Mid-Term Paper Assignment: Essay #1

Psychology is an academic field that uses the scientific method to study the human mind and behavior processes. Psychologists are interested and seek to understand, predict and explain how humans think, act and feel. For my mid-term paper I chose to conduct an interview in which I developed a case history for each person whom I interviewed. I interview two people, one whom I knew like the palm of my hand and one whom I knew casually.
My first interviewee has asked to leave her name unknown. She is a young girl that attends the High School for Art and Design. She is a junior and loves to draw and paint. This interview was conducted in a Starbucks in Union Square. It is approximately 2:30 in the afternoon. This young girl is my sister, we grew up together since we have the same parents. I find the need to protect her. This interview was a new experience for both of us since it was formally asked that she answered the questions truthfully and she concentrated in the questions that were being asked. She described herself as being talented, a leader, and unfiltered. She believes that her talent was not genetic but something she learned and got better over time. She knew she had a talent when her fellow classmates, friends, and teachers acknowledged that her drawing were better than the typical person at her age. She remembers being as young as four years old and attempting to draw faces and actual pictures when her rest of her friends were drawing stick figures. At that point in her life she knew that she had a talent but also knew that she was not going to get better unless she kept pushing herself to become better. She described that memory as a definite factor and contribution of her now existing talent. As we continued and got deeper in the interview she described she loved to incorporate her ideas to a project and was open minded to everything in life. She said since she had the influence of her sisters and we grew up very closely, and we always fought to be the leader in anything we did. She believes that this trait is genetic since she describes that both her parents are always fighting to be the leaders of everything they do. She seeked every opportunity to become the leader of group projects within the classroom. She describes that these leadership skills were just inserted into her blood and that’s simply who she is. Unfiltered in her terms means basically she states what’s on her mind seeking that people acknowledge what she says. She’s always been like this as far as she recalls. But she said that while she was young she was bullied for being different. As she recalls this story, her face expression and posture changed and she looks sad, regretful, and disturbed. As she reflects on her experience she states this was a major factor in shaping her to be who she is today. As she describes all those incidents I have came to the conclusion that this trait was a little bit of both. It is a trait that was learned through the hardships of her life and is something that she was born with. She describes she’s happy of who she bacame because of all her life experiences but is unhappy with the road that brought her here. She states that if she could go back in time she would never have seeked to stop eating to obtain the skinny figure everyone seemed to tell her she had to be. She describes all those night that traumatized her to make that choice. She regrets it because of the effects that it caused to her body. In conclusion these traits are the traits she feels are what shaped her the most.
My second interviewee had no problem if i kept his name. Cris Ortiz, a college freshman at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I met this young man about two years ago but we never spoken until this summer. I know Cris because his cousins are my close friends. This interview was divided into two parts. The first part of the interview was conducted through Facetime and the second