Life is, as always, busy. I'm naming today a Day of Productivity and so far it's going well. I read the rest of the chapter I'm supposed to for my Motivation class and then I'm going to attempt to read all the stuff for my Addictions class for tomorrow. Take a quiz on Motivation, write a discussion board topic on Addiction, and write as many personal statements as I can. Go team go!!

Also, I saw Aimee Mann the other night. Awesome! She has a really pretty smile.

Essentially what I wanted to complain about - I'm taking the GRE Psych test in about 10 days. Or 11. Something like that. Whenever October 10th is. I'm not happy about this. I don't have enough time to read or take notes. What kind of genius am I to schedule my GRE general test two weeks before the Psych test? Oh, right, I thought I could study for both at the same time. And on top of that my 470 quantitative score scares me. It's not a 500. And my verbal isn't super awesome amazing, either. I'm worried schools will just discount my ap based on those stupid numbers. And I'm applying to prestigious schools. I want to get into them. But I'm not really sure I can anymore. Ah, well, I'll try anyway and hope for the best and try not to cry when I don't get to work with Saul Kassin.

See I'm hoping the Psych test will be super awesome stellar and make up for my mediocre verbal score and my below-average quantitative score. But since I'm taking it so very, very soon I'm worried I'll just do terribly and make my chances worse. But the prestigious schools want my scores so they're going to get them and I'm going to try my very best to take in the information in my book without taking notes and, again, just hope for the best.

The good news is I talked to a prof today for about an hour and I finally understand standard deviation. And some other stuff sort of. One day I'll ask the prof I'm helping with research if he has about three hours to sit down and explain everything he did statistically. It would probably take that long and there would need to be lots of pictures.

The bad news is we didn't get to run a jury because two of our participants decided not to show up. Sigh. Note to whoever is reading this: if you sign up for a Psychological study, show up. Because we had five people and we needed just ONE more to be able to run the jury. But no.

Can't stay too long. We're running a jury bright and early tomorrow morning and I want to pretend to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Fact is I'll probably study for the GRE first because I was tired and spacing out an hour ago before I got on the computer and couldn't concentrate then. Funny how that works. If I just wait until it's late enough I'll no longer be tired. Maybe. Yesterday I kinda fell asleep on that book. One of those "I'll lie down and rest a bit" thing. And then I noticed I was drooling on my book. Yup.

Anyway, life's great. I started today off by reading part of the 100-page white paper on police induced confessions available via the AP-LS website. Very, very interesting stuff. Then I went to class and instead of studying, read some of The Myth of the Repressed Memory - Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Loftus and Ketchum. Yup. My life is awesome.

And on top of that I finally decided to be not lazy and checked to see if Aimee Mann's coming near Colorado sometime. Good thing I did, too, because she's coming to Boulder on October 14th. I totally bought a ticket. I'm excited.

AND my favorite prof's wife (who I've heard is just as awesome as he is) is teaching next semester! A class I haven't taken! The department head told me himself. Hah. She's a part-time teacher so whether or not she teaches depends on a few things. I emailed her a few weeks ago asking if she was going to teach (and asking her to consider votes for what she was teaching as I've already taken some of the classes she teaches) and she essentially said maybe - depending on if the department has the money. So I asked the department head and he said maybe - depending on some things. I mentioned that I've heard fantastic things about her etc., etc. Apparently I'm memorable and we ran into each other today and he told me the good news. This isn't really the memorable thing, though, since I've talked to him multiple times - he's my advisor for my field experience. The first time he remembered me was after I bugged him about whether or not my favorite prof is going to teach Psych of Religion in the spring. Answer - yes. Next semester is going to be the Best Ever. I'm way excited.

I've been looking a bit at applications and they're scary intimidating. I still need to narrow down schools. I want to have this done by October 15th so I can have applications in the mail by November 15th (I have to have stuff in order before I can contact my letter writers so they know where they're writing to and what to write about). Good news is I hear Career Services helps a lot with applications and the personal statement and such. Which is good because I don't know the first thing about writing one. The schools I looked at didn't have a "what to address" section. And seriously, John Jay's application fee is something like $145 if I read it correctly. That's mean. Very, very, very mean. Considering the $300 spent on taking both GREs and $10 for each transcript I send them (some schools, for some strange reason, want two copies... $20). Man, applying is expensive. Thank you, Mom and Dad! But I feel like I'm finally getting the "applying for college" experience since I didn't really care the first time around.

Something interesting. My first semester at college I got one D and one C. Icky, right? So I computed what my GPA would be without that semester - it only went up 0.07 points. Which is a nice change, but not really a lot. So that's pretty cool. I diluted the bad grades with my awesome ones.

The cooler thing is my Psych GPA. It's at a 3.82 and if I get all A's this semester, it'll go up to a 3.96. Oooh I just realized that when I was computing that I forgot that two of my classes (5 credits worth) don't have grades, just pass/fail. Ah, well. It'll still go up.

In any case, I hope grad school likes me.

Oh dear. I've been pretty much in a constant tired state. I've been cramming for the GRE and the only time I can do that (due to school, homework, and work) has usually been late at night. Which results in me staying up until 2:30 in the morning trying to learn math from a book I'm convinced has typos in it. Unless you could explain this to me?

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Alright. Please ignore my bad computer art. This is a right triangle. ABC. A's the top angle, B's the right angle, and C's the one on the bottom right. Angle B is 90 degrees. Angle A is marked as 43. My book claims that the correct angle number for angle C is also 43. I thought it was 47 because I thought all triangles = 180 degrees. So either I'm right and I win and my book is a horrible failure (which scares me) or it has 1337 (leet) math skillz beyond my comprehension.

It later claimed that adding -7 and 4 = +11. No negative sign. Do not understand.

But the moral of the story is I'm taking the GRE on Saturday and I'm scared of it and no longer trust my book. I've got a good deal of new vocab memorized and some math stuff but I've barely taken any practice quizzes - only one, really, and it was on paper and I kept cheating and looking at the answers in order to see what the correct one was. Tomorrow I'm going to try to take one of my computer practice tests and tonight and every other night (or day if I have a say) I'm going to work on this study thing. Blah. Lots and lots going on.

But basically that has been my life recently. Reading textbooks for school and reading GRE books in my spare time with a bit of slacking off mixed in with the going to class and the going to work thing. I just wanna take a nap.

I was on reid.com the other day - Reid is one of the leading interrogator training people... after all, The Reid Technique is named after him. But I was reading the critic's corner for fun because they have a habit of not paying any attention to what Psychologists are saying. I'm going to paraphrase because I don't want to find the exact quotes.

Critic: Developing themes implicitly suggests leniency
Response: Interrogators are not allowed to explicitly tell a suspect he will get a lesser sentence if he confesses.

Those definitely aren't the right words but it's the same meaning. They skirted around the issue. Yes. We know it's illegal to say "If you confess we'll cut you a deal." That's explicit vocalization of leniency. What Psychologists are saying is that developing themes in an interrogation (ie it's understandable that you stole the car, you must've done it to feed your kids) results in a suspect who infers leniency from that minimization. No explicit vocalization. Saul Kassin and whoever else was on that research project (forgive me, I don't feel like looking it up right now) found that explicit vocalization of leniency and minimization, which resulted in a suspect inferring leniency, resulted in the same number of confessions. If I remember correctly. If anything, it was pretty darn close. Probably not the exact same number, but statistically significant (not due to chance) and such.

Critic: Claiming to have evidence that does not exist causes an innocent suspect to confess
Response: The suspect knows that the evidence does not exist and therefore is not persuaded by it.

Itallics added for emphasis. I literally laughed when I read that. Also not an exact quote, but I think the part I put in itallics is their words. Oh yes, Reid, they are very much persuaded by it. It increases the chance of internalized false confession - "Well, it sure looks like I did it if you have all that proof. I just must not remember it." And then cue a false memory. OR the suspect confesses, hoping that the police will test the blood/fingerprint/etc... which never happens, of course, because a) the evidence doesn't exist and b) there's no need to get any evidence after they get a confession. Suspects are very much persuaded by false evidence ploys and they really need to be illegal. I was talking to my prof the other day about his co-author's project at her university - simple vs. orchestrated ploys. A simple ploy is just claiming to have evidence that doesn't exist (behavioral, scientific, or testimonial). An orchestrated ploy, however, I thought was illegal. It's actually creating a "murder weapon" - like the bloody rock they put in front of Kirk Bloodsworth before he falsely confessed. Which just results in the suspect believing there's no hope and he/she'd better confess, that they'll test the evidence, stuff like that. And then the suspect incorporates THAT INFORMATION into the confession which usually could have been used as corroborating evidence to distinguish between a true and false confession! My prof told me that, no, that's not illegal. My understanding was you couldn't do it if it could be mistaken for true evidence - and a fake bloody rock wouldn't be because it's full of fake blood.... hopefully. No, it's only illegal if it's a DNA report on official police letterhead or something else that could be mistaken as true evidence by the media or the courts.

They go on to claim that a suspect doesn't falsely confess unless there are other factors that influence the confession - illegal interrogator tactics or an extremely long interrogation session. The second part I find interesting because there are no limits on how long a suspect can be interrogated. It's easy to look back at a confession that was proven false and say that it was due to the length of an interrogation... but how many confessions that are viewed as true went through the same thing? Only you don't have to defend those because no one was exonerated by DNA evidence. I'm curious how many false confession cases did not have illegal interrogation tactics or a long session. Or how many true confessions lasted just that long....

It's interesting.

But all in all, interrogators still aren't really paying attention to psychologists.

Can you tell I think this stuff is cool?

In short, because I'm tired and want to go to bed:

- Physio test today. I think I did well! Let's hope.

- We did data collection on Tuesday. It was fun! I hope my prof gets it all analyzed soon so he can explain what the numbers mean. Exciting!

- Today work was kinda depressing. One of the patients is doing very poorly and another one who I had really high hopes for was dischared a few days ago but came back after 4 hours. And a suicidal person called, but the police got there in time, which was definitely good. I did not answer that phone and I'm very glad I didn't. I really wouldn't know what to say. It was just kinda intense today.

- I really need to buy groceries. I'm pretty out of food. I need to eat more healthy things.

- I was asking my favorite prof about whether or not his wife is going to teach next semester. He says she's thinking about teaching Clinical Psych and I really hope she does. I asked him to tell her I'd love it if she did but I'm still contemplating emailing her. Because obviously my opinion carries oh so much weight. :) But, seriously, that'd be the best last semester ever. Taking both of their classes! (Assuming, of course, that everying goes as planned and I can still take Psych of Religion).

- I need to unpack. Seriously. Big big big mess.

- I'm behind in my homework in some of my classes. I'm more or less on track with the others.

- I'm having fun this semester, I just need to crack down more on the textbooks.

- My motivation teacher let me copy an old interrogation manual he had lying around. I read it and it was awesome. I'm going to have to see what the psychologists say about it. I know what they say about the "deceptive behavioral cues" - they're wrong. And I know why. Because I do them several times a day anyway. Putting your purse in your lap is seen as deceptive because you're creating a barrier. As are grooming behaviors, such as playing with your hair, scratching your nose, or cleaning lint off your clothes. All of which I do a lot. Oh, and resting your head in your hand, making too little eye contact, slouching, turning away from the investigator, etc., etc. A bunch of silliness, really. Argh. Why don't they listen to psychologists?

- And finally, today I donated my eyes to science. They gave me a slice of pizza and some soda in return.