Exam 2: Conducting Research in Psychology

Sitting in the park one sunny day, Chaim notices that people who are walking dogs smile at him more often than people without dogs. Chaim concludes that people who own dogs are happier than those who do not own dogs. Based on the principles of psychological research, what is the biggest problem with Chaim's conclusion?

Sarah has just moved to a new city, where she works the night shift at the local hospital. On her way home from work, she walks through a park with a high crime rate. Sarah reasons that she is safe, because there are always a lot of people around. According to the research conducted by Darley and Latané, Sarah is

Dr. Sesay is testing a new antidepressant. He gives the experimental group the new medication and the control group sugar pills that look exactly the same as the real medication. He is excited about all the good he believes this new medication will do for people. When he gives his control group the sugar pills, he shows little emotion, but when he hands out the antidepressants, he grins at his participants. To control for ______________, Dr. Sesay should use a _______________________ design instead.

Edward hires a statistician to analyze the results for his correlational analysis of exercise and well being. The statistician finds a correlation coefficient of -1.65. What should Edward do?

Nathaniel is designing an experiment: He wants to learn how much time other students at his university spend studying for their art history exams. He decides to use a self-report survey, but he knows that people might over- or underreport their study time, due to

Kathy is uncomfortable with some of the things she's learning in her science classes, and she becomes convinced that many scientists are just buying in to the theories they've been taught and perpetuating inaccurate information in their own research. In reality,

Stanley Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII. He used deception in his study to make participant think they were giving shocks to the subject in the next room. Today, Milgram

Nahele has agreed to participate in a survey so he can receive extra credit in his psychology class. When he arrives, he is given a questionnaire that contains questions like "I enjoy playing team sports," "I often worry about getting things done," "I prefer to try new ways of doing things," and "I sometimes find it hard to trust other people." Measuring personality traits, one would most likely be using a(n) _________ research design.

Adira is driving to work when she sees a car fire at the side of a busy highway. She considers stopping, but then thinks that in the age of cell phones, and with so many cars passing by, someone must already have called the police. She passes the fire by. The next day, she sees an article in the newspaper about the person who had the car fire. He says, he was astonished that nobody stopped to try to help him. The reaction Adira and the other drivers had produced was a

Madison does a study to find out if talking on a cell phone while driving increases drivers' ability to react quickly to unexpected events. In her study, the dependent variable is

Dr. Howard really wants her newly developed antianxiety medication to help people, but by smiling at the people who are getting the new drug and not at those who are getting the placebo, she is influencing her experimental subjects to respond differently than her control group subjects. In other words, she is unintentionally creating

Dr. Sesay is testing a new antidepressant. He carefully screens his subjects and assigns them to either the control group or the experimental group. He gives one group the new medication and the other one sugar pills that look exactly the same as the real medication. By doing this, he is hoping to control for ____________ effects.

Stephanie conducts an experiment to learn if brunettes have more fun. She has three brunette female friends and three blonde female friends go to the same party and record how many times they are asked to dance. When Stephanie discovers that two of the three brunette friends in her experiment are terrible dancers, she realizes that her results may be invalid due to

In 1971, Phillip Zimbardo and colleagues conducted an experiment to learn about the power of roles. The subjects were randomly assigned to a "prisoner" group or a "guard" group. The guards were to do whatever they deemed necessary to maintain control. Less than two days into the experiment, one prisoner had a "nervous breakdown." Because the experimenters believed that the prisoner was trying to trick them into releasing him, they chided him for being weak and made him stay. If this experiment were done today, it would be in violation of the APA's ethical standards for informed consent, because

Audrey knows that her bathroom scale consistently measures her weight as 3 kg lighter than the scale at Weight Watchers. You could say that her scale is ________ but not ________.

Matthew is conducting research to learn whether chewing peppermint gum during learning will improve recall if the participants are also chewing peppermint gum when they take a test. Matthew assigns the first 10 people who arrive to his experimental group. He assigns the last 10 people to his control group. What mistake has Matthew already made?

"Given the spectrum of disorders within autism, what is the range of functioning?" This is an example of a question in a(n) _____________ design.

Zhuang is trying to decide which major he should choose in college. His older brother notes that Zhuang is always analyzing how things work, what causes things to happen, and then predicts what will happen in the future, so maybe he should become a scientist. Zhuang's brother has recognized that science is

If scientific research shows that there is a positive correlation between the number of bars in a city and the number of churches in a city, we know that

Hanson, et al. (2009) examined whether the principles associated with effective treatments for general offenders (Risk-Need-Responsivity: RNR) also applied to sexual offender treatment. Based on a analysis of 23 recidivism outcome studies meeting basic criteria for study quality, the unweighted sexual and general recidivism rates for the treated sexual offenders were lower than the rates observed for the comparison groups. What type of study was used