Welcome!
Hello, welcome to my Omeka site! Here you can find all the artifacts which go along with my podcast where I make a prediction on how the religious psyche of teenagers in America will change in the next 5 years. To listen to the podcast click here! Follow along to understand how all of these artifacts work together toward building my claim.
Follow along with this Omeka sight to understand how I piece together the artifacts that went into forming my predictions.
Here are the Predictions I make throughout this podcast.
1. Religion will cease to function as an inhibitor of drug consumption in teenagers in America in the next 5 years.
2. The increased usage of drugs amongst teenagers will evoke a different kind of spiritual resonance amongst the youth towards a more individualistic take on religion.
In order to understand how I make these predictions, you need to learn about two of the tools used in cultural psychology:
Religion As A Sensitive Period
A sensitive period is a period in cognitive development where the brain is more elastic and able to absorb the new information needed to develop a new skill such as learning a new language
Artifact #1: In the article “Adolescence As A Sensitive Period For Spiritual Development” by Marie Good and Teena Willoughby in 2008, the authors work to establish that the years of adolescence are a sensitive period for spiritual formation. This is important to this podcast because teenagers being generally more sensitive toward religion is what dictates how much influence religion will or will not have on the decisions made by youth.
Tightness and Looseness
Tightness and looseness are one of many ecological pressures used in cultural psychology to explain the phenomena in society of acceptance and rejection. When there is a shift in the cultural psyche of society there are ecological pressures more or less likely to show up and impact how the individual functions with society and culture. Tightness and Looseness specifically refer to the level of societal acceptance towards anything there is a commonly held opinion on. In the case of this podcast, we are evaluating the tightness or looseness of public opinion on drug consumption in America. A tighter public opinion means that your actions are expected to align with social expectations, and a looseness of public opinion means you have more freedom to deviate from the common opinion even if it is seen in an unfavorable light.