Jimmy Rizzo
Staff Writer
Psychology club observes motives of killers and teachers a rat to learn when to push down a lever by flashing a light.
“Our curriculum for the club is pretty flexible, but our main focus is awareness on things like the effects of drugs/alcohol, depression, bullying and we want to get kids more interested in psychology,” said psychology club supervisor Jonathan Petter.
Psychology club meets every Wednesday from 7:30 to 7:50 a.m. in room 316 with Petter. Around 25 people attend the club, but no freshmen are allowed because of mature content like the Freudian stages, oral, anal and gender phase.
Petter said,” These aren’t sexually related at all, but younger kids might laugh or giggle at these words. We’re trying to approach these things from a mature standpoint.”
Petter added, “We also discuss things like people who think they’re hearing voices, and if we’re watching something about these people we don’t want someone laughing at them.”
The main curriculum of psychology club is depression awareness, drug awareness, and recreating experiments like the Skinner box, which is a box used for animal learning. It helps the animal learn by giving it rewards when it does something right. Eventually it will learn to always do the task correctly.
Petter said, “It’s just like giving a kid five dollars for doing the dishes. Once they learn they will get money they’ll be more inclined to do the dishes.”
Normal activities are thing like talking about stuff in the media and talking about effects of drugs on the brain. Their main focus drug is heroine and they will be doing heroin awareness projects like passing out flyers that will talk about the effects of heroin mentally and physically.
Petter added, “We discussed things about the shooting in Arizona. The media is blaming it on schizophrenia, but schizophrenics rarely act out in violence. Instead of instantly blaming it on a mental disease we try to figure out actual motives the person might’ve had.”
“Some likely motives for the Arizona shooting were probably someone pulling strings, and getting the boy to do that.”
Juanita Bell, psychology club president, said, “We are going to try and do things like movie nights, we’re also getting a pet rat for our skinner box.”
Their funds are going to be from bake sales and other fundraisers.
“Anyone who is mildly interested in psychology should come to room 316 and check out what we do,” Petter said.
