Stephanie Terando
January 20, 2013
Honors Biology 9
Period 4
Science Fair Research Paper People spend thousands of dollars a year on food, trying to get the best food for the least amount of money. The experiment I conducted tests if a person’s subconscious mind matches the price of food to the food’s quality. By using the Placebo Effect, I told the test participants that three bowls of the same ice cream were all of a different price; the subjects then filled out a questionnaire about the three bowls of ice cream with just the knowledge of its’ price and how it tasted. Lev Vygotsky grew up in Russia in 1896. Even though he graduated from law school, he chose to not make law his profession, and instead became a teacher. Vygotsky was a firm supporter of the Russian Revolution, and wrote an article in 1930, “The Socialist Alteration of Man.” In this book, he stated his opinion on how a transformation of society was needed to become more beneficial. He was very adamant on forming a “Marxist Psychology.” He applied this way of thinking towards discovering the nature of human psychology.
Vygotsky’s early work at Moscow State University confirmed his view of the social plasticity of human psychology. The warfare of the Russian revolution left many victims suffering from a variety of somatic and psychological traumas. Vygotsky worked with these patients and saw that many of these traumas could be treated with social artifacts. Braille and sign language were obvious social artifacts that helped compensate for physical impairments in vision and hearing. Social support in the form of direct aid, guidance, and encouragement also helped compensate for physical and psychological disabilities. Socially mediated compensations enabled patients to engage in psychological functions such as reading, communicating, reasoning, and remembering (Vygotsky & Luria, 1930/1993, pp. 213-218). Tone deafness can be successfully treated by teaching individuals to recognize sounds. Individuals coached to prescribed tones, thereby matching their vocalization to the tones, were, after two six seasons, able to more accurately hear the tones (Rather, 1991, p. 212)
Stephen Krashen was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1941. Krashen got a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Linguistics Department where he concluded with his idea of the Language Acquisition.
Language Acquisition refers to the assimilation of natural, intuitive, subconscious result of interaction in real situations of human interaction in the foreign language and culture, in which the student participates as an active individual process environments. It is similar to the process of assimilation of the mother tongue by children; process that produces practical and functional ability on the spoken language and not theoretical knowledge, develop familiarity the phonetic characteristics of the language, its structure and its vocabulary, is responsible for the oral understanding, the capacity, for creative communication, and identifying cultural values. (Krashen, 1987)
The Placebo Effect was an idea that originated by H.K. Beecher. He began to take test where he would give sick people sugar pills and tell them it was a cure for their disease. He then took notes on the percent of patients that became well again due to the sugar pill, and the percent of patients that did not become well again. Researchers began to question his methods, and argued that the placebo had no evidence of being the reason the patients became well again. H.K. Beecher then started conducting new experiments to see how a person’s health could improve with no actual medical treatment and an inactive placebo. His studies were of low quality, and left people to the assumption that the active placebos were the cause of the health improvement. There are some people who believe that the placebo effect is based on all psychology.
A person’s beliefs and hopes about a treatment, combined with their