Chan Zhuang Sheng took a social psychology class taught by Miss Chia. In the first journal entry, he learned about self-concept, which is how people define themselves, and spotlight effect, which is when people with high self-esteem see themselves as the center of attention. He also learned that culture and family influence identities. In the second entry, he discussed automatic and controlled thinking, and how intuition comes from the brain. In the third entry, he explored how vision relates to psychology, such as different colors eliciting varied emotions and the phenomenon of inattentional blindness.

1. Name : Chan Zhuang Sheng
ID : 0314527
Course : FNBE April Intake
Social Psychology Journal
20.11.2013

2. Social Psychology – Journal 1
This was my very first time to have my psychology class. It was very fresh to me and I
did not know what will be taught in the class. I met my lecturer, Miss Chia who was a Chinese
with a serious face. At the beginning, I was scared but I realized that she was a funny lecturer
when she was teaching. She taught us a basic topic of social psychology which was called selfconcept. Self-concept is a method to define ourselves, like knowing the personalities and
behaviours of ourselves. We need to use the words “ I am…” to know what was inside ourselves.
As an example “I am a funny guy” means that you are a guy who likes to make jokes and make
people happy. This is a kind of psychology test that prove what kind of person you are. Besides,
Miss Chia taught us that a person who had high self-esteem and thought about they were in
centre of the stage, this is called spotlight effect. Furthermore, I learn about culture and family
background were the factors to influence our identities. So, there were a lot of people with
different identities around us. We cannot judge what kind of persons they are, but we can try to
know them by having connection with them. This is the best way to interact with others and get
to know more about yourself instead knowing others.

3. Social Psychology – Journal 2
In the second class of social psychology, the power and the perils of intuition was taught.
We knew that brain is the main controller of our thinking and it was the origin of the intuition.
Through this lecture, I had learnt that there were two types of thinking which were automatic
thinking and controlled thinking. There were differences between controlled thinking and
automatic thinking, as examples controlled thinking was used when we first encounter a new
environment that we never experienced, but after getting used to the situation automatic thinking
takes over. Controlled thinking was a kind of thinking which was conscious and effortful but
automatic thinking was not. Furthermore, I felt that we were not forgot our memories easily. I
believed that it came to our mind when it was needed in time, like naturally. This class had
fulfilled my curiosity because I got to know where my feeling comes from. Feeling shows the
condition of us and we cannot control the feeling easily when we are facing something that
stimulated us a lot. Moreover, I realised that a person got to be more matured and got to know
what was right or wrong when they were getting elder. The rational thinking of us was getting
stronger. In conclusion, attitudes and thinking of us changed often and we must knew about it.

4. Social Psychology – Journal 3
In the third class of my psychology class, I had learnt vision. As what I knew vision was
the ability that we could see when the light penetrated into our eyes but there was psychological
material contained in it. As an example, anything that we saw could affect our thinking and
feelings. Various types of colour provided us various type of feelings especially red colour, it
was the sharpest colour of all colour to me. It stimulated me and provided me energy. Some
professionals had proven that red colour was the colour can enhance men’s attraction to women.
I agreed what they had proved, girls in red outfit really attracted me a lot, not because of the
sharpness of the outfit but the strong personalities of them. I thought the girls who wear red shirt
had high self-esteem and bravery. They want to be the focal point in the crowd and showed their
characteristics to others. Furthermore, I also learnt inattentional blindness. It was the failure to
see visible objects or event because attention is focused on elsewhere. Illusion also affect our
psychological thinking, a lot of different images could be appeared in our vision because of our
attention was not enough to focus on something that we were looking on. Moreover, a visual
illusion involves an apparently discrepancy between the appearance of a visual stimulate and its
physical reality, like we saw something that was the same into different thing. In conclusion,
vision had a strong relationship with psychology.