Chapter 2: Research in Psychology (55-108)

Mark wants to do research using a survey about attitudes toward smoking. Mark wants his sample of respondents to be as representative as possible of the adult Illinois population. Mark should

Randomly pick names from the latest Illinois census

In an experiment, all subjects are randomly assigned to one of three groups. Group 1 receives Drug A, Group 2 gets Drug B (a placebo), and Group 3 receives no drug. Then subjects' pulse rates are measured to see if taking the drug resulted in a change. A major weakness in this study is

That an experimenter bias may exist

In an experiment to study the effects of marijuana usage on memory, previous experiences with drug usage is

A confounding variable

In studying the effects of amount of alcohol consumed on test taking, a subject's alcohol tolerance would be

A confounding variable

If you were interested in determining the effectiveness of a new medication in treating depression, it would be most important that you used

A double-blind design

Dr. Fischer is interested in the effects drug use of pregnant women has on the development of their babies. It will be best if he uses a(n) __________ design.

Quasi-experimental

Julia is conducting an experiment to study infants' responses to strangers. She has two confederates interact with infants in either an intrusive or a nonintrusive manner and observes the infants' responses to these strangers. In this study, the level of intrusiveness displayed by the stranger is known as the __________ variable.

Independent

To investigate the effects of exercise on mathematical problem-solving ability, a researcher assigned subjects to one of two groups. One group did 50 jumping jacks, the other group did 200 jumping jacks. After exercising, both groups did a set of math problems and their performances were compared. In this experiment the number of jumping jacks is the __________ variable.

Independent

Dr. Summers investigated the influence of snacking upon the onset of sleep in preschool children. One group of preschoolers ate a candy bar prior to bedtime, and the other group ate nothing. Time until the onset of sleep was recorded for each child. In this experiment, eating or not eating the snack is the __________ variable, and the time until the onset of sleep is the __________ variable.

Independent; dependent

Quisley's hypothesis is that listening to classical music improves intellectual performance. He randomly divided a mathematics class into two rooms. In Room A music by Mozart played softly in the background during a lecture. In Room B the students listened to a lecture without background music. The control group in this experiment

Is in Room B

One way to prevent experimenter bias is to be sure that the experimenter and the subjects know nothing of who is receiving the experimental treatment and who is not. This is known as

A double-blind design

In a drug study, schizophrenics received either an experimental drug or a placebo. The patients were then evaluated to see if the drug decreased symptoms. Neither the experimenter nor the patients knew who received the drug and who received the placebo. This study used

A double-blind design

Benefits of performing quasi-experiments include

Allowing research on topics and in settings that would otherwise be impossible

In order to study the relationship between motor development and neonatal exercise, a professor randomly assigns 50 one-week-old infants to either Group A or Group B. The 25 infants in Group A participate in a daily 15-minute exercise program. The infants in Group B are not exposed to anything beyond their normal daily activities. Twice a month for an entire year, when all the infants are fifty-three weeks old, the professor compares the average test score of subjects in Group A with the average test score of subjects in Group B. What is the independent variable in the professor's study?

Amount of exercise

Jon believes that exercise is a cause of higher levels of life satisfaction. If Jon plans to study this hypothesis experimentally, his independent variable would be the

Amount of exercise his subjects receive

Experimenters who want to find the best explanation fo a phenomenon when they have several rival hypotheses should

Conduct controlled research using experimental methods

A(n) __________ variable can be any factor, other than the variable being manipulated by the experimenter, in the experimental situation that might affect the dependent variable.

Confounding

Dr. Jones is studying the effects of fatigue on aggression. He hypothesizes that the more fatigue a person is experiencing, the more aggressively the person will behave. Unknown to Dr. Jones, subjects' level of hunger also had an impact on their aggression. Hunger could thus be a(n) __________ variable.

Confounding

Franz is conducting an experiment to study the effects of wearing heavy clothing on weight-lifting performance. He gives Group A heavy sweatshirts and lets Group B wear whatever they wish. He measures the amount of weight they can lift after the workout. Group B is the __________ group.

Control

A psychologist interested in determining the effects of a new diet regimen on the stress tolerance level of severely mentally retarded patients would most likely choose which research method?

Controlled experiment method

Dr. Jones is studying the effects of fatigue on aggression. He hypothesizes that the more fatigue a person is experiencing, the more aggressively the person will behave. The level of aggression in Dr. Jones's study is the __________ variable.

Dependent

Rica has children watch either violent or nonviolent cartoons. Afterwards, she watches to see which group of children gets into the most fights. In this study, the number of fights that each child engages in is the __________ variable.

Dependent

Dr. Smith is studying the effects of a drug on memory. Half f his subjects will receive the drug, while the other half will receive. placebo. The pills the two groups of subjects will take look exactly the same. Dr. Smith's assistant will administer the pills to both groups of subjects, but she will not know which group is getting the drug and which is getting the placebo. The subjects will not know which group they are in. What type of design is Dr. Smith employing?

Double-blind

Hoa believes that snakes and spiders are anxiety-provoking and that squirrels are nice animals that don't cause people stress. To test these beliefs, she conducts an experiment on the effects of watching a video about snakes and spiders on people's self-reports of anxiety and has a comparison group that watches a video about squirrels. When participants are finished watching the video about snakes and spiders, Hoa walks in and says, "Weren't those spiders creepy! Those snakes always scare me too!" To avoid the effects that these statements might have on the experiment's results, Hoa could have used

Double-blind design

Roger is conducting a study of the effects of mirrors in an exercise room on the intensity of exercise. He assigns Group A to lift weights in a room with mirrors and assigns Group B to lift weights in a room without mirrors. Roger then measures how many repetitions the participants could perform after their workout. In this study, the control group

Exercised without mirrors

A researcher was interested in determining whether or not test performance of students could be improved by providing them with individual tutoring. The researcher randomly divided fifty first-year college students into two groups. In Group A the instructor lectured to them for three hours per week. Group B received an equal amount of lecturing, but their instructor also met with each student for thirty minutes every week. Each group took the same final exam. The test performance of students in Group B was about the same as that of students in Group A. This study is an example of a(n)

Experiment

Dr. V. wanted to test her theory that sugar improves memory, so she gave one group of participants candy sweetened with sugar and another group candy sweetened with Nutrasweet. Then she compared the performance of the two groups on a test of recognition memory. Dr. V.'s research method is

Experimental

The title of a research article is "Hot and crowded: The effects of altering temperature and group size on exam performance." What research method was used in this study?

Experimental

Dr. Roberts is a community psychologist studying whether a special program instituted for an at-risk group of junior high school students decreases behavior problems. At-risk students are randomly assigned to either Group A, the special program, or Group B, a study hall meeting at the same time. In this experiment, Group A is the __________ while Group B is the __________.

Experimental group; control group

PeeWee Herman wanted to know whether the consumption of alcoholic beverages affected peoples' bicycling abilities. He thought maybe the alcohol itself didn't have any negative effects, but the people who drank alcohol expected to have their riding abilities impaired so they "acted drunk." To control for the subjects' expectations, PeeWee gave half of his sample vodka and the other half of his sample vodka-flavored water. PeeWee used the ___________ research method, and the vodka-flavored water was a __________.

Experimental; placebo

A pharmaceutical company claims to have found a very effective drug treatment for depression. According to their own research studies, they claim that the drug treatment works for 90 percent of people suffering from depression. Other researchers, not associated with the company, perform follow-up studies, in which evidence is found to the contrary. Assuming that the original claim was inaccurate, which of the following concepts best explains the misjudgment?

Experimenter bias

In an experiment, Dr. Buck watches 40 subjects play basketball and gives each subject a rating from 1 to 10 to assess each subjects' basketball ability. Dr. Buck randomly divides the 40 subjects into two groups and personally teaches one group how to play basketball and the other group how to play baseball. Finally, Dr. Buck watches all 40 subjects play basketball again and gives each subject a new rating. After looking at the data, Dr. Buck concludes that teaching basketball was more effective than teaching baseball in raising the basketball ratings. This experiment is flawed because of

Experimenter bias

The school psychologist at Happy Elementary School conducted a study where the students of one fourth-grade class were given five recesses during the day while students in the other class were allowed the standard two recesses. The psychologists explained to the teachers that more breaks should lead to better behavior in the classrooms and then had the teachers observe the children's progress. In this experiment there is the risk of

Experimenter bias

Observation is to ethology as manipulation is to

Experiments

An experimenter who conducts a study under highly controlled conditions often reduces the

Extent to which conclusions drawn from the results can be applied to populations or situations outside of the experimental conditions

Dr. Wilson asked fifty alcoholics a series of questions about their childhoods and then collected blood samples from them. He found a high correlation between levels of stress hormones and the amount of reported childhood trauma. Dr. Wilson concluded that childhood trauma causes high levels of stress during adulthood, which, in turn, causes alcoholism. Which of the following is not a good criticism of his research?

He did not use a double-blind design

Dr. Denton designed an experiment to test the hypothesis that children who are taught alternative ways of responding to failure will show increased persistence in problem solving. Dr. Denton assigned half of a random sample of third-graders to a tutor who emphasized learning from mistakes and increasing knowledge rather than improving grades. The other half of the sample received tutoring without the emphasis on "learning goals." After two months of tutoring, both groups were given a test of persistence. A possible random variable in this experiment is the

Level of intelligence of the children

Dr. R. wants to test his theory that caffeine improves memory, so he gives one group of participants caffeinated coffee and another group decaffeinated coffee. Then he compares the performance of the two groups on a test of recognition memory. The dependent variable in this experiment is

Memory

I want to see whether or not "super 1000" gasoline gives better mileage than Brand X. If I run a tankful of each brand in two identical cars, what would the dependent variable be?

Miles per gallon

Dr. Jones is studying the effects of fatigue on aggression. He hypothesizes that the more fatigue a person is experiencing, the more aggressively the person will behave. Dr. Jones's control group should be composed of __________ subjects.

Nonfatigued

Dale conducts a test to better understand what causes people to become addicted to cocaine. Dale uses two different groups. The first group consists of cocaine addicts, while the other group is made up of members of his lab. Dale then compares the moods and EEG data collected from the two groups. Which experimental design is Dale using?

Quasi-experiment

If your are reading about an experiment, what feature is necessary to give you confidence that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the independent and dependent variables?

Random assignment

It is assumed that random variables that are controlled by __________ will not act as confounding variables in experimentation.

Random assignment

A researcher had one group of children go trick-or-treating wearing masks and a second group of children go trick-or-treating without masks. The researcher found that the children who wore masks took more candy than the children who were not wearing masks. Which was the dependent variable in this study?

The amount of candy taken

Ree Searcher believes that drinking milk improves memory. He conducts an experiment in which he randomly chooses a group of subjects and randomly divides them into two groups. Group A drinks milk before trying to remember a list of nonsense syllables. Group B drinks nothing before trying to remember a list of nonsense syllables. The dependent variable in this experiment is

The number of nonsense syllables remembered

Tai is interested in how alcohol consumption affects driving ability. He gives college students two, four, or six beers and then measures how many obstacles the students "hit" when they are in a driving simulator. The dependent variable is

The number of obstacles hit

A professor wanted to examine the effects of diet on learning. He put some laboratory rats on a starvation diet (Group A) but only eliminated desserts form the diet of a second group (Group B). During this experiment, the professor discovered that he needed more Group B rats, so he caught some in a local alley. The results of the experiment showed that Group B rats were faster at learning a maze, so the professor concluded that diet is related to learning speed. Which of the following statements is most accurate?

The professor's conclusion is incorrect because the type of rat was a confounding variable.

A researcher shows a violent film to one group of subjects and a nonviolent film to another before giving both groups a test measuring aggressiveness. Which of the following is true?

The type of film shown is the independent variable

Malcolm administers a survey of people's attitudes about the relationship between exercise and stress level. What is the independent variable?

There is no independent variable

Dr. Denton designed an experiment to test the hypothesis that children who are taught alternative ways of responding to failure will show increased persistence in problem solving. Dr. Denton assigned half of a random sample of third-graders to a tutor who emphasized learning from mistakes and increasing knowledge rather than improving grades. The other half of the sample received tutoring without the emphasis on "learning goals." After two months of tutoring, both groups were given a test of persistence. The independent variable is the

Type of tutoring

Which of the following is the most effective way to eliminate experimenter bias?

Use a double-blind design

Quisley's hypothesis is that listening to classical music improves intellectual performance. He randomly divided a mathematics class into two rooms. In Room A music by Mozart played softly in the background during a lecture. In Room B students listened to a lecture without background music. The independent variable is

Whether music played during a lecture

James read a magazine ad about a drug that doctors say may help college students perform better on multiple-choice-type tests. Being the inquisitive person that he is, James decided to do an experiment to see if the magazine's claims were true. He administered the drug to one of his classes, and gave the other class a placebo. James then tested the students in both groups on material they had recently discussed in class. In this example, what is the independent variable?

Whether or not the students received the drug

Padma is doing an experiment concerning the effectiveness of a unique type of exercise as a treatment for pain. She has a placebo group in her experiment; the placebo subjects

Will do a different kind of exercise