Beyond going Dutch

Being a Dutch psychology student at a Dutch university (Leiden University, the Netherlands), doesn’t mean the study is completely in Dutch as well. However, the lectures are being told in Dutch mainly for the bachelor phase, most of the textbooks are in English. And although it is a little hard sometimes to fully understand the material it is just what I like about studying, the universal feeling that is coming with it. I’m probably not fluent in English and never will be because outside the faculty there’s no real need for me to practice any other language than my mother tongue. Except for conversations with the few English speaking friends. So, feel free to leave a comment when I am making a huge mistake in expressing my thoughts here, in a grammar way or overall. The reason why I am blogging here is because of the readers of the Dutch blog I’m writing weekly. I publish that blog on Wednesday nights (local time) and one of my favorite readers commented last time that she wishes after reading it would be Wednesday again the next day. I consider that as a big compliment and because I indeed want to write more often I thought of giving it a try with a second blog on another day of the week. Why in English then? Because the stats of my first blog are telling me that almost 50% of my readers are from the United States of America, Russia, Germany, and Belgium together. I won’t distinguish between those four countries because I like the contradiction in it. Probably those readers are Dutch oriented in a way because I can’t imagine anyone would use a translator for my blog. Besides, I like to expand my horizons and therefore I aim for a bigger audience. One last point is that in my opinion the only way to become more fluent is to keep on practicing. Actually selfish but hopefully entertaining as well.

At the moment I am in my third year. This is also supposed to be the last year of the bachelor phase, or undergraduate phase as it is in international perspective. I’m willing to graduate at the end of 2012, with only a delay of six months. The course I mainly participate in now is the bachelor project, very time consuming but worth it because eventually this brings together every aspect from the study so far from A to Z. Under supervision of a professor we are working in a small group together for several months and doing real research. That means departing from a research question and a hypothesis to testing people in the computer labs and analyzing the data they provide as a result from their tests. The two other courses I participate in at this moment, however interesting, did not really have my full attention until last week. I am ashamed to admit that only because the exams for these two are in a very short time I felt I couldn’t avoid seriously starting anymore. Emotion and Cognition is the first, about, how obvious, the science of emotion. The second, although sounding intriguing is actually a little horrifying, Sexology because like almost everything in psychology courses it is mainly about abnormalities. The lectures are very early on Tuesday mornings and are spiced up with Powerpoint slides of, never mind, I won’t go into that subject here because it may be early in the morning for some readers as well.

Emotion is a subject I am very interested in. And so is cognition. The combination of those two subjects is not so obvious, as you might expect. Some people in this field argue that emotion evolves from an ancient part of the brain that is therefore not really connected with the neocortex, which is responsible for most cognitive aspects of us human beings. Supposing that emotions are mainly involuntary like ones heart rate or breathing. That approach seems plausible in explaining why therapies like EMDR or Somatic Experiencing work well where talking fails in the case of trauma. I haven’t made my mind up about that yet because the course description says to address the interaction of human emotion and cognition. Interaction almost immediately brings an image of two non-parallel lines into my mind as a result of the endless statistics courses in this study. In a statistical way interaction means that the effect of one variable is being influenced by a second variable or vice versa. Anyhow, I should better return to my textbook about that and prepare for the coming exam as good as I can instead of following my silly creative bubble. Although, one never know what may come from following one’s heart and it would be nice anyway to make someone looking forward to Sundays as well.