The observation of the psychophysical state is an important method in behavioral assessment. The increased emphasis on this phenomenon is due, in part, to the growing recognition of the importance of the physiological components of behavioral problems such as depression, anxiety, and many others.
Importance of psychophysical assessment
Behavioral therapists are increasingly involved in the evaluation and treatment of disorders that have traditionally been the focus of medical interventions - cancer, chronic pain, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. The importance of assessing the psychophysical state lies in the fact that many behavioral intervention procedures, such as relaxation training and desensitization, focus in part on changing physiological processes.
Advances in ambulatory monitoring, computerization and other technologies have increased the clinical effectiveness of psychophysiological measurements. Finally, the psychophysiological dimension is easily combined with otherbehavioral assessment methods such as self-monitoring and analog observation. Recognition of the importance of the physiological response mode in behavioral problems suggests the inclusion of electrophysiological and other psychophysiological methods of measurement.
Methods for measuring behavioral evaluation
Electromyographic, electrocardiovascular, electroencephalographic and electrodermal measures are particularly applicable to behavioral assessment with adults. A number of behavioral problems, such as panic disorder, schizophrenic behavior, obsessive-compulsive behavior, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, sleep initiation and maintenance disorders, have physiological components.
Psychophysical assessment is a complex, powerful and useful assessment method. Psychophysiological science tries to understand the relationship between physiological and psychological processes. Psychophysiological assessment is language free and thus transcends cultural, ethnic and age boundaries in a unique way. Depending on their age, children may not be aware of their emotional or cognitive processes and may not have the knowledge to describe them.
Such barriers can be exacerbated in children with clinical disorders that involve impaired communication. Thus, the questionnaire or interview methods may be biased or inappropriate for inferring such information. An important context for understanding the complex features of the psychophysicalstatus can be provided through self-report and behavioral measures, which are often obtained in combination with psychophysiological responses.
Behavioral Research
Behavioral observations and interviews have been weighed heavily in the practice of evaluating children. However, conceptually and statistically, adding psychophysiological variables with sources of measurement error and bias independently of other scoring methods can improve the overall validity and reliability of attention, emotion, and cognition scores.
In addition, the assessment of the psychophysical condition can provide insight into how the underlying physiological mechanisms may be involved in shaping the child's behavior. Moreover, since the regulation of the autonomic nervous system changes during development due to structural and functional changes in the central and peripheral nervous systems, the perspective of understanding changes in developmental behavior in children can be greatly expanded by examining physiological data.
Connection between body and mind
It is no longer a secret that our mental states (emotions, thoughts and feelings) affect our physical he alth, and vice versa, diet, lifestyle and exercise affect our mental well-being. Recently, science has proven that the relationship between the body and the spirit shells plays a significant role in determining our overallwelfare. There is even a certain technique for managing one's own psychophysical state. Pedagogy has several techniques, many of which have been developed to help the mind-body relationship center around calming the mind.
For both children and adults, it is also important to pay great attention to nutrition, exercise and sleep, because all of these together and in the right proportions ensure that our minds will function at the highest possible level. It is also obvious that all mental stress should be kept to a minimum, however, there are still some inevitable situations that make us feel fear, anger, hatred and other negative types of psychophysical state.
Failed public speaking attempt will provoke microphone fear the next time we take the stage. The cultural belief that job interviews are an unpleasant procedure leads us to think about something scary and uncomfortable and exhibit nervous behavioral tendencies, such as biting our nails, fidgeting, lowering our eyes, and so on. The fear of rejection when we enter any social situation makes us anxious and forbids us from being ourselves.
Psychophysical he alth
While diet, exercise, meditation and other methods of relaxing the mind and body can help maintain mental and physical he alth, avoid cases that require treatment. Fortunately, since the mind affects the body andthe body affects the mind, you can consciously change your emotional state by changing your body language. The mental he alth of a child, teenager, or even an adult can often be easily determined by the way they look or behave.
Body language can tell you a lot about your inner state. It would be impossible to find a person who, while being severely depressed, will demonstrate an open and confident body language. In the same way, someone who is in high spirits will not sit and stare gloomily at the floor. This is a real connection between mind and body, and by consciously changing body language, it is possible to change mental states anywhere, anytime, anywhere.
Psychophysics
Psychophysics is the quantitative study of the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. This scientific knowledge is described as the scientific study of the relationship between stimulus and sensation, or, more fully, as the analysis of perceptual processes by examining the effect on subject experience or behavior of systematically changing stimulus properties along one or more physical dimensions. The study of psychophysical states belongs to the general class of methods that can be applied to the study of the perceptual system. This direction has a wide and important practical application.
History
Many classical techniques and theories of psychophysics were formulated in 1860,when Gustav Theodor Fechner published his Elements of Psychophysics in Leipzig. He coined the term "psychophysics", which describes research aimed at relating physical stimuli to contents of consciousness, such as sensations. As a physicist and philosopher, Fechner sought to develop a method that links matter to the mind, linking the public world and a person's personal impression of it. Fechner developed his famous logarithmic scale, now known as the Fechner scale.
Modern approaches to sensory perception
Psychophysicists usually use experimental stimuli that can be objectively measured, such as pure tones that vary in intensity, or lights that vary in brightness. All senses are studied: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and sense of time. Regardless of the sensory area, there are three main areas of study: absolute thresholds, discrimination thresholds, and scaling.
Classic psychophysical methods
Traditionally, three methods have been used to test the perception of subjects when stimuli are detected and differential detection experiments: the limit method, the constant stimulus method, and the tuning method.
- Method of restrictions. In the bottom-up limit method, some property of the stimulus starts at such a low level that the stimulus cannot be detected,then this level is gradually increased until the participant reports that he knows about it. For example, if an experiment is testing the minimum amplitude of a sound that can be detected, the sound is too soft and gradually gets louder. In the top-down method of limits, this is the reverse. In each case, the threshold is considered to be the level of the stimulus property at which the stimuli were just detected.
- Method of constant stimuli. Instead of being presented in ascending or descending order, in the persistent stimulus method, the levels of a particular stimulus property are not associated with one trial to the next, but are presented randomly. This prevents the subject from predicting the level of the next stimulus and therefore reduces habituation and anticipation errors.
- Setting method. It requires the subject to control the level of the stimulus and change it until it is barely noticeable against background noise, or is the same as the level of another stimulus. This is repeated many times. This is also called the mean error method. In this method, the observer himself controls the magnitude of the variable stimulus, starting with a variable that is noticeably larger or smaller than the standard one, and he changes it until he is satisfied with the subjectivity of the two. The difference between the stimulus variables and the standard is recorded after each adjustment, and the error is tabulated for significant series. At the end, the mean value is calculated, which gives the average error, which can be taken as a measure of sensitivity.
Adaptive psychophysical methods
Classical experimental methods often claim to be inefficient. This is because the psychometric threshold is usually unknown before testing, and much data is collected at psychometric function points that provide little information about the parameter of interest, usually the threshold. Adaptive ladder procedures (or the classical tuning method) can be used such that the selected points cluster around the psychometric threshold. However, the cost of this efficiency is that there is less information about the shape of the psychometric function.
Psychophysical education
It is important to recognize that learning is not just about the mind, but about the whole person. There is so much emphasis in school these days on the study of the subject (as opposed to, for example, the study of the arts) that it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to think about the functioning, development, and psychophysical well-being of a child or adult in a truly holistic way.
But a child does not learn simply with his brain, but perceives information as a psychophysical whole. But an education that does not understand the workings of this general system lacks the most fundamental knowledge that we should have, since all education must be based on a solid foundation of self-knowledge.
The Higher Art of Education
Imagine a class full ofchildren. There is a teacher at the head of the room, and the children are engaged in various activities: drawing or writing letters, playing, socializing. These children are not 4 or 5, they are 10 and 12, 14 and 16 years old. They are not just engaged in activities, but draw attention to themselves in a way that almost never happened in the classroom of general education schools. Their teacher is also concerned not only with what they are learning, but also with the quality of how they participate in their activities, because she (or he) is aware of the whole system of the child. That is, the teacher also cares about how children do what they do, about the learning process, as well as about goals.
A new approach to child development
How a child behaves is fundamental to he alth, development and learning. Education should not be focused on external actions and achievements, but on mastery of oneself as "the central instrument on which all learning depends." In addition to being extremely practical in helping children solve basic learning problems, this approach leads to full development as blind habit is replaced by intellectual self-awareness, giving the child self-command as the basis of all learning processes and as the basis for a completely new and intelligent approach. to learning.
The state of mental and physical he alth of preschoolers is of great importance. Perhaps the first thing we should look at in helping children master themselves is the process of breaking down skill into discrete steps so that instead offocus on the end goal, we could master the intermediate steps in the learning process and thus pay more attention to how we do something than to what we do. Even something as simple as swinging a tennis racquet can be broken down into five or six different elements if carefully studied, but we are rarely given the opportunity to master these steps on our own or even understand that these different elements exist.
The second skill element is the "receptive" component. If you've ever watched someone learn how to hit a moving ball with a racket, you know that a teacher's main concern is to show how to swing the racket correctly as the basis for hitting the ball. But how can a student hit the ball if he doesn't see it for the first time, or if the process of swinging the racket actually distracts the student from his observation?
The psychophysical state of the sports form of organisms is such a state of athletes, which implies a holistic reaction of the individual to external and internal stimuli, aimed at achieving a useful result. It may seem obvious, but many of us have been given the opportunity to learn to simply see the ball first as a basis for hitting. Most skills are actually made up of many receptive components like this, and if we are to be effective, we need to take the time to identify and learn those elements.
The third element is coordination, which is by far the most difficult element to learnskill. For example, learning how to swing a tennis racquet is not easy, most students are generally unaware of the fact that swinging a tennis racquet requires coordinated squatting and weight shifting.
All of these elements fall under the general category of process focus, which raises an even more fundamental issue, namely how schools approach learning. If a child is to learn through attention to process, then the methods on which all learning is based both in and out of school must be considered in kind.
The psychophysical state of a person - what is it?
The physical and mental he alth of a person depends on his ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. For example, the subjective factors of a student's psychophysical state before an exam are fear of tests, relationships with a host teacher, previous successes or failures. Some cope with the overstrain of adaptive mechanisms easily, others more difficult. In more severe cases, this can lead to depression or other painful conditions. The impact of environmental factors on a person is subject to the active participation of his psyche. Here, objective factors of the student's psychophysical state come into play, for example, the level of his preparation.
Psychophysical approach to education
In the past century or so, mankind has made great strides in expanding knowledge of child development, especially in the areas of emotional andcognitive development. Two hundred years ago there was little understanding of the importance of emotional development in a child. Today there are quite complex models that describe how a child develops emotionally. There is also a greater understanding of cognitive development and its fundamental importance in learning. Now there is a lack of understanding of the child as a whole organism, acting, moving, and without this, a disembodied, incomplete concept of development is formed, which, despite advances in this area, is still rather archaic due to a lack of knowledge about the biological foundations of a functioning child.
The psychophysical state of a university student or a student in high school before the test, or a job seeker at an interview - all these are examples of negative states, the reasons for which can be very different. However, it is possible to overcome such conditions. From childhood, it is important to acquire such skills as self-control, adequate self-esteem and self-knowledge. The psychophysical state of a student before the final exam is the totality of all his previous experience, it is the result of how strong his values are, whether he has the ability to concentrate, whether he knows how to study and live more relaxed, whether he has a he althy lifestyle and knows how to he maintains balance in everyday situations.
