Philosophy of Psychology and Intuition
The philosophy that undergirds what we consider evidence in psychology; the "test it out" approach rather than relying on intuition, faith, random guessing, or simply following what has always been believed to be true traditionally.
Empiricism
A publication that has articles with go through rigorous peer review
Academic Journal
The Latin phrase used for 3+ authors in APA style in in-text parenthetical citations
et al.
Number of visits to the doctor in the past year
Ratio Variable
The name of the typically used correlation statistic, ranging from -1 to 1, indicating the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables
Pearson's r/r
The unethical study that prompted the creation of the Belmont Report, which involved refraining from curing a sexually transmitted infection in hundreds of low-income Black men.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
An survey question on a scale measuring the opposite of what a scale is intended to measure
A Reverse-coded item
What you should do if you realize you have a design confound in your study right before you apply to the IRB.
Eliminate the design confound before applying to the IRB
A type of claim that can't be tested using any scientific method, such as "Cancer is caused by the will of a vengeful Goddess."
Unfalsifiable claim
A journal article reporting the results of a single study or small series of interconnected studies
Empirical Journal Article
The three (or four if you split one of them up) typical subsections in a methods section of an APA style study
Participants, Materials, Design and Procedure
or
Participants, Materials, Design, Procedure
The variable that is also known as a "manipulated variable"
Independent Variable
An expected correlation coefficient for the correlation between two completely unrelated variables, such as liking of tango music and severity of blueberry allergy.
0
The difference between the 25th and 75th percentile in a dataset
Interquartile range
The typically last stage of a study in which you need to disclose the purpose of a study and correct any deception that took place during the study
Debriefing
An example of this type of problematic survey item is "I am doing well in my Math and English courses in school".
Double-barreled Item
A type of claim that only an experiment can provide strong evidence for.
Causal claim
A threat to internal validity caused by an event taking place in the middle of a longitudinal study, such as a participant's parent dying in a study on the effects of anti-depressants on depression symptoms.
History Threat
A form of cognitive bias that causes people to seek out and remember information that supports what they already believe and ignore, avoid, or discount information that challenges what they already believe. A bias that creates a high risk of cherry-picking evidence.
Confirmation Bias/Belief Confirmation Bias
An article that details past studies, doesn't report any new data, and doesn't follow any particular set of structured rules for selecting articles.
Review Article
All of the seven sections of an APA style empirical Journal article, in order (eight if you include the title page).
Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, References, Appendices
Favorite Color
Nominal
The number that represents the percentage of the variance in the dependent variable that can be predicted from the variance in the independent variable.
Coefficient of determination
The appropriate measure of central tendency for a dataset consisting of the names given to newly born children in the united states in 2026.
Mode
The ethical principle violated in a study that says on it's informed consent form: "You must answer all questions on the survey in order to be paid for your participation in the study"
The Right to Withdraw
An effective strategy for combatting participants who may be very likely to engage in fence-sitting in a self-report survey.
Have an even number of response options.
A type of validity threatened in an experiment in which the experimental manipulation looks almost nothing like what real-world scenarios with that variable look like
Ecological Validity
A major threat to internal validity in a longitudinal study with no control group looking at the effect of reading to children on vocabulary gain between the ages of 1-3 years old.
Maturation Threat
Two examples of biases related to emotion we covered in this class where relying purely on emotional intuition may lead to irrational outcomes or irrational choices
Affect Heuristic/Affect Bias and Compassion Fade
A journal article that statistically combines together the effect of several past studies, such as reporting what the average number of children people have in the United States based on 37 past studies.
Meta-Analysis
The APA style error in the following report of a correlation:
Higher levels of gratitude are positively associated with higher life satisfaction, r(78)=.32, p=.03
A space is needed before and after each equals sign.
A ranked list of preferred candidates in an election (Candidate B as first choice, then Candidate C, then Candidate D, then Candidate A as the least favorite candidate)
Ordinal Variable
The name of the "backup" statistic that can be used for a correlation when you violate a variety of assumptions for a correlation, such as violating homoskedasticity, outliers, or nonlinearity(though only if it's monotonic)
Spearman's Rho/Rho
The square root of the variance
Standard deviation
A legal document given out by the National Institutes of Health that protects research data on sensitive subjects from being subpoenaed.
Certificate of Confidentiality
An effective strategy, other than a reverse-coded item, for dealing with participants who might not actually be reading any of the questions and are just trying to get through the survey as quickly as possible.
Three requirements for establishing Internal Validity for a causal relationship between two variables
Temporal Precedence, Covariation between cause and effect, Ruling Out Alternative Explanations
Two threats to internal validity specific to just within-subjects study designs
Order effects
Carryover effects
A set of two roles people take on in research that have a symbiotic (feeding into and reinforcing one another) relationship with one another
and
A set of two research types people conduct in research that have a symbiotic relationship with one another
Producers of Research and Consumers of Research
Basic Research and Applied Research
An article that carefully selects past studies using a set of objective rules and criteria, details on search words and search engines, and summarizes the results of those past studies, but does so without statistically combining together any of those effects (especially important for including qualitative studies that don't have statistical effects)
Systematic Review/Systematic Review Article
What should be alphabetized and what shouldn't be alphabetized regarding Author names on a References list
The reference list should be alphabetized by first author's last name, but you shouldn't alphabetize the names within each reference
A variable which poses a threat to internal validity, but which can have that threat neutralized by randomly assigning participants to condition.
Extraneous Variable
The value of the correlation coefficient in a study with a coefficient of determination of .64
.8 (i.e., the square root of .64, since coefficient of determination is the correlation coefficient squared)
A statistic computed by taking the average of a dataset, computing the different between each datapoint and the average, squaring those differences, adding them together, and dividing by the number of datapoints minus 1
Variance
A typical ethical requirement that can be skipped in a study targeting LGBTQ+ youth.
Parental Consent
A type of participant response bias that a reverse-coded item can help to detect
Acquiesence bias
All three subtypes of Construct Validity (which together provide strong evidence of convergent validity)
Face Validity, Divergent/Discriminant Validity, Convergent Validity
A plausible explanation for a null effect is found in a study that actually did have a real effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable which occurs despite having random assignment, a high sample size, the study being double-blind, using valid measures, having no floor or ceiling effect, and a strong manipulation that did, in fact, manipulate the independent variable, and everyone staying in the study.
A design confound working in reverse