Instructions:
• This assignment will consist of a review of two Psychology research articles (chosen from a list of 5 possible articles). There will be 4 “questions” (sets of questions) that will need to be answered for each of the two articles.
• The assignment will be approximately 8-12 pages in total (i.e. 4-6 pages per article) it will be double spaced with one-inch margins (using a 12-point, Times New Roman font). A paper that is longer than 12 pages is acceptable (provided that the extra length is justifiable!), but a paper that is less than 8 pages will be considered too short (i.e. inadequate). This page limit will not include the title page (the title page will include your identifying information – i.e. name, student number, email address, course number, and instructor).
• The evaluation form is at the bottom of this document, please read carefully.
• If you have any questions, or need any help, I am definitely available to help. Please feel free to visit during office hours or email for alternate times to meet. In addition, our Teaching Assistant is also available to help – and will be holding “help sessions” closer to the due date. Lastly, the Library has people who are available to help you if you are having difficulty using the Library’s web site. (Look at all this help! It’s almost as if we want you to succeed.)
Here is the list of the five possible articles (choose any two):
When looking for the articles online – use PsycINFO (a psychology-specific search tool available through the library’s website) – anything else is just a waste of your time. Thus, you need to get to this search tool by going through the library’s web site. It requires you to log in (as a Carleton student, access to this tool is free).
A tip is to search PsycINFO using the author’s last name (and then you would change the search criteria to “Author”). For example, if you were looking for the first article, you would enter “Acee” on the first row (and change the search criteria to “author”) and enter “Cho” on the second row (and change the search criteria to “author”) and then click “search” – this will give you every article published by “Acee” and “Cho” (or any other pair of authors with the same last names).
1. Acee, T. W., Cho, Y., Kim, J., & Weinstein, C. E. (2012). Relationships among properties of college students’ self-set academic goals and academic achievement. Educational Psychology, 32, 681-698.
2. Shimamura, A. P., Marian, D. E., & Haskins, A. L. (2013). Neural correlates of emotional regulation while viewing films. Brain Imaging and Behavior, 7, 77-84.
3. Hanssen, M. M., Peters, M. L., Vlaeyen, J. W. S., Meevissen, Y. M. C., & Vancleef, L. M. G. (2013). Optimism lowers pain: Evidence of the causal status and underlying mechanisms. Pain, 154, 53-58.
4. Ahrberg, K., Dresler, M., Niedermaier, S., Steiger, A., & Genzel, L. (2012). The interaction between sleep quality and academic performance. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 46, 1618-1622.
5. Stewart, M. J., & Wohl, M. J. A. (2013). Pop-up messages, dissociation, and craving: How monetary limit reminders facilitate adherence in a session of slot machine gambling. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 27, 268-273.
Here are the four questions to be answered for each of the two articles:
1. What is the underlying theoretical basis of the article?
To answer this question, you will read (and understand) the article’s Introduction. In addition, you might want to make use of your textbook and match up the ideas presented in the article with material from the text (looking for similar concepts). The textbook will help give you some background to the ideas, but the majority of the information will come from the article itself.
When answering this question, you might want to touch on the following ideas:
What general “psychological theory” are the authors basing their work upon? Discuss this theoretical basis. What is it? What does it say about human nature (how does it explain the behaviour of people)? How does this theoretical basis relate to this specific article? This part of your answer can be rather lengthy (i.e. two pages, or more)
2. What hypothesis (or hypotheses) are the authors testing in this study? How are they proposing to test these hypotheses?
To answer the first part of this question, you are going to tell me the article’s hypothesis (or hypotheses). This particular answer will bring you close to quoting the article (but I still want everything put into your own words). The answer to the first part of this question will be relatively short.
To answer the second part of this question, you are going to tell me a bit about “what they did” in their study. They have proposed a hypothesis, and then they designed a study to test that hypothesis – and you are to tell me “how” they tested that hypothesis (i.e. they brought participants into a lab and had them fill out questionnaires on their level of “Stress” and their “Satisfaction With Life”). The answer to all of question number two might take just one page.
3. What are the results of this study? Were the hypotheses supported? If so, how? If not, what did the authors find?
To answer this question, you do not need to get into too many numbers; I want to know the results “in general.” The answer to this question might take one or two pages.
4. From this study, what do we now know about human behaviour? What has this study revealed (what new understanding) about human nature?
This question is the first opportunity for you to be a bit creative. I want you to tell me about the study, and the meaning of their findings. But I also want you to relate these findings to the real world – based on these findings, what do we now know about human nature? Your discussion here should be grounded in the results of the study, but feel free to explore what these results might mean in the larger context of the real world.
NOTE: In order to answer these questions, you will need to carefully read the articles. Also, you might refer to the lecture notes and the textbook for additional supporting material. If you are having trouble answering any of these questions, please feel free to meet with me to discuss the issues – I would be more than glad to help you work through the articles. The purpose here is to learn something about Psychology (and to demonstrate your learning), not to force you into some impossible task.