PSYCH
Which of the following is a difference between a debriefing session following a study with deception compared to a debriefing session following a study without deception?
A deception study debriefing must attempt to restore a sense of honesty and trustworthiness.
Which of the following is NOT possible?
A measure is valid but not reliable.
Which of the following is NOT an example of coercion?
A researcher offering three points of extra credit to college students to participate in a study
Which of the following is the difference between claims based on personal experience (anecdotal claims) and frequency claims?
Anecdotal claims are not based on scientific studies but frequency claims are
What is the difference between advice from an authority and that from a researcher?
Authorities often base their advice on intuition, while researchers rely on facts.
Which of the following is true of the difference between basic and applied research?
Basic and applied research have different goals.
You read a news article titled, "New Drug Reduces OCD Symptoms in Mice" about a recent scientific study. To evaluate whether the title's claim is supported, you should do which of the following?
Check whether the authors established covariance, temporal precedence, and internal validity.
RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling. Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble. Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling. The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr. Sheffield has decided to test the discriminant validity of his new measure. He has a group of first-time Gamblers Anonymous (GA) attendants complete his measure and finds that they score higher than a group of people who do not attend the group. Which of the following results would provide evidence for discriminant validity?
He finds that the measure of gambling is not correlated with a measure of life satisfaction in the same two groups of people.
Elliott is double majoring in English and psychology. He plans on being a high school English teacher and is only majoring in psychology because he finds the classes interesting. Which of the following is an important reason for him to be a good consumer of research?
He will probably want to read research related to enhancing his teaching.
What does it mean that "reliability is necessary but not sufficient for validity"?
If a measure is valid, it is also reliable.
Generally, what is the main priority for experimental studies?
Internal validity
Researchers conducting an experiment can ensure temporal precedence by doing which of the following?
Manipulating the cause before measuring the effect
Matthew is reading an empirical journal article and wants to know whether the authors used the Big Five Inventory (BFI-44) or the NEO-PI to measure extraversion. In which section would he find this information?
Method
Which of the following is NOT an example of physiological measurement?
Number of panic attacks a patient reports
Which of the following sources is most likely to contain only information that has been rigorously peer-reviewed?
Review journal articles
In considering whether research is ethical, which of the following are balanced against each other?
Risk to participants versus value of the knowledge gained
Which of the following is NOT true of selection effects?
Selection effects are unimportant for interrogating internal validity.
How many subcategories of quantitative variables exist?
Three
Tim tells you that the best way to make friends is by opening the conversation with a joke. He can easily recall all the friends he met by telling a joke and also the times he opened with chitchat and didn't befriend the person. If you were concerned that Tim was making the present/present bias, what would you ask him?
What about the times you opened with a joke and didn't become friends with the person?
A psychiatrist is testing a drug that treats depression. He has given the drug to all his patients, and all of them have experienced a decrease in depressive symptoms. Although this is interesting, his experience is limited because he does not have:
a comparison group that did not receive the drug
Considering a measure's face validity is:
a good way to interrogate the construct validity of the dependent variable.
Ethical decision making should be:
a thoughtful balance.
Research that is done specifically to solve a practical problem, like increasing memory ability or decreasing symptoms of depression, is known as:
applied research.
RESEARCH STUDY 3.3: Anton and his friends are discussing a study he read about in his developmental psychology class. In the study, the researcher made the claim that most middle school students who are bullied have low self-esteem. Clarissa questions the study, saying, "I am not sure that I am convinced. I am not sure you can really measure being bullied." Quinn also questions the study, saying, "Which middle school students did they study? I am curious if they included both private and public school students." Manish also is curious about the study, asking, "I wonder how strong the relationship is between bullying and self-esteem. Could you predict one from the other?" Why should Anton NOT interrogate the internal validity of the study?
because the study's claim is an association claim
Different factors that could account for significant results are called ______
confounds
RESEARCH STUDY 3.5: Jenny reads the following headline on an online article: "If You're Sexist, People Will Think You're Racist, and Vice Versa." (This headline is based on a study conducted by Sanchez and colleagues, 2017.) This study found that members of stigmatized groups are threatened by prejudice directed at other stigmatized groups. Their results showed that White women can be threatened by racism, and men of color threatened by sexism, and that these perceptions made participants expect unfair treatment. Because of the design of this study, Sanchez and colleagues are likely more interested in ____________ than _____________.
construct validity; generalizing to all minority groups
A variable that the researcher controls is a _________ variable.
manipulated
RESEARCH STUDY 3.5: Jenny reads the following headline on an online article: "If You're Sexist, People Will Think You're Racist, and Vice Versa." (This headline is based on a study conducted by Sanchez and colleagues, 2017.) This study found that members of stigmatized groups are threatened by prejudice directed at other stigmatized groups. Their results showed that White women can be threatened by racism, and men of color threatened by sexism, and that these perceptions made participants expect unfair treatment. In this study, ________ is a conceptual definition of one of their primary variables.
perceived prejudiced attitudes
An educational psychologist is testing the discriminant validity of a new measure of numerical learning difficulties. He gives his measure to a group of students along with another measure of verbal learning difficulties, which he predicts should not be strongly related to numerical learning difficulties. Which of the following correlations would the psychologist hope to find in order to establish discriminant validity?
r = −0.18
Advice that is based on _____________ is most likely to be correct.
research
You read research that found that first-born children tend to have higher IQs than their siblings. However, you typically earn higher grades than your older brother. Scientists might explain this discrepancy by saying that:
research is probabilistic.
Dr. Hadden wants to conduct a study that will allow him to make claims that apply to all college students. Which of the following validities is he prioritizing
the external validity of the study
The quality of journalists' coverage of a science story will be determined by two factors:
the importance and accuracy of the story.
The principle of justice calls for a balance between and .
the kind of people who participate in research; the kind of people who benefit from it
RESEARCH STUDY 3.1: Anderson is reading his morning paper and sees the following headline: "Men Should Avoid Rock Music When Playing Board Games." (This headline is based on a study conducted by Fancourt, Burton, & Williamon, 2016.) In the study, men and women played the game "Operation" when listening to different types of music. Male participants performed worse when listening to AC/DC than when listening to Mozart, but female participants' performance did not differ based on music. Which of the following is a variable in this study?
the sex of the participant
A common finding in the study of aggression is that exposure to television is associated with increased aggressive behavior in children. You are curious as to whether peer pressure is really to blame (peer pressure encourages you to watch television and peer pressure encourages you to be aggressive). You are questioning which of the following criteria of causation?
the third-variable criterion
Which of the following is an example of applied research?
An educational psychologist who looks for a way to increase math skills in 8-year-olds
Your friend Gaby loves reading articles about psychology studies in her monthly women's magazine. Which of the following would you tell her?
Be careful about reading those articles because they may not present findings accurately."
After reading the chapter, Cyril says to himself, "I am sure other people might engage in faulty thinking, but I never would." What is Cyril experiencing
Bias blind spot
RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling. Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble. Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling. The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr. Sheffield gives his measure to his supervisor, who is also an expert in pathological gambling. His supervisor says that his measure appears to test all the components of pathological gambling, including feeling restless when attempting to stop gambling, jeopardizing jobs in order to keep gambling, and using gambling to escape from problems and a bad mood. Given this information, Dr. Sheffield's measure has evidence of which of the following?
Content validity
Which of the following ethical violations proposed by the Belmont Report was NOT committed in the Tuskegee Study?
Participants were not given monetary payments for their time
RESEARCH STUDY 4.1: Dr. Kushner is planning on conducting a study next semester. He is curious as to whether sleep deprivation is associated with poorer cognitive performance. For example, if you sleep poorly the night before a big exam, will you do worse? Dr. Kushner is especially curious about selective sleep deprivation, where people are kept from entering REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to monitor brain waves, he plans to let participants sleep until they enter REM sleep and then wake them. After the participants are awake for one minute, Dr. Kushner plans to let them return to sleep. As they enter REM sleep again, he will wake them again and follow the same procedure. He plans to do this through the entire eight-hour sleep session. The following morning, participants will be asked to take a sample SAT test. Dr. Kushner asks his participants to provide informed consent. Doing this is adhering to which principle of the Belmont Report?
The principle of respect for persons
RESEARCH STUDY 1.1: Deci and Ryan (1985, 2001) have proposed that there are three fundamental needs that are required for human growth and fulfillment: relatedness, autonomy, and competence. Susan predicts that students who have these needs met in their psychology class feel happier and more satisfied with the class. She collects data and finds that students who feel more related and competent do feel happier but that feeling more autonomous does not seem to matter. Susan thinks that maybe autonomy is only necessary when people are in situations in which they are not being evaluated. Susan's prediction that students who have all three needs met will experience greater satisfaction with their psychology class is an example of which of the following?
A hypothesis
odd is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for his research methods project. He decides to measure popularity by asking each elementary school student to tell him how many friends he or she has. He assumes that more friends means the student is more popular. Which of the following best describes this variable?
A ratio scale of measurement
To evaluate how well a study supports a frequency claim, you need to focus most on evaluating which of the following validities?
Construct validity and external validity
Which of the following is the correct ordering of the sections of an empirical journal article?
Abstract, Method, Results, Discussion, References
RESEARCH STUDY 10.2: Dr. Dormeur studies sleep and sleep disorders. She is curious as to whether technology exposure before bedtime causes people to fall asleep more slowly. She recruits a sample of 60 middle-aged women from a local church who reported no history of sleep problems. She creates three conditions. All participants come to the sleep lab for three nights in a row and experience all three conditions. In the first condition (A), participants were asked to play an online game (Candy Crush) on an iPad for 10 minutes prior to going to bed. In the second condition (B), participants were asked to read an article using an iPad that discussed tricks and tips for improving one's score on Candy Crush (which took about 10 minutes). In the third condition (C), participants were asked to read a newspaper article about the inventor of Candy Crush (which took about 10 minutes). With the use of an electroencephalograph (EEG), the researcher measures how long it takes participants to fall asleep. Dr. Dormeur was concerned that asking participants how long it took them to fall asleep would lead them to suspect that was the purpose of the study. Her decision to measure how long it took participants to go to sleep using the EEG instead of self-report was meant to decrease which of the following?
Demand characteristics
RESEARCH STUDY 3.5: Jenny reads the following headline on an online article: "If You're Sexist, People Will Think You're Racist, and Vice Versa." (This headline is based on a study conducted by Sanchez and colleagues, 2017.) This study found that members of stigmatized groups are threatened by prejudice directed at other stigmatized groups. Their results showed that White women can be threatened by racism, and men of color threatened by sexism, and that these perceptions made participants expect unfair treatment. Which of the following questions assesses the construct validity of this study?
How did the researchers measure expectations of unfair treatment?
All of the following are advantages of within-groups designs EXCEPT:
It is less time-consuming for the participants.
Both James and Thomas have theories that explain why listening to classical music while reading is associated with increased recall of the material. James' theory is much simpler than Thomas'. Thomas created his theory a few months before James did. Which of the following is true?
James' theory would be considered better because it is more parsimonious.
Vanessa claims that she sleeps better when she falls asleep to music. She has a comparison group because she has noticed that she does not listen to music every night, only when she remembers to charge her iPod. She typically remembers to charge her iPod on nights when she is able to finish studying earlier. What problem do you see in Vanessa's reasoning about sleeping better to music?
Vanessa may be sleeping better because she is less distracted by studying/going to bed sooner
RESEARCH STUDY 3.2: Dr. Ramon makes the following claim: "Watching television leads people to spend less time communicating with their spouses, study says." Dr. LaSalle makes the claim: "Research shows that making more money correlates with spending less time talking with your spouse." Which type of claim is Dr. LaSalle making?
association claim
RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling. Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble. Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling. The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr. Sheffield has now decided that he wants to test his measure on some university students (who some estimates say have a 6% prevalence rate of compulsive gambling). He has a group of 100 university students complete his measure. He also has them complete two other measures (one that measures addictive behavior in general and one that measures general attitudes toward gambling). He finds that his new measure is positively associated with each of these other measures. This procedure has provided evidence for the _____ of Dr. Sheffield's measure.
convergent validity
RESEARCH STUDY 4.1: Dr. Kushner is planning on conducting a study next semester. He is curious as to whether sleep deprivation is associated with poorer cognitive performance. For example, if you sleep poorly the night before a big exam, will you do worse? Dr. Kushner is especially curious about selective sleep deprivation, where people are kept from entering REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to monitor brain waves, he plans to let participants sleep until they enter REM sleep and then wake them. After the participants are awake for one minute, Dr. Kushner plans to let them return to sleep. As they enter REM sleep again, he will wake them again and follow the same procedure. He plans to do this through the entire eight-hour sleep session. The following morning, participants will be asked to take a sample SAT test. Upon receiving institutional review board (IRB) approval, Dr. Kushner trusts his graduate student to conduct the study. However, his graduate student does not conduct the study and instead provides Dr. Kushner with invented results that support his hypotheses. This is known as which of the following?
Data fabrication
RESEARCH STUDY 10.1: Dr. Lonsbary is a cognitive psychologist who is curious about how mood affects memory. She recruited 60 high school students and divided them into three groups. Group A listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel happy ("Happy" by Pharrell). Group B listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel sad (a song titled "Home Is Such a Lonely Place" by Blink-182). Group C listened to no music and instead was asked to sit quietly for 5 minutes (thought to make them feel neutral). When a participant would come to her laboratory, Dr. Lonsbary would greet the participant and then ask him or her to roll a six-sided die. Participants who rolled a 1 or 2 were assigned to Group A. Participants who rolled a 3 or 4 were assigned to Group B. Participants who rolled a 5 or 6 were assigned to Group C. The participants were then given an unlabeled CD to listen to based on their group assignment. The CD contained either the song selection or 5 minutes of silence. They were then escorted into a different room, where they were greeted by a research assistant who conducted the experiment. The research assistant sat the participants in front of a computer screen and told them that a list of 25 words would be displayed on the screen. They were instructed to listen to the CD with headphones while trying to memorize the list of words. All participants were given the same list of 25 common words to remember (e.g., desk, gray, plane, car, mask). When 5 minutes had passed, the screen displayed a question asking them whether they felt happy, sad, or neutral. After the participant responded, a new screen was displayed asking them to type in all the words they could remember from the list of 25 words. All participants were given 3 minutes to type the words they remembered. Afterward, the participant was thanked and dismissed. In response to the mood question, a majority of Group A participants said they were happy, a majority of Group B participants said they were sad, and a majority of Group C participants said they were neutral in their mood. Dr. Lonsbary found the following results in response to the number of words remembered. Group A (Happy) Group B (Sad) Group C (Neutral) Number of Words Remembered 16 14 9 Groups A and B vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .36 Group A vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .30 Group B vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .41 Group A vs. Group B No statistically significant difference d = .09 Dr. Lonsbary is considering doing a follow-up study in which instead of asking participants to listen to music to induce mood, she has them write either a story about a character who just won the lottery or a story about a character who just experienced the death of their spouse. This change in the mood variable is designed to enhance the study's _________ validity.
external
In interrogating the construct validity of a measure, which question should a researcher ask?
Is there enough evidence that this measure is valid?
RESEARCH STUDY 10.2: Dr. Dormeur studies sleep and sleep disorders. She is curious as to whether technology exposure before bedtime causes people to fall asleep more slowly. She recruits a sample of 60 middle-aged women from a local church who reported no history of sleep problems. She creates three conditions. All participants come to the sleep lab for three nights in a row and experience all three conditions. In the first condition (A), participants were asked to play an online game (Candy Crush) on an iPad for 10 minutes prior to going to bed. In the second condition (B), participants were asked to read an article using an iPad that discussed tricks and tips for improving one's score on Candy Crush (which took about 10 minutes). In the third condition (C), participants were asked to read a newspaper article about the inventor of Candy Crush (which took about 10 minutes). With the use of an electroencephalograph (EEG), the researcher measures how long it takes participants to fall asleep. Dr. Dormeur's participants have only agreed to participate in the study for three nights each. Which type of counterbalancing can she use?
Partial counterbalancing
RESEARCH STUDY 2.1: Charlotte is studying subliminal messages and weight loss. She is curious whether people will lose more weight if they hear subliminal messages that encourage weight loss ("don't eat that food," "you want to be thin," etc.) in the music on their iPods compared to people who do not have subliminal messages in their music. She studies 40 people and finds the following results: Number Who Lost Weight Number Who Did Not Lose Weight Exposed to Subliminal Messages (Cell A) 15 people (Cell C) 5 people Not Exposed to Subliminal Messages (Cell B) 10 people (Cell D) 10 people To understand whether the subliminal messages have an effect, Charlotte needs to consider which of the following cells in the chart?
She must consider all of the cells
RESEARCH STUDY 10.1: Dr. Lonsbary is a cognitive psychologist who is curious about how mood affects memory. She recruited 60 high school students and divided them into three groups. Group A listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel happy ("Happy" by Pharrell). Group B listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel sad (a song titled "Home Is Such a Lonely Place" by Blink-182). Group C listened to no music and instead was asked to sit quietly for 5 minutes (thought to make them feel neutral). When a participant would come to her laboratory, Dr. Lonsbary would greet the participant and then ask him or her to roll a six-sided die. Participants who rolled a 1 or 2 were assigned to Group A. Participants who rolled a 3 or 4 were assigned to Group B. Participants who rolled a 5 or 6 were assigned to Group C. The participants were then given an unlabeled CD to listen to based on their group assignment. The CD contained either the song selection or 5 minutes of silence. They were then escorted into a different room, where they were greeted by a research assistant who conducted the experiment. The research assistant sat the participants in front of a computer screen and told them that a list of 25 words would be displayed on the screen. They were instructed to listen to the CD with headphones while trying to memorize the list of words. All participants were given the same list of 25 common words to remember (e.g., desk, gray, plane, car, mask). When 5 minutes had passed, the screen displayed a question asking them whether they felt happy, sad, or neutral. After the participant responded, a new screen was displayed asking them to type in all the words they could remember from the list of 25 words. All participants were given 3 minutes to type the words they remembered. Afterward, the participant was thanked and dismissed. In response to the mood question, a majority of Group A participants said they were happy, a majority of Group B participants said they were sad, and a majority of Group C participants said they were neutral in their mood. Dr. Lonsbary found the following results in response to the number of words remembered. Group A (Happy) Group B (Sad) Group C (Neutral) Number of Words Remembered 16 14 9 Groups A and B vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .36 Group A vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .30 Group B vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .41 Group A vs. Group B No statistically significant difference d = .09 Which of the following is NOT a control variable in Dr. Lonsbary's study?
The mood of the participants
RESEARCH STUDY 10.1: Dr. Lonsbary is a cognitive psychologist who is curious about how mood affects memory. She recruited 60 high school students and divided them into three groups. Group A listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel happy ("Happy" by Pharrell). Group B listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel sad (a song titled "Home Is Such a Lonely Place" by Blink-182). Group C listened to no music and instead was asked to sit quietly for 5 minutes (thought to make them feel neutral). When a participant would come to her laboratory, Dr. Lonsbary would greet the participant and then ask him or her to roll a six-sided die. Participants who rolled a 1 or 2 were assigned to Group A. Participants who rolled a 3 or 4 were assigned to Group B. Participants who rolled a 5 or 6 were assigned to Group C. The participants were then given an unlabeled CD to listen to based on their group assignment. The CD contained either the song selection or 5 minutes of silence. They were then escorted into a different room, where they were greeted by a research assistant who conducted the experiment. The research assistant sat the participants in front of a computer screen and told them that a list of 25 words would be displayed on the screen. They were instructed to listen to the CD with headphones while trying to memorize the list of words. All participants were given the same list of 25 common words to remember (e.g., desk, gray, plane, car, mask). When 5 minutes had passed, the screen displayed a question asking them whether they felt happy, sad, or neutral. After the participant responded, a new screen was displayed asking them to type in all the words they could remember from the list of 25 words. All participants were given 3 minutes to type the words they remembered. Afterward, the participant was thanked and dismissed. In response to the mood question, a majority of Group A participants said they were happy, a majority of Group B participants said they were sad, and a majority of Group C participants said they were neutral in their mood. Dr. Lonsbary found the following results in response to the number of words remembered. Group A (Happy) Group B (Sad) Group C (Neutral) Number of Words Remembered 16 14 9 Groups A and B vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .36 Group A vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .30 Group B vs. Group C Statistically significant difference d = .41 Group A vs. Group B No statistically significant difference d = .09 Prior to conducting the current study, Dr. Lonsbary asked her research assistant to use the same mood manipulation with a sample of 30 college students to determine if people's moods really did change after listening to the music. This preliminary study is known as a _________ study.
pilot