Post by Kuang on Jul 7, 2010 20:24:14 GMT -5
Name: Kuang Sheng-hui (Chinese naming patterns are applied, meaning that Kuang is her last name and Sheng-hui is her first name)
Age: 22
Gender: Girl
Sexuality: She likes boys (that's what this word means, right?)
Shift: Asian elephant
Appearance:
Personality: Sheng-hui is bright and quick. Her emotions and temperament have been compared to mercury, always shifting. While she is normally optimistic and good humored, she can become angry just as quickly. Like any young girl, it does not take much to make her shed a tear or two. A hard word or even disapproving glance is quick to trigger her guilt, and she is always prepared to apologize. Part of her less assured personality is due to her upbringing. Because the son is considered more important, someone who can do no wrong, her parents usually blamed her for anything that went wrong, not her brother.
Sheng-hui is responsible and wise beyond her years. Having to deal with stressed parents, a poorly-behaved shifter brother, and a cut-throat life, she never expected to be a shifter or envied her brother for his ability to shift. She has surprising romantic and childish dreams, however, and likes to watch Chinese soap operas. She falls in love easily and lightly with the handsome actors on screen and their beautiful lives, but separates reality and fantasy very well. In a new environment, she is more watchful than talkative and usually can be counted on to know her way around a new city within the week, as she has both an excellent memory and intellect, as sharp and quick as her mood.
History: The twins Long-wei and Sheng-hui in a Chinatown district in New York. Their father ran an Asian grocery market and their mother worked at a barber's shop. The recent recession caused their mother to lose her job, and their father's sales to decrease. Sheng-hui decided that she would be thoughtful and took her brother with her, leaving their home so their parents would not be forced to continue supporting them.
Two years ago, Sheng-hui was working harder than ever because her mother had no work and her father had a reduced salary. Getting two heavy construction jobs, she was on the verge of fainting from the hard labor. Without her knowing it, she blacked out and shifted into an elephant, easily shouldering the heavy beams and planks. She killed two of the men on site when they spooked. It took her two more shifts to realize that she was shifting. She tries not to shift if she can help it, because she likes her small body better.
Other: She lives in Verge Apartments, sharing a room with her brother.
Sample:
Age: 22
Gender: Girl
Sexuality: She likes boys (that's what this word means, right?)
Shift: Asian elephant
Appearance:
Personality: Sheng-hui is bright and quick. Her emotions and temperament have been compared to mercury, always shifting. While she is normally optimistic and good humored, she can become angry just as quickly. Like any young girl, it does not take much to make her shed a tear or two. A hard word or even disapproving glance is quick to trigger her guilt, and she is always prepared to apologize. Part of her less assured personality is due to her upbringing. Because the son is considered more important, someone who can do no wrong, her parents usually blamed her for anything that went wrong, not her brother.
Sheng-hui is responsible and wise beyond her years. Having to deal with stressed parents, a poorly-behaved shifter brother, and a cut-throat life, she never expected to be a shifter or envied her brother for his ability to shift. She has surprising romantic and childish dreams, however, and likes to watch Chinese soap operas. She falls in love easily and lightly with the handsome actors on screen and their beautiful lives, but separates reality and fantasy very well. In a new environment, she is more watchful than talkative and usually can be counted on to know her way around a new city within the week, as she has both an excellent memory and intellect, as sharp and quick as her mood.
History: The twins Long-wei and Sheng-hui in a Chinatown district in New York. Their father ran an Asian grocery market and their mother worked at a barber's shop. The recent recession caused their mother to lose her job, and their father's sales to decrease. Sheng-hui decided that she would be thoughtful and took her brother with her, leaving their home so their parents would not be forced to continue supporting them.
Two years ago, Sheng-hui was working harder than ever because her mother had no work and her father had a reduced salary. Getting two heavy construction jobs, she was on the verge of fainting from the hard labor. Without her knowing it, she blacked out and shifted into an elephant, easily shouldering the heavy beams and planks. She killed two of the men on site when they spooked. It took her two more shifts to realize that she was shifting. She tries not to shift if she can help it, because she likes her small body better.
Other: She lives in Verge Apartments, sharing a room with her brother.
Sample:
Love and Attachment as Observed in Infant Monkeys
"Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research," wrote the psychologist Harry Harlow in his 1958 paper "The Nature of Love." The role of love, having been seen as unscientific and difficult to quantify, was not given a very important place when developmental psychologists attempted to determine correlations of affection in infants. Psychologists were aware that love was a strong motivation factor through life, from childhood to adulthood. Likewise, they knew that it first develops as a response to affection "by the infant to the mother or some mother surrogate" (Harlow, 1958).
In the 1950s, Harlow, who was inspired by studies that showed that infants raised in orphanages without loving attention often withered away and died (Spitz, 1946), sought to explore this interaction by beginning a series of experiments with more than 60 infant rhesus monkeys separated from their mothers 6 to 12 hours after their birth (Harlow, 1958). Divided into two groups, the monkeys were either fed from a wire-mesh "mother" (a frame of heated wire mesh that had ample surface for the monkey to cling to) or a terry-cloth "mother" (the same frame of wire mesh, though covered with soft tan terry cloth meant to resemble fur).
According to Harlow, "the result was a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger... it is our opinion that we engineered a very superior monkey mother, although this position is not held universally by the monkey fathers."
An initial experiment revealed that given the choice of the company of either mother, monkeys fed from the wire-mesh mother (henceforth abbreviated as WMF) spent most of their time with the terry-cloth mother, even though "physical nourishment came from bottles mounted on the bare wire mothers," as Ellen Herman of the Adoption History Project at Oregon University notes (2007). Monkeys fed from the terry-cloth mother (henceforth abbreviated as TCF) spent little or no time with the wire-mesh mother. Harlow realized that this partition of time indicated attachment came from sources beyond simply satisfying basic, physiological needs (Harlow, 1958). Attachment was more than nursing and unlikely to be solely based on hunger or thirst (Herman, 2007).
Modifying his experiment, Harlow designed a second study. Separating the WMF and TCF monkeys into two groups, he did not give them the choice of two mothers this time. Physiologically, all the infant monkeys drank the same amount of milk and gained weight at the same rate (Harlow, 1958).
While there was no obvious outward disparagement, the composition of feces from the infants provided early insight into potential differences to be manifested - "the softer stools of the wire-mother infants suggesting psychosomatic involvement," noticed Harlow (1958). "The wire mother is biologically adequate but psychologically inept."
Providing the WMF and TCF monkeys with the same sources of stress, Harlow was able to examine how differently the infants reacted to the perceived threats. He presented strange and frightening objcts such as teddy bears with drums to WMF monkeys, who sought physical comfort and warmth from their mothers' soft fur, rubbing against her until they eventually relaxed. After getting over the intial scare, these WMF infants progressed to curiousity and inquisitiveness, and started to expore the teddy bears.
In contrast, TCF infants "threw themselves on the floor, clutched themselves, rocked back and forth, and screamed in terror," according to Herman (2007). Harlow related this behaviour to that of the trauma victims and autistic children he had observed in orphanages, further extrapolating that a lack of physical comfort bred a lack of emotional attachment and reassurance, which resulted in loss of mental health and illness (Herman, 2007). With his new conclusions, Harlow challenged the view of social learning theorists and psychoanalysts who viewed attachment mainly as a function of feeding on the basis that contact and comfort appeared to be most important factour in the development of attachment (Harlow & Zimmerman, 1959).
Further studies confirmed what Harlow observed. Human toddlers, studied in isolated conditions, were witnessed developing attachments to soft toys and blankets. "These objects are effective sources of security that seem to substitute for special people when such people are not available (Passman, 1987), yet such objects have never played an important role in feeding," according to Patricia Pendry in her 1998 paper "Ethological Attachment Theory: A Great Idea in Personality?".
Harlow concluded in his 1958 paper: "We believe that contact comfort has long served the animal kingdom as a motivating agent for affectional responses. Since at the present time we have no experimental data to substantiate this position, we supply information which must be accepted, if at all, on the basis of face validity."