Jenson’s Blog

What I found fascinating about this unit was Barbara Frederickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. It talked about how having positive emotions could have positive snowball effects on our lives and how it could create a cycle. First, having positive emotions could widen novel or new thoughts, activities and relationships. In effect, it could build enduring personal resource characteristics such as skills and knowledge. Which on the long run, could enhance our health, survival rate, and fulfillment in life. Resulting in overall production of more experiences of positive emotions that could create a positive cycle.

I wanted to experience for myself whether the theory made sense or not so I did a personal social experiment wherein I surrounded myself only with positive emotions, regardless of the trigger situations, for one week. Just two days into the experiment, I observed that I was more swift and creative with my jokes when I was around with my friends. Four days into the experiment, which was coincidentally also my Intact Recollection day. I noticed that I was more open and proactive with other Ateneans when we were tasked to form small groups and define what “home” was for us. On the last two days of the experiment, I could immediately note that I was easily delighted with whatever achievement that I had, no matter how small or big it was. After the one week experiment, I must say that I would continue to try my best to surround myself only with positive emotions since I saw the significant change it had on my life.

After taking up “The Feeling Self”, I was able to gain a lot of knowledge about emotions and depression. Some of the key things that I learned was: (1) The process on how our emotions are actually experienced and produced; (2) The distinctive basic emotions; (3) The basic emotions themselves; (4) Display rule; (5) Theories of emotions; (6) Factual statistics about depression, (7) The anatomy of depression, and (8) Doing mode & Being mode.

My personal favorite was learning about doing mode and being mode since I think it would greatly influence how I live my life moving forward. If ever I encounter another problem in the future wherein I could not provide an answer to immediately, the first thing I would do is to switch on my being mode. That is to acknowledge the fact that I’m facing a problem as of the moment and to allow it to affect me temporarily. Consequently, that’s when I would switch on my doing mode, which is to try and find ways to solve the problem. Switching on being mode first before doing mode is crucial because if ever one immediately tried to find a solution to a problem and failed to do so, one would feel like another problem is developing which would cause more frustration and self-doubt.

Being a sneaker-head at this day and age isn’t as easy as being one during the previous 4 or 5 decades simply because of the photo attached above. Before, new sneakers would be released per year. An example would be the Jordan line wherein a new model would be released annually indicated by a number. As of today, the latest model is called the Jordan 34. As for new colorways, it would usually be released either monthly or weekly. In the modern era however, multiple new sneakers and colorways would be releasing almost every day to the point that it would be hard to keep track anymore. That’s where the problem kicks in.

Since new sneakers and colorways are always popping out simultaneously, it made me unaware that my system 2 is sometimes too slow to react and would be overpowered by my system 1, resulting to impulse purchasing. After learning about this lesson, it made me realize that although system 1 would give me the answer that my heart wants, I can never go wrong by giving some extra time for my system 2 to evaluate whether it is right or wrong or whether it is necessary or not.

• 

After learning about the Bioecological Theory, it made me come to realize that my best friend, which is Richmond Chua, had a huge impact on my development as a person in our everyday interactions throughout high school. Through his actions and thoughts, I learned not to be too serious and critical about everything in life since he always mentioned that life is already too complicated.

Though I and Richmond always try to avoid having conflicts, sometimes it is just unavoidable. That’s where the concept of “Self as a Society of Mind” in Globalization kicks in. Since whatever is happening in the real world can also happen in our own minds, everything that we see in the physical world is processed differently for each and every one of us, especially if we come from different family backgrounds.