Psychology of terrorism

When we look to the past we can notice that every century has its major problem. Nowadays such problem is terrorism. Moreover, this issue is difficult to talk about from the psychological point of view. However, I would like to overview this topic.
The main difficulty of this psychological issue is that reasons of terrorism depend on many external causes. The main reason is religion. For example, Muslims believe hat dying in Jihad is very honest. So maybe we should look for reasons of such radical depending on religion. Some psychologists explain that when people have weak Ego, when they are not self-confident they unconsciously begin to look for some groups to join. Those groups may be of different types: It can be dependent on music style – rockers, rappers and so on, also those groups can be made by religious or social basis for example, Muslims, Christians, drug addicts or alcoholics. When people join any group they begin to feel stronger – this is the reason why they try to do everything for that group – they can even become a terrorists. Personally I support this idea.
However, it is said that psychological terrorism reasons can be explained as some combinations of traits, childhood events and some other factors. For example, extraversion + early death of parents + being poor. However, this theory isn’t finally proved. It is not valid yet because the same researches often give different results.
So finally, I can say that terrorism is one of those spheres where psychology can be improved. Perhaps after some time there will be some undeniable evidence about the reasons of this phenomenon. And let’s hope that soon some ways to deal with this problem will be found.

Creativity in psychology

A psychodinamic approach to understanding creativity was proposed by Sigmund Freud. He suggested that creativity arises as a result of frustrated desires for fame, fortune and love. However, later he changed his mind.
According to Graham Wallas creative insights may be explained by a process consisting of 5 stages:

1. PREPARATION- focusing individuals' mind on the problem.



2. INCUBATION - problem is internalized into the unconscious mind.



3. INTIMATION - the creative person gets a feeling that a solution is on its way.



4. ILLUMINATION - creative idea goes from preconscious processing into conscious awareness.



5. VERIFICATION - idea is consciously verified, elaborated and than applied.

Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process.

J. P. Guilford claimed that convergent thinking involves aiming for a single solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking is involves creative generations of multiple answers to a problem. Sometimes even term "fluid intelligence" is used when speaking about creativity.

I was surprised but creativity can be measured. The first psychometric approaches were constructed by J. P. Guilford too in 1967. However, in 1974 Torrance developed those tests. Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking involved simple tasks of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:

• Fluency



• Flexibility



• Originality



• Elaboration

In 2005 The Creativity Achievement Questionare was designed and it was shown that it is reliable and valid. It is widely used until these days.

Online broadcasts (self-assessment)

There are many ways to improve listening skills. Recently we have tried one new method - online broadcast listening. So now I am going to overview advantages and disadvantages of this way of listening.
Firstly, it is important to mention that to me it was difficult to find a broadcast of proper length and level of English. However, I found some in this website: www.bbc.co.uk. I have listened broadcasts called “Black type” (about 15min) and “Sweet mother” (about 20min). The first one was about educational problems of black teenagers. There was a discussion if the education system is failing black teenagers or their attitude to education. The second one was about young mothers (schoolgirls). I liked these listening because topics were interesting. Moreover, it was very good that I could read everything what was said. It was important because listening was for native people.
Although it was for native people, there were just a few unknown words. However, speaking was fast so it wasn’t very easy to understand it. I didn’t use dictionary and tried to understand everything from the context – I think I was successful. Some cases were difficult to understand but after listening second time everything became clear. Both broadcasts were listened twice.
Finally, I can say that listening to online broadcasts is an interesting task however, it requires much time and some equipment (for instance, the Internet, speakers and so on). Nevertheless, the fact that tasks like this are useful is undeniable.