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Body modification Essay Nowadays, students have more opportunities to choose what sport they want to play. One of them, for example, is Ultimate Frisbee. It is a rising sport here in the Philippines. It is played with a disc with 7 players per team, 4 boys and 3 girls or 5 boys and 2 girls but the 4/3 ratio is more applied in almost all leagues and tournaments. Basically, the goal of this game is to score in an end zone and played with a 50-min. time cap or in the finals just a 15-pt. point cap. There have been countless leagues and tournaments for students. One kind of tournament is the NUCC or the National Ultimate Collegiate Championship. It is tournament exclusively for students and alumni of different schools. I asked some of the student-athletes on how they manage their time on playing and academics. It is pretty hard to manage time with the training schedule and their academics, as I am one of the student-athletes. Some of the ones that I asked answered that they put their academics first before they go to play or to train and some procrastinate their acads for ultimate Frisbee while some have a specific schedule for training. All of the student-athlete say that they sometime have to sacrifice one for the other but they try to get back what they lost. They say that it’s time management that you need when you are a Student-Athlete. Every sport has their own sports attire and gear. And Ultimate Frisbee has its own specific attire and gear. Examples of these are: dry-fit shirt with the team’s name on the front and the player’s number on the back, dry-fit shorts, and cleats or spikes. Injuries are almost a part of playing this sport as sometimes you cannot predict that you will have a tiny bruise or even yet break your anterior cruciate ligament or ACL or your ankle so some of the players who already injured their ACL or ankle have knee or ankle support when they play, after their recovery, and to protect them from the harmful rays of the sun they wear sunblock, hats, and rash guards. Sometimes the disc slips off the hands of the players hence they wear a special glove that is anti-slip. The pictures below are examples of what Ultimate Frisbee players wear. There is also a new up-rising sport in the world of Board Sports here in the Philippines. It is Longboarding or Downhill Longboarding. Basically, a longboard is just the bigger brother of the skateboard because the longboard is bigger, wider, and more stable than the skateboard. The rule of Downhill Longboarding is like any other race-oriented sport, whoever goes through the finish line wins but the twist is you are in a board with speeds reaching up to 75 km/h depending on what the track is and the fastest known hill here in Metro Manila is in Sierra Madre. There are also different types of competition in Longboarding not just downhill racing, and they are: Slide jams, and Push races. Slide jam is a competition where you can show what your hardest and coolest tricks and judges decide who the winner is. Push race is a race where you push or in the players’ jargon term â€Å"padyak† from the starting line to the finish line and the distance is very far. The last recent push race held here in Metro Manila, the Sector 9’s Push Don’t Pollute which was a 10-km race. These competitions have various categories and they are: Men’s A, Men’s B, Women’s, Amateur, and Open. There is a very special kind of playing longboard and it combines all the three types, it is Freeriding. In Freeriding, you can do outrageous drifts and slides which is on an open road unlike the other three where you are playing on a closed road. And under Freeriding is Freestyles, on this type you can do dances, grab tricks, and manuals or wheelies. Like all other extreme sports, Downhill Longboarding has also safety rules like: wear safety gears and leathers. Safety gears are helmet, gloves, knee pads, and elbow pads. In downhill racing, the safety gears are just helmet, gloves and leathers. And in the other two, its helmet, gloves, knee pads and/or elbow pads. Here are the photo examples of Longboarding: The Hipster: Carmela Llorca An Article on Hipsterism on psychologytoday. com The Sad Science of Hipsterism The Psychology of Indie Bands, PBR and Weird Facial Hair Published on September 8, 2010 by Jeff Wise in Extreme Fear Behold the hipster, the stylishly disaffected breed of twentysomethings whose fog of twee whimsy envelops Williamsburg and the East Village. Most who encounter the hipster in its natural habitat respond in one of two ways: derision or ridicule. But science does not cast judgment. Its goal is to explore and explain dispassionately, whether the object of study be the noble eagle or the lowly nematode. So what does science have to tell us about this fascinatingly misunderstood breed, the indigenous North American hipster? Surprisingly much. In a paper in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research entitled Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field- Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths, authors Zeynep Arsel and Craig J. Thompson delve deep into the phenomenon of hipsterism, and in particular its most abiding mystery: if everyone hates hipsters, why would anyone want to be one? The long and short of it is that they dont. In general, psychologists who study consumers understand that people are largely motivated to spend money not just on things that they materially need, but that bolster their sense of identity. They purchase not just goods and services, but mythologies. Imagining themselves as rugged, rebellious patriots, they buy a Harley-Davidson. Imagining themselves as respected and well-heeled, they buy a Lexus. Hipsters, though, follow a different paradigm. Their problem is that their purchases tend to place them within a category whose mythology they despise. Thats right: Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters. As Arsel and Thompson put it, the beats of the 50s and hippies of the 60s and 70s, both of which had an admirable authenticity about them even if you didnt care for the particulars, eventually gave rise to the millennial hipster, which came to be represented as an uberconsumer of trends and as a new, and rather gullible, target market that consumes cool rather than creating it. As examples of the dorkification they cite online parodies of the iconic Mac v. PC ads and this viral YouTube video. The upshot being that any people who legitimately enjoy all the trappings on hipsterhood the authors mention Pabst Blue Ribbon, Puma, and the trucker hat must psychologically distance themselves from the demographic group of which they are so clearly a part. And so their subconscious brains have to work double time so that they can convince themselves that the things they buy do not reflect on their true character. Arsel and Thompson interviewed hipsters and asked them how they dealt with the problem of being identified as such. The answer, they found, was to demythologize the hipster experience, that is, to psychologically reclassify their own behavior as being separate from the aggregate activity that the rest of the world lumps together as hipster. They interviewed one consumer, identified as Scarlet, who told them: Im not gonna lie, I shop at Urban [Outfitters] sometimes, only when its on sale of course I like doing a lot of the things that are the hipster thing to do, but I do them because I like to do them, not because theyre the cool thing to do. And because I am immersed in the social scene where there are a lot of hipsters, people mistake me for being one of them. The deeper irony is that those who try to assert their independence from the commodification of identity wind up tapping into another marketplace myth, what the authors call the myth of consumer sovereignty. This is the idea that by assiduously selecting from all the identity markers available for purchase, a person can assemble one that authentically reflects their true self independent of the marketplace. Some of the hipsters that Arsel and Thompson talked to are well aware of the futility of this project. Said one, identified as Tom: I dont necessarily know every single weird obscure band. I dont necessarily want to. But I mean, yeah, who do I hang out with? I hang out with like a bunch of tattooed indie dorks. So, yeah, I guess I am but I wouldnt self-identify, I think. Id listen to stuff thats outside the mainstream or its like I dress weird compared to the majority of the population. I just try not to think about it too much. The minute you start identifying with a subcultureyou kind of lose individuality, surrender part of your identity, and we dont wanna do that. This, then, is the essence of being a hipster. Pretending you arent one. Filipino hipsters today can be found mainly in Cubao Expo or in The Collective in Makati. Many hipsters hate that they are called hipsters because it would connote them to a certain stereotype. Jobless, irresponsible, beer-drinking, night-dwelling twentysomethings who have vast knowledge of some obscure topic that is not mainstream. The goal is, the more you know of this something that has been never heard of, the higher you are in the hipster ladder. Additional points to those who are environmentally aware, more points if you are vegetarian and more points if you only smoke either marijuana or cigarettes. Sarcasm and wit are the main means of discussion and usually topics flow from â€Å"which was the best circa for French films† to â€Å"Philosophical take on my coffee choices† Nonetheless, this stage of life is a purgatory for those who don’t have anything solid they can call a career or just lazy to actually start on and would rather debate on the importance of a job. Don’t get me wrong, there are ACTUAL HIPSTERS. Those whose actual being is an admirer of the past eras, have an interest in something peculiar or probably, really an environmentalist who goes around riding bikes. The Professional: Theresa Llamas Racial stereotypes of one hundred college students. Katz, D. ; Braly, K. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol 28(3), Oct 1933, 280-290. The degree of agreement among the students in assigning characteristics from a list of 84 adjectives to different races seemed too great to be the result solely of the students contacts with members of those races. Individual experience may have entered into a students judgment, but it probably did so to confirm the original stereotype which he had learned. Because human beings from time to time exhibit all kinds of behavior he could find confirmation of his views. By omitting cases which contradict the stereotype, the individual becomes convinced from association with a race that its members are just the kind of people he always thought they were. The manner in which public and private attitudes are bound up together was shown in the order of the 10 racial and national groups as determined by the definiteness with which students assigned characteristics to them. The definiteness of the stereotyped picture of a race, however, had little relation to the prejudice exhibited against that race. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) COLLEGE STUDENTS WITH TATTOOS AND PIERCINGS: MOTIVES, FAMILY EXPERIENCES, PERSONALITY FACTORS, AND PERCEPTION BY OTHERS GORDON B. FORBES Body piercing, which is prevalent in young adults, has been suggested to be associated with features usually related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) such as high-risk behaviours and psychopathological symptoms and might be motivated by a wish to deal with prior traumatic experiences. However, to date, no research has investigated the relationship between this practice and PTSD symptoms. The present research aims to investigate the possible relationship between body piercing and PTSD symptoms in French-speaking young adults. According to our results, having two or more body piercings was associated with a twofold increased risk for scoring above the cut-off score for PTSD on the PTSD checklist. Our findings suggest that two or more body piercings might serve as an identifiable marker for PTSD symptoms and may have important implications for clinical screening. Copyright  © 2012 John Wiley Sons, Ltd. Read More: http://www. amsciepub. com/doi/abs/10. 2466/pr0. 2001. 89. 3. 774 PERSONALITY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TATTOOED AND NONTATTOOED INDIVIDUALS VIREN SWAMI This study examined differences between tattooed and non-tattooed individuals on a range of personality and individual difference measures. A community sample of 540 individuals from the southern German-speaking area of central Europe completed a survey consisting of measures of the Big Five personality factors, Need for Uniqueness, Self-esteem, sensation seeking, Religious and Spiritual Beliefs, Attitudes Toward Tattoos, tattoo possession, and demographics. Preliminary analyses showed that 22% of the total sample possessed at least one tattoo. Further analyses showed that, compared with non-tattooed (n = 420) individuals, tattooed participants (n = 120) had significantly higher scores on Extraversion, Experience Seeking, Need for Uniqueness, and held more positive Attitudes Toward Tattoos, although effect sizes of these group differences were generally small- to medium-sized. These results are considered in relation to the contemporary prevalence of tattoos in socioeconomically developed societies. Read More: http://www. amsciepub. com/doi/abs/10. 2466/09. 07. 21. PR0. 111. 4. 97-106 Exploring professional stereotypes and learning for inter-professional practice: an example from UK qualifying level social work education. Bell, Linda and Allain, Lucille (2010) Exploring professional stereotypes and learning for inter-professional practice: an example from UK qualifying level social work education. Social Work Education, 30 (3). pp. 266-280. ISSN 0261-5479 This paper explores the concept of stereotyping from UK social work students’ and educators’ perspectives. It discusses findings from an exploration of inter-professional practice with two cohorts of final year social work students in a UK university. The authors adapted a questionnaire (Barnes et al, 2000; Hean et al, 2006) to initiate discussion about inter-professional working with BA and MA students participating in a specialist child and family social work module. This paper analyses students’ responses to the questionnaire and explores wider issues relating to professional stereotyping and identity, discussing the usefulness of these concepts for social work education and collaborative practice. Results suggest that student social workers held both positive and negative assumptions about specific occupations / professions (such as medicine), and that these acted as a mirror or tool for reflecting back their own views of social work identity/ies. We argue that this pedagogic exercise in identifying stereotypical assumptions about ‘others’ may encourage the building of a positive sense of ‘own’ professional identity. We further suggest that students should be encouraged to construct a core social work identity that is dynamic and responsive to changing contexts. Body modifications, sexual activity, and religious practices. Rivardo MG, Keelan CM. Source: Department of Psychology, Saint Vincent College, 300 Fraser Purchase Road, Latrobe, PA 15650, USA. mark. [emailprotected] edu Relations among body modifications (i. e. , tattoos and piercings), sexual activity, and religious practices and beliefs were examined. In previous studies, Koch and colleagues found the type of body modification seemed to interact with sex to predict sexual activity; but only weak, negative correlations were found between tattoos and religious beliefs and practices. In a sample of 236 students (M age=20. 1 yr. ) from a small Catholic liberal arts college, numbers of tattoos and sexual partners were correlated statistically significantly. Other results differed by t sex: men with piercings were more likely to have had premarital intercourse, and women who had had premarital intercourse had more piercings than women who had not. There were no statistically significant correlations among body modifications and religious variables.