Psych 144 Final
There is a statistical relationship between two variables if ......
the average level of one variable differs across levels of the other
Cohen's d was .22 but the sample size was 6,213 (real or due to chance)
real
A graduate student conducted a pretest posttest study on the effects of using a stress balls on anxiety. His results seem to indicate that his using a stress ball for 5 minutes could be effective in lowering testing anxiety. What else should he consider before concluding that the use of a stress ball was the causation of the lowered anxiety?
regression to the mean and spontaneous recovery
(due to chance or real) Cohen's d is 1.22 for a sample of 75.
reject the null hypothesis
In general, researchers want to...
reject the null hypothesis
The decision to reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis depends on which 2 factors?
relationship strength and sample size.
What 2 factors must be considered in deciding whether a psychological measure is good or not?
reliability and validity
The researcher writes "Being in a negative mood causes people to be more attentive and to try harder to succeed... and this is why they recall more of the words." What has the researcher done here?
proposed a theory
Correlational, Quasi-Experimental, or experiment: Tenaya middle school students were exposed to a new anti-drug program while Wawona Middle school served as a control group.
quasi-experimental
In a nonequivalent groups design, what wouldn't happen?
random assignment
True/False: Pearson's r correlation is used as a measure of effect size and as a null hypothesis test statistic.
true
Triangulation refers to....
using multiple quantitative and qualitative methods to study the same topic, with the goal of converging on a single interpretation.
Weak, Medium, or Strong: Pearson's r is +.09
weak
When will the standard deviation of a set of scores be zero?
when the scores are exactly the same.
A graduate student's faculty mentor asks her "What about the directionality problem?" What is he asking her about?
whether it is possible that being willing to engage in unethical behavior might cause people to have higher incomes.
Between or Within: A sample of people with social anxiety was divided into two groups. One group was tested while being watched and the other group was tested while not being watched.
within subject
Between or within: Each student rated the attractiveness of 20 models presented individually and 20 models presented within groups of three.
within subject
What is an untrue statement about ethics in research? You only have to get IRB approval if you work with kids Risks and benefits should be equally distributed among all participants Let all participants know that they are able to withdraw from the study at any time.
you only have to get IRB approval if you work with kids
The split-half correlation is a measure of...
internal consistency
D or R: Do people who exercise regularly have lower levels of depression than people who do not exercise regularly?
D relationship
Which area of psychology is most likely to use single-subject research designs?
ABA
D or R relationship: Do fresno state students party more than San Jose state students?
D relationship
Where is the methods section for an APA formatted paper?
Between the introduction and results
Professor Williams gives an exam. Afterwards students complain about material that was not covered in the course and that it failed to include questions about many important concepts that were covered. What aspect of validity are the students complaining about?
Content validity.
Correlational, Quasi-Experimental, or experiment: people attending the Caruthers District Fair had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than people attending the Big Fresno Fair.
Correlational
Weak, Medium, or Strong: Cohen's d was .50
medium
A Psychologist studies the effect of mood on memory. She makes half her participants sad by showing them sad by showing them video and she makes the other half happy by showing them happy videos. Then she has all of them read a list of 20 words and tests their memory for the words. She finds that participants in the sad group recall a mean of 12 words with a standard deviation of 4, while participants in the happy group recall a mean of 8 words with a standard deviation of 4. What type of statistical relationship is this? What kind of study is this? What is the independent variable? How big is the difference between the two groups in terms of the number of words they recalled?
D relationship, experiment, mood, large
Research on the placebo effect strongly suggests what?
Even placebo surgery can have positive effects.
Which aspect of validity can a researcher assess by carefully looking over a psychological test?
Face validity
True or False: Scientific research has shown that on average women speak 20,000 words per day while men speak about 7,000 words per day.
False
True/False: random sampling is the most common type of sampling in psychological research studies.
False
At a psych 144 poster session, Professor Toro asks a student presenter "So what was your operational definition of memory performance." Based on this question what does she want to know?
How the student measure memory performance in the study.
Weak, Medium, or Strong: The correlation(r) between everyday sadism and bullying was +.32
medium
What does the IRB stand for?
Institutional Review Board
Are there many reasonable theories about phenomenon?
No there is one correct theory.
Imagine a study on the effect of note taking type (longhand versus laptop) on the later recall of lecture material. If someone were to say the study was low in internal validity, what would that person mean?
It is not clear that the note taking type is actually influencing recall.
Weak, Medium, or Strong: Cohen's d was +.50
Medium
Does the statement "a study on the relationship between gender and television viewing habits" have a directionally problem?
No.
Ted conducts an experiment study on the effect of note taking type (longhand versus laptop) on the later recall of lecture material using a within subjects design, if he is using counterbalancing what does this mean>
Participants in one condition receive the treatment and participants in the other condition receive the placebo.
Imagine a between-subjects experiment with 2 conditions: an anxiety condition and a no-anxiety condition. What might it man if someone says "participants ages were a confounding variable?
Participants in the younger condition were much younger than participants in the no anxiety condition.
Psych 144 student conducts a study on the relationship between people's level of extroversion and their level of commitment to their current romantic partner. She computes Pearson's R, which comes out to be -.30. What does this mean?
People who are extroverted tend to be less committed to their romantic partners.
A psychologist recruits 50 anxious subjects. He tests them for their level of anxiety and their average score is 52 (higher means more anxious). Then he has them attend a series of workshops on time management. Then he tests them for level of anxiety again 3 months later and finds that their average anxiety score is only 48. What kind of design is this? Is it possible that the time management workshops caused a decrease in anxiety. What is a reasonable explanation for the decrease in anxiety? If the researchers goal is to show that the time management workshops reduce anxiety what would be an improvement he could make to his study?
Pre-test post-test, spontaneous remission, another group that does not attend a workshop
D or R: Is there a relationship between how many texts people send per day and how extroverted they are?
R relationship
What does a true experiment have that a quasi-experiment does not?
Random assignment
What would it mean to say that a study is low in external validity?
The results do not apply to the real world.
High level APA style can be seen as reflecting what?
The scientific values and assumptions of psychology
What would tell you for sure that a study is non-experimental/correlational rather than experimental? It is analyzed using Pearson's R, It is described as involving a correlation, there is no manipulated IV.
There is no manipulated IV
In APA syle writing what is true about direct quotations from other researchers?
They are rarely used
A researcher rejects the null hypothesis... but the null hypothesis is actually true.
Type 1 error.
A Psych 144 student creates a 10 item self report measure of fashion sense. Fashion sense is a good example of what? The student says, "fashion sense is the extent to which a person is aware of and conforms to the latest fashion trends in clothing and personal grooming." What is the student dong? If the student wants to assess the test-retest reliability of her measure, what would she need to do? Imagine the student forgot to include items about personal grooming on her measure (even though it's supposed to be part of fashion sense) what would this imply?
a construct, giving conceptual definition, measure fashion sense for the same participants on two different occasions, poor content validity.
Witt (2011) reports that perceivers with narrow shoulders perceive door ways to be wider compared with perceivers with wide shoulders. This is a good example of what?
a phenomenon
What is the definition of a confounding variable?
a variable that can affect the dependent variable
Imagine an experiment with anxiety as the IV. If each condition includes half men and half women, then sex is what kind of variable?
an extraneous variable
ABA designs are commonly used in single subject research, "A" represents what aspect?
baseline.
Imagine an experiment with one independent variable (room temp) with three levels (cool, warm, hot) what would be true regarding the design?
between-subject would require three times as many participants.
Which would be considered unethical to manipulate (IV) in an experiment using humans? Mood, hunger, brain damage, room temp.
brain damage
Fred creates a new measure of greed and gives it two groups of college students. One group consists of students who want to become investment bakers. The other group consists of those who want to become social workers. What doe Fred appear to be doing?
checking the criterion validity of the greed measure
A researcher compares a group of extroverts to a group of introverts in terms of how much television they watch. What would best describe the strength of the statistical relationship
cohen's d
What might you do to see if a measure of political orientation has good criterion validity?
compare the scores of republicans to those of democrats
A researcher wants to compare the effectiveness of two SAT prep programs and she is thinking about how to design the study. What kind of sample will the researcher probably use? IV? Which design makes the most sense? Assuming the researcher randomly assigned her participants to conditions what is true about validity? What could be a DV?
convenience, SAT prep program, between-subject, high internal validity, college acceptance.
A graduate student proposes a study to his faculty mentor. The graduate thinks that having more money causes people to be more focused on themselves and less focused on other people... Which then makes them more willing to engage in unethical behaviors. To test this, he wants to measure the income of 100 people and also have them complete a questionnaire about their willingness to engage in unethical behaviors such as cheating. Higher scores on this questionnaire means a person is more willing to engage in unethical behavior. What kind of research design is this? What is the independent variable? What is the dependent variable? The graduate student finds that the correlation between income and willingness to engage in ethical behavior is positive. What does this mean? If the pearson's r is .32 how strong of a relationship is this?
correlational, income, scores on the unethical-behavior questionnaire, people who earn more tend to be more willing to engage in unethical behavior, medium
As part of her research on fashion sense, the student asks her participants to wait for 10 minutes in a room with a tv playing an episode of America's Next Top Model and she measures how much time they spend actually looking at the tv. She reasons that people who score higher in fashion sense should also tend to spend more time watching the tv while they wait. For her 23 participants, the correlation between fashion sense and time spent watching tv was r=+.18 What kind of validity is most relevant to this statement? The student tests the null hypothesis, what is the null hypothesis? If the student fails to reject the null hypothesis, what is she deciding? What could be the p value in this example?
criterion validity, that there is no correlation in the population, the correlation in the sample is due to chance, .40
A psych student compares the stress levels of 30 men and 25 women. What kind of relationship is the student studying? What is the null hypothesis? The student computes a tscore. the t score is an example of what? If his p value turns out to be .07 what should he do?
d relationship, there is no difference between men and women in the population, test statistic, fail to reject
(due to chance or real) Pearson's r is .20 based on a sample of 18.
due to chance
Imagine that you are a subject in an experiment on the effects of being sad on test-taking performance. If it is a between-subjects design, what would you do?
either take the test sad or not sad
Which of the following is a categorical is a categorical/qualitative variable? Eye color, IQ, number of sexual partners, or shoe size
eye color
True/False: No one has ever successfully measure self-esteem
false
A psychology student wants to measure extroversion. So she ask each person in a large sample to rate themselves in terms on 10 different adjectives: outgoing, friendly, etc... She then takes the averages of these 10 ratings as her measure of extroversion. Most people would probably agree that this measure has what type of validity? What could this student do to show that her measure has good criterion validity? What might this student do to show that her measure has good internal validity?
good face validity, shows that people's scores on her test are positively correlated with a measure of how talkative they are, do a split alf correlation.
What is an advantage of using a within-subjects design?
holds more variables constant across conditions
A researcher is studying people's moods. Is mood an independent variable or a dependent variable?
it could be either
Is depression a categorical/qualitative variable or a quantitative variable?
it could be either
Is a sample of elderly people in tulare county a representative sample?
it depends on the population
What is true in regards to self-report?
it is often used
A researcher conducts a within-subject experiment on the effects of group size on judgements of attractiveness. The researcher has participants judge the attractiveness of people shown in groups of 2, 4, and 6. What is the DV in this experiment? What might be a reason that the researcher used a within-subject design? What would not be a problem in this study? (catching on effect, fatigue effect, or intelligence differing across conditions).
judgement of attractiveness, fewer subjects, intelligence differing across conditions.
A strong statistical relationship based on a large sample will have a very...... p value.
low.
In an Experiment, the IV is.
manipulated
Several psychologists have found that the personality trait of conscientiousness is positively correlated with life span. They have found that people who are more conscientious tend to live longer. One idea about this is that people who are more conscientious have less stress in their lives, which means they have healthier hearts and immune systems, which causes them to live longer. What is the phenomenon of interest?
people who are more conscientious tend to live longer
In an APA style research report a good results section should...
present statistics, graphs, and tables
In scientific research, which of the following words has generally the same meaning as "theory"
result
The mean for the women was 21 with a standard deviation of 8. The mean for the men was 17 with a standard deviation of 8. There were 120 women and 79 men in the study. (significant or not)
statistically significant
There was a positive correlation between stress and aggressive driving for a sample of 95. Pearson's r was +.59
statistically significant
Weak, Medium, or Strong: Cohen's d is 1.40
strong
Weak, Medium, or Strong: Pearson's r was .50
strong
Weak, Medium, or Strong: The mean for the men was 4. The mean for the women was 3. The SD's were both 1.
strong
Weak, medium, strong: the mean for the children was 24 while the mean for adults was 34. The SD was 2.
strong
The discussion section of an APA style paper typically includes...
summary of results in words, limitations, suggestions for future.
If i wanted to test the differences between males and females on extroversion (measured continuously/ quantitatively) what type of statistical test would I use?
t test
When subjects were shown photographs of people in groups of three, their attractiveness judgments (M=6.25, SD=1.99) were greater than when they were shown photographs of the same people alone (M=4.88, SD=1.75). This difference was statistically signifiant, t(29)=2.65, p=.03 What are the researchers concluding? The p value (.03) is the probability of something. What is it the probability of? Could the researcher here be making a type 2 error? Yes/No
the difference in the sample reflects a real difference in the population, probability of the sample result if the null hypothesis were true, no
A researcher thinks that aging has a negative effect on people's memories. To test this idea, she gives a memory test to a group of teenagers and a group of a senior citizens. For the teenagers, the mean memory score is 107 with a standard deviation of 10. For the senior citizens, the mean memory score is 104 with a standard deviation of 10. The average person might refer to this study as an "experiment," why would this be wrong? How big is the difference in memory between the two groups in terms of Cohen's d? What would be the best description of this difference in words (size)? What is the IV? What is the DV?
the independent variable was not manipulated, .30, small or weak, age, memory
What is the defining feature of an experiment?
the manipulation of the independent variable
One study shows that extroverts have more Facebook friends than introverts and that Cohen's d is 0.50. A second study shows that people who are more extroverted tend to have more Facebook friends and persons r is .50 Which of the following can we say about the two studies?
the second study produced a stronger result
In a statistics class, all the students do pretty well on the first exam. On the second exam, most do pretty well but some do poorly. On the third exam, about half do well and the others do poorly. What is happening to their standard deviation of the exam scores from the first exam to the third exam? Assume that the exams are worth the same number of points
the standard deviation is getting larger
According to the APA ethical principles, deception in a research study should not be used if...
the study can be done without using deception
What is the primary weakness of correlational studies?
they do not show whether the independent variable caused the observed changes in the dependent
Why are confounding variables bad?
they provide an alternative explanation for any observed differences between conditions, reduce internal validity, and make it hard to tell if the iv was responsible for dv.
What does it mean to control a variable?
to keep it the same across conditions