Event

The Department of Behavioural Sciences hosts a seminar by Dr. Shirin Haque-Copilah, titled  “A Psychophysics Relationship For The Subjective Experience of Past, Present And Future Psychological Events.” This seminar will take place on Thursday 24^th March, 2011, from 8:30-10:30 am, at the Dean’s Meeting Room, Faculty of Social Sciences.

Abstract

This is the second seminar on this study of impact of life events, where the wave hypothesis was used to model the theoretical basis of the experience of life events in the first exposition. In this seminar we quantify the data obtained based on that hypothesis.

In the Caribbean, it is common practice to use textbooks for teaching Psychology based on studies that have been conducted in the developed world. For example, the scale of the significant life events listed in the famous Holmes & Rahe (HR) (1967) study. This occurs in part because not enough studies have been conducted in the Caribbean to formulate a substantive body of teaching material.  Yet the culture of different regions will play a significant part in the way the impact of life events is perceived. This would hold true in the Caribbean region as well. We conducted such a study on the impact of life events in Trinidad and Tobago.  The study was conducted in two parts. The first part was open ended where participants listed significant events in their lives and their impact at the time of occurrence and at the present time. From this, a list of 26 of the most significant life events in the region was drawn up. This was found to be at variance from the HR scale, for our region. As an example, abortion is listed quite high on the scale as a significant life event in the Caribbean but does not appear on the HR study. The second part of the study sought to quantify the manner in which the life events decayed with time. We found there to be an exponential decay where the impact of life events can be defined by a 'half life' factor. The impact of the event reduces with time but does not go to zero. The additive effect of more than one significant life event is also explored.