Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Two Women in a Lab

Assignment 9 Option 1

I chose to assess the grainy black and white photo of two women in a laboratory for ten minutes. I wrote 409 words mostly about the testing of a new drug intended to help women achieve more pleasurable sex.
My LIWQ scores are as follows:

LIWC dimension
Need for Achievement 7.58 (mine) 5.8 (male average) 5.6 (female average)
Need for Affiliation 0.73- 1.1- 1.3
Need for power 2.93- 1.7- 1.8
Self-references (I, me, my)0.00- 0.5- 0.8
Social words 13.45- 11.4- 12.0
Positive emotions 1.22- 1.8- 2.1
Negative emotions 1.22- 1.5- 1.6
Big words (> 6 letters) 26.16- 18.7- 17.7

Need for Achievement. My results show that I wrote significantly more about achievement-related themes than "the typical person."

Need for Affiliation. Apparently, I don't pay much attention to human relationships. I mentioned in the story that the two women were student and teacher, but didn't provide any insights to their intimate encounters. I also mentioned the student having a sexual encounter with her boyfriend, but I guess this simulation categorized that as more physical than affiliation.

Need for Power. I am a power-hungry beast. Even in a ten minute creative story, I needed someone to clearly be in control. I scored well about the average in this output.

Self-references: While people who use a high rate of self-references tend to be more insecure, nervous, and possibly depressed, and honest, I think it's unlikely to have self-references in a made-up story about two women in a photo. I also think it would be considered self-centered and egotistical to put yourself as a character in the story. I'm happy(?) my score was very low, indicating that I'm not a basket-case.

Social words: I was writing a story about two people. OF COURSE I was going to use social words. Duh. Also, of course I'm outgoing and well-connected to others-->I am a Facebook whore.

Positive emotion words: I think I may have used a few happy/good words in my brilliant piece of literature, but I don't think my creativity indicates anything about my optimism or mood.

Negative emotion words: Similarly, I don't attribute my use of sad/bad words to my pessimism or anxiety.

Big words (words with more than 6 letters): Essentially, I am a genius. I chose to use big words because they are more fun to use than smaller words. I am so so smart and got a perfect score on my SATs and tomorrow I'm being inducted into MENSA. Unfortunately, I'm not very happy about that because I'm distant and have no emotions.

While this assignment was fun and entertaining, it honestly wasn't very indicative of anything. I wrote whatever came off the top of my head and I even had to be reminded to keep typing because I got a little bored with my own made up story.
According to Keila and Skillicorn, my few (zero actually) self-references is supposed to show my "dissasociative" nature. This is dubious to me because the story didn't lend itself to any opportunity to say "me, my, or I." I counted my exclusive words and I had a few, and my story was "less cognitively complex" (it was mostly gibberish), but my story was COMPLETELY fabricated. According to previous research, in 409 words, I shouldn't have had very many (if any at all). Additionally, my task scores don't match up with research regarding negative emotion words; I was well below average, even though I made the story up out of thin air.

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