Research Methods
The variable that is manipulated by the researcher in a true experiment.
What is the independent variable (IV)?
Another name for learning.
What is conditioning?
This hormone is associated with increased levels of aggression. Males produce approximately 10 times more of this than females.
What is testosterone?
Festinger used this research method to investigate the cognitive dissonance experienced by members of a doomsday cult when the predicted end of the world date passed without incident.
What is covert observation?
When summarising any research on attraction, these 4 parts of a study are really important to include.
What are the Aim, Method, Results and Conclusion?
This type of study uses more than one research method (method triangulation) and is typically focused on one or a small number of participants.
What is a case study?
This man is considered the 'father' of classical conditioning.
Who is Ivan Pavlov?
The man allowed psychologists to determine that the frontal lobe was responsible for impulse control and related behaviours when he survived an accident that involved a metal pole being shot through his skull.
Who is Phineas Gage?
Participants were asked to 'cross out all the e's' in these two types of texts when we investigated automatic processing (the processing of information that guides behaviour without conscious awareness).
What are normal and nonsense texts?
When we think beautiful people must be good people, they are benefitting from this effect. It refers to the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area.
What is the halo effect?
This type of research gathers numerical data that can be analysed with statistics.
What is quantitative research?
This type of learning involves rewards and punishments.
What is operant conditioning?
This part of the brain is tiny but has a big job in helping to process emotion, especially fear and anger.
What is the amygdala?
This was the underpinning theory we investigated when we looked at the impact of listening to music while doing maths.
What is the working memory model?
These researchers carried out a study in 2007 that investigated how similarity affects attraction using single, American university students. A high correlation was found between descriptions of an ideal partner and self-descriptions, demonstrating that perceived similarity is important in mate selection.
Who are Markey and Markey?
This type of validity is concerned with whether the researcher is measuring what they think they are measuring (or how well controlled the study is).
What is internal validity?
Once the notification sound on your smartphone reliably triggers you to check your phone for messages, it has become this element of classical conditioning.
What is a conditioned stimulus?
What is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)?
This participant bias may explain why the results of the 'Impact of listening to music while doing maths' did not match our hypothesis. It potentially occurred because teenagers do not typically like to be told what to do. :-)
What is the negative participant role, or the 'screw-you' effect?
This critical thinking concept refers to how well-controlled a study was and whether or not we can use the results to determine causation.
What is internal validity?
This type of validity refers to how generalisable the findings of a study are to other groups of people.
What is population validity?
Completing the annoying reminders on my smartphone to encourage me to drink more water is an example of this type of response in operant conditioning.
What is negative reinforcement?
I'm removing the annoying reminder to encourage a behaviour to occur/increase.
This phenomenon happens when you observe someone else experience a reward of some kind as a result of their behaviour. This is a key component of Social Learning theory.
What is vicarious reinforcement?
This inferential test was performed in the Music and Maths experiment to determine whether the results were significant or not.
What is a Wilcoxon's Signed Ranks test?
(The experiment used a repeated measures design).
Researchers have suggested several reasons why similarity leads to attraction, including this phenomenon which occurs when other people share your values.
What is consensual validation?