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My Interview with Dr. Loeb

I interviewed psychology Professor Roger Loeb in his office at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. During my interview with Dr. Loeb, I noticed many beautiful pieces of art and souvenirs that decorated his office. I could tell Dr. Loeb loves to travel; each piece of art in his office came from a different country. He had a lamp from India, a stuffed animal parrot from Mexico, a beautiful quilt from Peru hung on his wall, and hanging from his ceiling I saw the most beautiful, colorful butterfly kite from China. I also saw many pictures of him and his family members, showing how family oriented he is. I also saw a picture of him smiling with a group of children from a different country; I could tell that he likes children. Professor Loeb is a very nice man; he smiles all the time he has a gentle, yet assertive presence. He is very knowledgeable about the field of psychology, his gray hair symbolizes his wisdom but he has very few wrinkles, he has a young spirit and is very down to earth. He is a very passionate teacher and he knows how to relate to his students and I think that is a very good quality to have as a professor.
Dr. Loeb has been a psychology professor for almost forty years but he was not as enthusiastic about teaching at the start of his career. He just sort of “fell into it”, as he describes. Even though he applied to graduate programs in psychology, his PhD is not in psychology; he actually doesn’t have any degrees in psychology. His PhD is in human development with a major in child and family psychopathology.
Through his first years of college Dr. Loeb had trouble making up his mind and what field he wanted to pursue; he studied political science at Cornell University, then discovered that he was no longer interested in being a pre-law major. He took a vocational interest test and the test suggested he be a lawyer, accountant or a social science teacher. He did not want to be a lawyer or an accountant, and at that time he did not even know what social science meant, but he figured it had something to do with sociology, so he took a sociology classes and loved it. He then decided to be a sociology/anthropology major, however, by the end of his junior year he started to prefer psychology.
When Dr. Loeb applied to the graduate program at Cornell University, he expressed that he was not interested in teaching. He wanted to work with and research emotionally disturbed children and families, but they offered him a teaching assistantship anyway; he accepted the offer because it was good pay. He was so nervous about teaching his first class, because he didn’t really want to teach. He did not prepare for his classes and did not teach by any of the readings, he changed the classes into discussion sections. “…the students started asking me questions and amazingly enough I knew the answers. Others I would turn into discussion questions, others I would say ‘that’s so important; I’ll get back to you next week’.” He said with a smirk. “The cutting edge therapies, many of which are biochemical, I barely understand and find confusing as do I think many students and I don’t think that’s really necessary in a first-time undergraduate class.”
When he noticed how engaged the student were in his class, he became excited. “They wrote everything down that I said, and they laughed at my poor jokes, and they all paid attention, and I thought ‘this is great! I love this!’” The light bulb went on, and Dr. Loeb changed his entire career plan at that point, during his second year of graduate school. He never wavered since then, he’s been teaching full time for thirty-nine years and still loves his job.
When I asked Dr. Loeb what interests him the most about psychology, he answered, “Why people behave the way they do, what it is particularly in their backgrounds that make them do these things like: want to learn or not want to learn, to be shy versus outgoing, submissive or domineering. My particular interest is parent/ child interaction, and I think that comes from my own childhood experiences; issues of control, issues of self-esteem. And I’m interested in those same topics applied to special groups.”
Dr. Loeb has done research with regular children, as well as children kids with sensory impairments, visual or hearing impairments and gifted children. He is mostly interested in gender differences; it is a variable he likes to study. “…and reflecting my sociology background, I’m also very impressed with the power of social class differences. Even within what America calls ‘broadly middle class’, the difference between lower middle class and middle to upper middle class, there are substantial differences.” Over the years Dr. Loeb has also become very interested in evaluating the impact of education. “…since I’ve been doing it for so long, I’m curious as to what educators actually accomplish. And I’m not so interested in what they accomplish intellectually or academically, but what changes they bring about in their students’ values, attitudes and approaches to life.”
Not only has Dr. Loeb been a professor for thirty-nine years, he was also a part-time practicing psychologist for a number of years. He was a therapist in graduate school, and he worked in a variety of settings. The first place he worked was in a program for dealing with mentally retarded children, he also ran parent groups for the parents of those children. Dr. Loeb ran parent groups for parents of children suffering from schizophrenia as well. In Michigan, he worked in a private clinic as a therapist for individuals, families and groups. Dr. Loeb found that the more he practiced therapy, the more he realized that he made the right choice in being a teacher. Dr. Loeb has no interest in being a therapist anymore but he does teach therapeutic assessment techniques to his students.
When I asked why he didn’t like being a therapist, Dr. Loeb answered, “A friend of mine, who is an excellent therapist, says ‘To be a good therapist, you have to be nosey.’ I think I wasn’t nosey enough. I am nosey about my friends; but people I didn’t know, I found I just wasn’t that interested. I also found it frustrating working with kids when I didn’t have access to their parents. And with adults, I found it frustrating because what seemed to happen over the months of seeing them…they didn’t seem to make a lot of progress; the same old issues kept coming up. The only thing that seemed to change is they seemed to become more dependent on me as a therapist, which was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish; and that is to make them independent. It’s very tough, I think you need a special kind of personality that I don’t have for being a good therapist.” He told me after seeing his clients, he was much happier to see his students.
Dr. Loeb started teaching at the University of Michigan- Dearborn in 1978. He teaches many courses, three every semester. The course I was mainly fond of was his Abnormal Psychology through Film class, because my paper has to do with the effects of films. Dr. Loeb created this particular class two years ago. He has been teaching normal psychology since his first year at the university and he was getting tired of doing the same course over and over. He also felt that he was a little out of date and since psychology is a rapidly changing field, he decided to teach his psychology class with a twist. Loeb also teaches a class called Psychology and Theatre; he found it to be very challenging and reinvigorating. “…Relating to theatre through film and there’s so much abnormal psychology in movies I thought it would be interesting for the students, interesting for me; I think it brings special things to the classroom…It makes it much more real than reading about it in textbooks, another thing that it brings, is that it shows the impact of the mental illness on family and friends, which you also don’t get from reading in a book. The third thing I think that some of the films do is they show the societal reaction to the person or persons with mental illness; that is how they are treated in the hospital, outside of the hospital. And those are issues of interest to me, given my interdisciplinary background. I’m very interested in societal reactions, family impact issues. And that’s something special that I can bring to the class.” The kind of movies he shows are primarily dramas, mystery and suspense; sometimes “slasher” movies but Prof. Loeb does not show many horror films because he finds them to be inappropriate for the classroom and the students react very strongly.

Answer to pg. 356

The name "Second Life" is referring to a virtual fantasy life that people can use as an escape from their real life. In your "Second Life" you are in charge. You can look however you want, you can have whatever job you want, you can really let your imagination soar in your second life. You don't have to worry about other people judging you, it's your own world where anyting goes.

Comments on Academic Article Paper

For the 1st draft, I only used two articles and I really focused on each author's theory. And I explained their theories in depth; my 1st draft was very long and I had a lot of run on sentences. What i did differently was I found another article and I explained the authors theories, but it a more condensed way. I tried to break up my run on sentences, and although I went over 750 words in my final draft, I think it was more concise and organized than my first draft. My final draft also correlated each article in a logical order and the paper as a whole flowed together better than the first draft.

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Academic Article Paper (1st Draft)

Effects of Horror Movies on Children (1st Draft)

It is apparent that horror movies affect a child’s psychological development. A child’s mind is prone to absorb what is displayed on screen. Studies and surveys both have agreed that horror movies do indeed affect a child’s psychological development. Most studies concentrate on the short term effects horror films have on children, but very few focus on the long term effects it may have on young children. In the article “Tales from the Screen: Enduring Fright Reactions to Scary Media” from Media Psychology (1999), Dr. Kristen Harrison, begins her essay with the story of two young boys that were severely traumatized by a scary TV program that aired in Britain Oct. 1992. Dr. Harrison reported that one of the young boys was affected to the point that he had to be admitted to a hospital for 8 weeks. She also wrote that he “…suffered panic attacks, refused to go upstairs alone and slept with the bedroom light on. He had nightmares and daytime flashbacks and banged his head to remove thoughts of ghosts. He became increasingly clingy and was reluctant to go to school or to allow his mother to go out without him.”
This example of a documented, long term clinical case is rare. However, Dr. Harrison does mention what she calls anecdotal observations not clinically documented of which we are all aware. She mentions a friend who cannot shower without watching the door after seeing the movie “Psycho” 25 years before. She also mentions a colleague that still can’t swim in the ocean after seeing the movie “Jaws” twenty years earlier.
In studying the phenomena of lingering effects of scary media stimuli, Dr. Harrison quoted a study that found a number gender differences in the reactions between males and females. One of the differences in the study by Sparks (1989), “…found that half of the females and one-quarter of the males in his sample reported enduring fright effects after viewing scary media.” Dr. Harrison’s study showed no significant difference in gender other than a reluctance to participate in the study by males.
Dr. Harrison’s study was very detailed and was conducted at two Midwestern universities using student volunteers. One example of the amount of scientific detail involved is in the area of coding. Dr. Harrison reports, “Coding was done on the basis of both the open-ended description (Part I) and the structured questionnaire (Part II). Responses were coded for immediate symptoms, enduring effects, duration of effects, stimulus types, and coping strategies.”
Her conclusion is that 90% of her volunteers had lingering effects from scary media stimuli. Dr. Harrison validates her study by the fact that a number of her statistical findings using college students match closely with another study of parent interviews concerning their children’s exposure to scary media. Dr. Harrison states, “Comparing our convenience sample of reports to Cantor and Nathanson's (1996) random sample of parental reports further validates our data.”
The article was very interesting and compelling and indicates the need for more study and perhaps more content ratings to warn parents of possible lingering effects. At the very least, it points to a need for a much more serious attitude toward the exposure of young children to scary media and a change from the very casual attitude we seem to have today.
The second article is entitled; “The Psychological Effects of Media Violence on Children and Adolescents” by Joanne Cantor, Ph.D. Dr. Cantor begins her article by stating that the effects of media violence on children are misunderstood by the general public. In her article she states three major arguments for this. The first reason is that the effects cannot be simply induced and studied as with animal studies. The second reason is that in her words, “…most public discussions of the problem focus on criminal violence and ignore the other unhealthy outcomes that affect many more children.” The third reason is that the media, including movie and video game producers as well, in her opinion have been less than forthright about revealing the true content of their products, and any research about harmful effects.
After dealing with the public’s misconception about the harmful effects of media violence on children, she then begins to break down her analysis into four basic categories: Aggression, Desensitization, Interpersonal Hostility, and Fears/Anxiety.
Under the heading of aggression, she mentions one behavior in children that she calls “copying”, in which children imitate aggressive behaviors they’ve seen in media. She sites one case in Israel, where numerous injuries were reported by school principles immediately following the airing World Wrestling Federation (WWF) programming. Many of these cases involved children who were old enough to know that the content was fake and potentially dangerous but that did not stop them from imitating the behavior anyway.
In the category of desensitization, which is commonly mentioned as a negative effect of media violence on children, Dr. Cantor indicates two striking examples of desensitization. She states that children exposed to more media violence are less likely to call an adult when there is an altercation between peers and they are less likely to feel sympathy for victims of abuse.
In the area of hostile feelings, the article mentions a argument by those arguing against the creation of hostile feelings by violent media. The argument states that increased hostility in those that view more violent media simply indicates a predisposition to hostility in those individuals to begin with. However, the article sites two case studies to the contrary and Dr. Cantor states that hostile feelings can be produced to the extent that “…media violence can cause interference in the ability to interact in interpersonal relationships.”
On the subject of fears and anxiety Dr. Cantor indicates that it is a much ignored area of study. She states, “Although most of researchers' attention has focused on how media violence affects the interpersonal behaviors of children and adolescents, there is growing evidence that violence viewing also induces intense fears and anxieties in young viewers.” She mentions a study of third graders where as the number of television viewing hours increased so did the prevalence of symptoms of psychological trauma.
I agree with Dr. Cantor’s statement in which she says, “The research I’ve described above provides overwhelming evidence that growing up with unrestricted access to media violence is, in the least, very unhealthy for young people.” Dr. Cantor ends her article with suggestions about what can be done to reduce the effects of media violence on children.