Awe Expands the Perception of Time

this article did experiments to place people under conditions of awe. These conditions were compared to a control group that was primed to feel happiness. It showed that people who experienced awe felt like they had more time which in turn led to prosocial behaviors like donating money/time. This article helped me come up with a few new research questions to explore:

Is sense of time a mediating factor between awe and behavior?

Are there other factors that explain behavioral changes that result from feelings of awe?

What are some benefits and costs of feeling like one has more time?

Does knowing that one is in an “awe” condition affect the results of an experiment? do I have to create a sneaky experience of awe to get valid results?

Would we see the same results if the authors had used a negative kind of awe?

Hopefully by reading more of the literature on this topic I can start to answer these questions and find a more direct question to answer with my own research.

The book I am reading now, Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology, is pure gold! This is exactly the kind of secondary resource I needed to jump start my research. Every chapter is from various professors, educators, and historians about using comic books as historical artifacts to provide “insight into political, social, and cultural changes in the United States” (12), among other things. The introduction also indicates that the book will provide a good factual overview of the comic book (and even the graphic novel) world.

My handwritten notes on the introduction and first chapter of Matthew Pustz’s anthology are attached. I have really enjoyed the work so far and foresee myself reading through it rather quickly!

Hogg et al. – 2017 – Social identity The role of self in group process

This time I took my notes by hand, which really helped me think more in depth about what I was reading. Although this article was short, it gave me some good background information about representative democracy. It discussed our modern democracy in terms of mass media, but I plan to look at social media, specifically Twitter. Despite not discussing Twitter, the article was helpful and served as a good starting point for my research.  It did not, however, address my question of how social media has impacted representative democracy.

This exercise was helpful because it forced me to think about my question in terms of history. It made me think beyond my research question, and ask in what ways technology has changed democracy and in what ways will it continue to change democracy. Is there any way to check the increased power of media? This new style of note taking challenges me to stop and think, rather than simply copy.

Honors Notes

Below are my notes which I took on the article titled “School Principals’ Leadership Style and Teachers’ Subjective Well Being at School”. The article is focused on exploring the extent to which a principal’s leadership style moderates various teacher variables such as teacher burnout, job insecurity and others.

Copying notes on freehand allowed me to take a closer look at the reading and some of its pitfalls when applying this to my own research. One of the major shortcomings of this article is that it focuses specifically on Eastern European countries. Its limited scope presents a challenge to applying similar approaches to my study because nearly all of the countries in the study have more homogeneous demographics than the communities of which I hope to focus. Additionally, the article does not focus on student performance or outcomes which I hope to also examine. However, it did provide me with a useful framework to guide the structure of my paper, specifically regarding explanation of various leadership styles at the beginning and clearly demonstrating the instruments used to measure those leadership styles such as the MLQ.

My notes differed as I was taking them this time from how they normally are because I found myself questioning everything I read. I was constantly wondering and making side notes for other things to look up during the reading. This ranged from how credible was the source, to whether or not I personally bought the argument of the author that was trying to convince me. I was careful to include page numbers and track the source where I got it, as well as note where I am in the research process so that later on, when I come back to these notes, I will see that I have hardly done any research so far (and if there is conflicting data later on, this definitely deserves a second look). However, my notes were similar in that I like taking most of my notes by had, especially when reading about things that I’m not completely familiar with.

I chose to read this article because it is a broader picture of my overall topic which I think is good to read at this point. I am trying to widen my scope before narrowing in. This article helped me gain a bit more perspective and brought up a few topics (gender and leadership in the U.S., attitudes and actions of women and the responses to these actions, etc) which reaffirmed the major questions I have right now about the world.

The book I am starting with for my research on heroes is On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History ( 2013) by Thomas Carlyle with essays by a number of contributors. I chose this work to start because the title repeatedly popped up on preliminary theoretical resource searches. After reading the introduction, I know why: It argues and explores what has been termed the “Great Man” theory (i.e., history is defined by great men).

Although I think it could still be beneficial to read thiswork for my research, I don’t think it’s best to right now. The introduction provided a good overview of what Carlyle’s lectures contain, and at this point that’s all I really need from the book. That said, my next step will probably be to read Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology. I need to wade around in comic book history and cultural before progressing into the modern-day superhero franchise (while engaging with more theoretical texts along the way).

As for my notes, I have uploaded a photo of them because I take notes best the old-fashioned way: by hand. I find that I retain what I read way better when I do so, and it keeps all of my notes (apart from supplement materials–which I keep, in addition to my notebook, in a research binder) together.

You’ll notice that I use different colored ink; I use blue ink for direct quotations and black ink for general notes, that way when I am going back through my notes I can pull quotes easily. You might also notice that my pages are numbered; my high school chemistry teacher taught us to treat notebooks much like books with table of contents and page numbers, and this method has helped keep my pages-upon-pages of notes organized and navigable. I also have the habit of writing key words in the left-hand margins of my notes, and major concepts in the upper margins. If a note or quote is particularly important, I star it. Section headings or chapters I put in brackets, and I always put the title and year of what I am reading along with author(s) on top of the first line of every corresponding page, often with (continued) in parenthesis if the notes area continuation of the same work.

Notes_Voter Strategy

Taking notes on a separate document was certainly a new method of note taking for me, but after my brief experience with it thus far, I can tell that it will work quite well for me. Traditionally, I have taken notes through highlighting/underlining, with some notes in the margin. While this system might be adequate if I only need to return to a reading once for class discussion, it would be inadequate for full research because flipping through a reading to find the quote or note that I’m looking for over and over again while writing a paper would waste considerable time and become quite tiresome. However, with my notes in a single document, I can quickly look through the document, without having to skim past all the things I don’t need, and easily find what I am looking for.

The single downside to this method is that I might not pull as many things out of the reading to write down as I might with a highlight or underline. Admittedly, I often underline much more than I actually need to, but I also find that underlining forces me to read an important piece of the reading a second time, which helps me to absorb the material, even if I don’t use that exact piece later in a paper. My hope is that I will be reading my sources for my research more than once anyway, so I will not need the practice of underlining to help me read the material more than once for better comprehension.

391c2317d60fcde56fb3968146fc7e2efb68 I highlighted and made notes throughout this article. it is about the different types of awe and how they are experienced. It analyzes awe from many different sources including nature, art, and extraordinary human abilities. Usually when I read scientific articles like this I read it all the way through and make a few bullet notes at the end. In this article, I highlighted and made notes about things I could do further research into as I go along. I also highlighted some sources and citations I think will be helpful further down the road as well. Instead of strictly reading to get this gist of this article, I think I am more using this article as a stepping stone to many other sources of information that will be helpful for my research.

Abrams and Hogg – 2017 – Twenty years of group processes and intergroup rel

I highlighted content in the PDF file and marked some important articles to look up later since this article is an overview of a journal. Normally, when reading articles, I don’t pay much attention to references in the end, but this time they became one of the most important things where I paid attention.