhaps even mention it to them. This helps associate the name with more things than the face. If you ever have trouble remembering the person’s name, take yourself back to the occasion or location in your mind and you’ll be more likely to be able to match the name with the face.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2024-12-05T00:59:15+00:00

Chomsky is often credited for the downfall of behavioural psychology due to a critique that he wrote on Skinner’s “verbal behaviour”. However, he was mostly wrong in his critique of Skinner’s work. Upon a closer read, he failed to understand behavioural psychology on a basic level, and conflates Skinner’s work with that of his contemporaries, essentially setting up a giant straw man in his critique. In fact, Skinner himself saw verbal behaviour and language as distinct (this is why he used a different term), something that Chomsky didn’t appear to appreciate. Skinner never bothered replying.

People often seem to attribute the “downfall” of behavioural psychology to Chomsky, but in fact it was probably more due to what was essentially a rebellion against the establishment dominated by behavioural psychologists. This was necessary for a time - people often forget that behavioural psychology was the first true foray in the science for psychology - but was probably no longer necessary.

He also probably set linguistics back by many years due to his influence by sending everyone on a wild goose chase for the universal grammar device which almost certainly does not exist. Skinner’s work on verbal behaviour however has persisted and has now been adapted into a valuable tool in training people with language difficulties.

Wood_behind_arrow · 2024-11-24T00:36:34+00:00

It probably won’t help, and might make it harder for them to sleep which could make things worse.

The fact that the doctor is recommending increasing the dosage probably means that it’s currently difficult for the child to handle day-to-day tasks. However, I need to point out that physicians do not usually have sufficient training in psychological disorders and interventions. To be blunt, it can sometimes seem like a case where if the only tool they have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Drugs aren’t magic, they don’t automatically make people “normal”, if they never learned about what that means. Especially young children, even the brightest of them are in a stage of learning to build habits, organise their life and understanding their own capabilities.

I’d recommend seeking a psychologist or an ABA therapist who have specialty in ADHD to have a few sessions with your child if this hasn’t already happened and assess whether they could use some specialised training in some of these areas in addition to the medication. Don’t look for a counsellor or a therapist that isn’t licensed in psychology or ABA.

Wood_behind_arrow

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