Diary Today I completed my first lesson here. It did help with my writing. My problem identified by the teacher is like what our professor said " curve of knowledge". I will try to explain my ideas to my friend before writing next time. I hope this will help.

developmental psychology 2 Today we learned baby's sensation and perception. First, we talked about five senses : vision, audition, smell, taste and touch. For vision, it is surprising that newborns are legally blind. For example, when they see at distance at 6m is roughly equivalent to the level of detail that an adult can see at 180m. Additionally, infants will gaze one thing and be difficult to move their gaze from that thing, which is called 'sticky fixation'. Infants born with immature visual function and they are maturing along their growth. For the audition, similar to vision, the finest sound they can hear is around four times louder than the finest sound that an adult can detect. Newborns also will orient their head towards the source of sounds like adult. Therefore, they have the ability to understand the multisensory events that stimulate more than one sensory system. The most interesting senses are the smell and taste. Newborns seem to have preference to sweetness because when they are fetus, they swallow the amniotic fluids which are sweet. Moreover, they prefer particular flavours of amniotic fluids which take on flavours from food eaten by mother. And this can translate into food preference once the child is born. In terms of touch, massage for infants can stimulate the release of hormones in the brain that regulate growth and metabolism. Why do humans have brain? Because we need to move and act on the environment. Like plants, they have no brain so they cannot move.

New course Today we started a new course named developmental psychology. It is a really interesting one since it it related to our own development. At the first lecture, we learned how to test babies, which should be a difficulty because babies will not answer specific questions and they are seldom controlled. One of the experiment impressed me. The experimenter used fence to enclose a babe. Then he showed different things to grab the baby's attention above the fence. The result was that the baby showed more interests in human faces due to a longer time staring faces. We also talked about nature vs. nurture debate. Some argued that humans were predisposed by genes and environment had no effect on humans. However, for the nurturists, they argued that humans were born like "a blank sheet" and all skills were learned from outside. We can say both of two opinions are too naive and too extreme today. The most convincing idea is that there are predispositions for some skills (e.g. language) but only appropriate environment can trigger them. Psychology is exciting, isn't it?

Today Today I went out to have lunch with my friends. We went to a Chinese restaurant and ordered 4 dishes. However, I got a question about ordering : how to call someone to take an order? Calling "excuse me" or something else? I am in the UK, anyone can give me an answer?

About my psychology study It is so exciting that I find this place! This is a review of my study last teaching block. Feel free to correct my writing. I have learned foundation to cognitive psychology and social psychology last teaching block and they were interesting. I was a beginner of psychology so I needed to check a great amount of new words at the beginning. The most impressing topic was about memory. My professor talked about some mnemonic techniques, including chunking, imagery memory, organizational structure and so on. I started to use some of them to memorize something. For example, when I was in panic to prepare my exam, I linked some terms with characters from comedies or movies. Then I would give each term (character) some characteristics to help my memory. One example for chunking was OCEAN, the Big Five personality. O=openness to experience, C=conscientiousness, E=extroversion, A=agreeableness, N=neuroticism. For my cognitive psychology coursework, I chose 'language relativity' as my topic. However, I was interested in it, I only got 11/20. About my social psychology, we learned some cases such as mental disorders, including GAD(generalised anxiety disorder), OCD (obsessional-compulsive disorder) and the most exciting one, dissociative identity disorder. I am sure some of you have seen "Identity". DID is similar to this. Similarly, I needed to choose a topic as my coursework and I chose "prejudice". Unfortunately, I got the same mark as my cognitive one. Anyway, I am going to practice my writing from now! I will try to keep writing and correcting. Good evening every one!

My diary Dear my diary, This is the first time I come here. Please correct my grammar or other problems. Yesterday I just got my essay mark and I felt worried about it. My comments said, poor language and unclear sentences. I have been in UK for one year and I hope I can get used to the life here. Formal writing is so difficult and I have no idea how to improve it. What do you think? Do you think practicing IELTS writing will help?