'Shell Shock'

Gender and Cultural Differences in Emotion

The gender difference of emotion highly depends on cluture as well. Studies show that women are more emotionally expressive than men. Most clutures, however, raise the men as being the dominant sex, powerful, and strong. Where as women are grown up by believing they are the weaker sex and can be viewed as week. This may effect the study because men may want to hide emotions and be afraid to admit that they are 'weak'.

TO BE CONTINUED...


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Survival Tip #1: Controling Your Emotions

What is emotion? Well look around you, people show it all the time. You may be smiling right now, or may have fear or anxiety about something. Whatever the case, emotion is the way our body expresses what our mind feels. For example, if we take a spider and the a person with arachnophobia and put them together, then the person would show fear as their emotion because they are terrified of spiders. People, you and I, have shown emotion since birth. Emotion characterizes each person apart from each other. Our emotion is our key to who we, as human beings are.

Emotion is a way of survival for our race. Now let me take you back in time. Back to when are first ancestors roamed the earth. Why did our race stand above the rest? One of the main reasons was emotion. Emotion allowed us to work together and interact, in turn allowing us to complete necessary task towards the development of modern creation. We needed to work together in order for food to be fed into our mouths, defend our tribe, build housing, and more things as we began to become more sofisticated.

Our emotion is basically our thoughts expressed through our facial expressions. As we began to mature as a spiecies, our emotion helped determine if people were in need of help, or were sad, happy, and so on. It allowed us to recognize what was initially either a friend or a foe. We still use emotion today both as a weapon and as a shield. Humans have learned to manipulate their facial expressions for beneficial use, others may manipulate their facial expressions to hide the embarrassment of lets say crying, or hide and control their anger. Next time someone stops you in the street, be aware whether they be a friend or foe and whether you can trust them or not.

Alzhemer's: The Slow and Deady Silent Assassin

Alzheimer’s disease is a slow and deadly silent assassin. You can have it in you your whole life, but not be hit by hit until you reach an average age of 65+, however, although rare, there have been cases where the disease has started early for people around the age of 40. It is an illness that has skyrocketed over the past 18 years. 13 years ago only 500,000 people were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but now there have been 5,000,000 people in the US alone with the disease. This is amazing considering how over one century ago the disease was so rare it didn’t even have a name! It wasn’t until Alweiss Alzheimer, the discoverer of Alzheimer’s, and the name giver, came across this deadly illness in 1907.

Alzheimer's symptoms may first show up as memory loss or difficulty performing every day thinking tasks that are things the patient never forgets or does wrong, such as simple math problems, or leaving the car keys in the fridge, or going to work in the middle of the morning. They basically show abnormal behavior and conduct abnormal tasks. This is due to the death of nerve cells in the brain that work in the memory center, primarily the Hippocampus. The ability of these cells to communicate with the rest of the nervous system is impaired. Some of the biological signs of Alzheimer's are the formation of clumps in brain called amyloid plaques, as well as tangled nerve fibers called neurofibrillary tangles. The brain, during Alzheimer’s, initially shrinks. This gives people mood swings, can turn a once peaceful person into a violent being, and a variety of other uncommon properties of the average person contaminated by Alzheimer’s.

There is so far no cure to this horrid illness. The worst thing about this illness, however, is the effect of your loved ones and the people around you who are close and how they have to you go through the disease. ‘I am not dying, I am just disappearing before your eyes.’

Memory Manipulation

In July of 1984, a woman had her house broken into, was sexually assaulted, and had her belongings taken from her. While being sexually assaulted, she studied the man who was doing it to her so she could then lock him up and give him what he deserves. The woman was then brought into questioning as an eyewitness. She gave the police a description of the rapist, which led to the police making her pick from a photo line up. In this line up was a 22-year-old man by the name of Ronald Cotton. The woman told the police that he was the man who had raped her. The question is, did she pick the right suspect?

Ronald was soon brought to the police station for questioning. They asked him where he was on the weekend of the assault. He told them where he was, however, they soon found out he was lying, for Ronald had mistaken the previous weekend with the weekend of the crime. Ronald was found guilty for a crime he did not commit and sentenced to life plus 50 years in prison. His lawyers would not give him another case because, at the time, an eyewitness testimony was the strongest evidence in court. However, one day an inmate was sent to his prison and Ronald thought he looked familiar. It so happens that the new inmate, whose name was Bobby Poole, was convicted for rape. The inmates started confusing Bobby for Ronald left and right. One night, another convict told Ronald that Bobby had admitted to sexually abusing the woman Ronald was accused of raping. Ronald then gets another case and this time Bobby is present. The woman, with the actual rapist in front of her, still accused Ronald. Ronald was then sentenced to 2 life sentences. While this was going on, so was the famous OJ Simpson case, where the use of DNA was being used for one of the first times as evidence. Ronald immediately contacted his lawyers and asked to have a DNA test made. Hidden deep in the evidence room was a single sperm cell that was 10 years old found at the scene of the crime in 1984. This DNA proved Ronald’s innocence. Bobby Poole was the true rapist. Ronald Cotton was then released two days later. He was once again, a free man.

How this could have happened you may ask? Well, it so happens that Bobby Poole was not even in the line up. Therefore the woman’s memory had been altered. This is because the woman had a motive to convict someone. Therefore, the brain tried to pick the person that look the most similar to Bobby Poole. If the brain is not sure on its memory, it will take the new information, in this case the photo line up, and mix it with the old information to make an image closest to the original. If Bobby Poole were in the line up, then the victim would have picked him right away. Studies show that if people in a line up were shown to a victim individually, there is a higher chance that the right person will be picked because the brain doesn’t try and combine all the suspects together to get an approximate match. This case shows that you cant overcome what the brain wants to do.

In my opinion, this type of evidence is unreliable to immediately convict someone for a crime and in proving similar cases like Ronald’s, or any cases for that matter. Yes, it may be good and perhaps even powerful evidence, but I wouldn’t use it as the strongest evidence. People can mistake things very easily and their minds can play tricks on them. Thanks to Ronald Cotton’s innocence, over 230 prisoners have been released due to false conviction over the course of the past decade. Our memory is not written in stone. Therefore, it can be manipulated very easily.