What Would You Do?

This is a video of a popular show on ABC call "What Would You Do?" This show is very interesting because it is real life application and their experiments don't have to go through IRB's because they aren't accredited by an academic institution. This specific excerpt of the show is about racism, which is a very popular topic in psychology research currently and expected to grow. 

 

As with everything in life from now on think about what you do because you never know who is watching!

Oh Watson.....

My least favorite psychology researcher is John Watson. From what I have read I feel like he was very arrogant. He raised his children emotionally detached and was extremely critical because he felt like everyone should raise their children this way. He also had an affair with a graduate student assistant that caused him to get fired from John Hopkins University. Watson performed "Little Albert" experiments where he experimented on this baby to be afraid of anything white and fluffy, and other experiments. Today this would be considered unethical. Later he joined the business world after loosing his university position. I know he made contributions to the field, but it is hard to have respect for him personally.

Agnosias

Agnosias are severe deficits in ability to perceive sensory information that are often caused by lesions. Psychology research in this area is usually case studies of people who have been in accidents that caused lesions on their brain and the agnosia to develop.


Some examples of agnosias: 

• Similtagnosia: inability to pay attention to more than one object at a time
• Spatial agnosia: severe difficulty in everyday environments (getting lost in your own house) 
• Prospagnosia: inability to recognize human faces
• Auditory agnosia: no recognition of music melodies, even from your own collection 
• Apperceptive agnosia: no ability to recognize familiar objects  
• Akinetopsia: loss of motion perception (a woman in Zurich saw cars as a series of frames—she was afraid to cross the street).

 

The Magic Pill

Sometimes in psychology research as in other forms of research placeboes are used. A placedbo is described as a "magic pill" because it doesn't actually have any medical value to it, the only reason it is used is to make the experiment particants blind to which treatment group they are actually in. The psychological value is the important part, because we do not know what the mind is capable of so some participants in the placebo groups will have an improvement even though they weren't actually given anything.

I Feel For You With My Mirror Neurons

“Experiencing disgust and perceiving it in others appear therefore to have a common neural base…overlapping of the cerebral activations found following the inhalation of disgusting smells and during observation of expressions of disgust on the faces of other people confirms the hypothesis that the understanding of the emotive states of others depends on a mirror mechanism that codes sensory information directly in emotional terms” (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006).


This shows that we really can feed off each others emotions to offer empathy. It also shows why we like to be around others because we are social creatures. We like to be around each other and that is also how we can tell how others are feeling.

Where Are Mirror Neurons?

Adding to the previous post...

In the lateral view of the brain: 

Reddish Area - Action execution and observed execution


Yellowish Area -  Also activates


The wwo sectors form the action mirror neuron system in the brain.

What Are Mirror Neurons?

“There are neurons in the brain that respond when a person or animal observes another person or animal carrying out an action. These same neurons also respond when the observer carries out the same action him- or herself.” (Goldstein, 2008)

These are important for psychology research because they could help us discover ways to learn more efficiently.

Something to Think About

Many psychology experiments have been performed with Ritalin on working memory and attention. Results have found that it does improve working memory compacity therefore would help on like difficult math tests because you would be able to have more numbers and formulas in your memory at one time.

This means that taking Ritalin before an important test such as the ACT, SAT, or GRE would improve your test scores. Is it fair for someone to take this drug while someone else doesn't? It's a controversy that I believe will continue to grow as prescribtion drugs abuse also continues to grow.

Oliver Sacks, M.D.

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist and author of numerous books about psychological disorders. He has performed many case studies that appear in many psychology textbooks today. A short excerpt from his biography:

"Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease."

For more information check out his website: www.oliversacks.com

Psychology Research Humor :)

Pavlov did research in classical conditioning using dogs because he noticed they would drool before food was brought to them when they heard a bell due to an association previously made, this is a humorous cartoon of what he did.

Accuracy of Eye Witness Testimony...or not?

"A real life example of the eye witness testimony flaw is the Harris and Adams case. A police officer pulled over a vehicle at night to let the driver know that his headlights were turned off. The driver pulled out a gun and killed the officer. Suspect Harris was found a month later denying that he shot the officer. Harris claimed he picked up a hitch-hiker who was driving the car and the hitch-hiker shot the officer. The second suspect Adams who was the hitch-hiker claimed he was innocent but three witnesses claimed they saw him shoot the officer because Adams had a mustache and long hair which fit in to their description. Although Harris confessed that he stole the car and the loaded handgun, Adams was charged for the murder because three witnesses claimed they saw a description of Adams shooting the officer. Years later, the freed Harris was charged for a different murder and confessed on death row that he also shot the police officer twelve years earlier. Adams was finally released after an innocent twelve year sentence. Three witnesses pointed the finger at the wrong person."
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Accuracy-of-Eye-Witness-Testimony-and-Its-Flaws&id=328261


This shows how eye witnesses could potenitally put innocent people behind bars while guilty people go free. Eye witness testimony is very influencial in court because people like to hear what happened from other people who were there, with improving DNA testing and surveylliance hopefully we can have more accurate information about crimes. 

Lucky Number 7!

Seven is the magic number! Did you know you can hold an average of 7 pieces of information in your working memory? This is why it is easy to recall a phone number after you have repeated it several times. Experimentors have also discovered that if you chunk pieces of information together, such as remembering a list of numbers by double digits (instead of 7...9, remember 79), you can retain even more information in your working memory.

Clorox Bleach Commercial

The other day when I was watching TV therea was a commercial that came on advertising Clorox Bleach. In the commercial the man was carrying a board that had two white socks tacked on it and one had the Clorox logo under it. He then would ask people on the street which one was brighter. What's wrong with this "experimental" design?

By placing the logo under one of the white socks it ruins the idea of testing people on which sock they really think is brighter because of bias towards Clorox. If someone knows that Clorox is bleach and bleach is suppose to make things brighter then just being exposed the logo ruins your ability to eliminate bias for judging which one is brighter. For good experiments you must eliminate biases.

One Marshmallow or Two?

This video is a demonstration of delayed gratification in children. Each child is given one marshmallow and told that if the marshmallow is still there when the experimenter returns then she/he will receive another marshmallow. The children who waited ended up being more successful later in life and were more focused as shown by the follow up study years later. The children who ate the first marshmallow were described as more impulsive and less focused in the study years later. The good thing about this is that even if a child eats the first marshmallow they aren’t doomed to the fate of only doing immediate gratification. It is possible for parents to enforce techniques to help their children learn the benefits of delayed gratification.

Happy Birthday! (Cont...)

The rest of the cognitive lab...

“Study 2 as conducted by Kesebir and Oishi had students first right down the names of ten of their friends. After that they were given another sheet of paper and told to write down the birthdays they could remember out of the friends they had written down if they thought they were reasonable accurate. In the last stage of the study, the participants were asked to look up their friends’ birthdays on their Facebook or MySpace accounts or their own personal computers to obtain the birthdays that they could not remember. Participants also wrote down their own birthdays like Study 1, and explicitly priming was controlled because participants were not asked for their birthday until the end. Study 2 as conducted in the Cognitive Psychology class was very similar. We were asked to take out a sheet of paper and write down the names of ten friends, then we were asked to write down their birthdays, and we took the sheets home to use our Facebook accounts to check on the birthdays. Then we wrote down our birthdays and returned the sheets to the instructor.



The studies are comparable in the procedure and in the results; see Figure 2. Females recalled more birthdays than males and both groups showed birthdays remembered were closer to their own. Because our Cognitive Psychology class has very few people compared to the Kesebir and Oishi study, there was no significance in the class study. Overall the results replicate the Study 1 results that people remember birthdays of others that are closer to their own, compared to people who have farther away birthdays. Study 2 eliminated some of the limitations of Study 1 because it showed that it wasn’t just the recall based on instructions or that participants just tend to have friends with close birthdays because they had friends listed with birthdays far away from their birthdays.”

Happy Birthday?!

The next couple posts get a little more technical to show a comparison of a study done by psychologists and how it was replicated for learning purposes in the classroom. This is a cognitive psychology lab short paper (minus the graphs) that I completed.

“The purpose of the Kesebir and Oishi study was to show how the self-reference effect relates to remembering peoples birthdays. They hypothesized that because birthdays are very close to the self, participants would be most likely to remember birthdays that are close to the participants. The self-reference effect is when memories are processed with relation to the self and are better remembered. Using birthdays that are personal to the individual participant allowed for the investigation of a naturalistic case of the self reference effect occurring outside of the laboratory. For the “Happy Birthday” cog-lab Kesebir and Oishi’s first study was replicated in an Educational Psychology course and the second study was replicated in our Cognitive Psychology course.


Study 1 as conducted by Kesebir and Oishi had students in an online study free recall the birthdays of up to 10 friends only if they could be reasonably sure of the date. After entering their friends’ birthdays, they were then instructed on a new screen to enter their own birthday. The experimenters ensured that participants were not explicitly primed by asking for the participants’ birthday after they had already given the dates of their friends’ birthdays. Study 1 as conducted in the Educational Psychology Course had students to list up to 10 friends that they knew the exact birthday of. They were also instructed to list their birthday. Papers were then collected to be recorded by the instructor.


These studies are similar in the basic instructions and the results; see Figure 1. In every category the results are very similar such as females remembering more birthdays than males, which the article suggests is because females are more often concerned with interpersonal relationships, and that males remember birthdays closer to theirs more than females showing a stronger self-reference effect. Both studies suggest significance in the self-reference affect to remembering birthdays closer to one’s own.” One difference between the studies is that one was online based while the other was in class.”

To be continued....

Experimental Humor :)

To lighten up the posts with some humor....

"A very shy guy goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman sitting at the bar. After an hour of gathering up his courage, he finally goes over to her and asks, tentatively, "Um, would you mind if I chatted with you for a while?"


She responds by yelling, at the top of her lungs, "NO! I won't sleep with you tonight!" Everyone in the bar is now staring at them. Naturally, the guy is hopelessly and completely embarrassed and he slinks back to his table.

After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologizes. She smiles at him and says, "I'm sorry if I embarrassed you. You see, I'm a graduate student in psychology, and I'm studying how people respond to embarrassing situations."

To which he responds, at the top of his lungs, "What do you mean $200?!"
http://www.funnyhumor.com/jokes/996.php

Psychology Takes Flight

Human Factors in Aviation (Out of a Training video)




This video explains the theory behind Human Factors in Aviation. This relates to psychology research because there is research behind decisions made to reduce human error caused by confusing designs. Airplanes and flight have always been fascinating to me so this is interesting because it shows how even two interests (Psychology and Aviation) can be linked together.

Psychology Research Meets Engineering

“Human Factors Engineering is the discipline of applying what is known about human capabilities and limitations to the design of products, processes, systems, and work environments. It can be applied to the design of all systems having a human interface, including hardware and software. Its application to system design improves ease of use, system performance and reliability, and user satisfaction, while reducing operational errors, operator stress, training requirements, user fatigue, and product liability.”

http://reliability.sandia.gov/Human_Factor_Engineering/human_factor_engineering.html

I have an interest in the design of products based on how people think so this is an exciting field to me. With a growing interest in improving products by companies, it is growing career field. There are so many possibilities such as working on iPhone applications and aviation safety. A degree is no required to work in this field, but because it is so competitive, a degree and a masters would increase your chances of succeeding in this career field.

Disagreement with Landis

Landis’ Facial Expressions Experiment

“In 1924, Carney Landis, a psychology graduate at the University of Minnesota developed an experiment to determine whether different emotions create facial expressions specific to that emotion. The aim of this experiment was to see if all people have a common expression when feeling disgust, shock, joy, and so on.

Most of the participants in the experiment were students. They were taken to a lab and their faces were painted with black lines, in order to study the movements of their facial muscles. They were then exposed to a variety of stimuli designed to create a strong reaction. As each person reacted, they were photographed by Landis. The subjects were made to smell ammonia, to look at pornography, and to put their hands into a bucket of frogs. But the controversy around this study was the final part of the test.


Participants were shown a live rat and given instructions to behead it. While all the participants were repelled by the idea, fully one third did it. The situation was made worse by the fact that most of the students had no idea how to perform this operation in a humane manner and the animals were forced to experience great suffering. For the one third who refused to perform the decapitation, Landis would pick up the knife and cut the animals head off for them.


The consequences of the study were actually more important for their evidence that people are willing to do almost anything when asked in a situation like this. The study did not prove that humans have a common set of unique facial expressions.”
http://listverse.com/2008/09/07/top-10-unethical-psychological-experiments/


I completely disagree with the ethics of this study. In my opinion this study should have never taken place because of the inhumane treatment to the rats used in this study and the emotional disturbance that was caused to the participants. Although I do believe this study has a legitimate psychological experiment design, the unethical side of this study completely ruins the entire value of the experiment for me. To modify the experiment to be more ethical, Landis could have used video clips of less extreme scenarios, which do not harm animals or inflict possible emotional disturbance to participants, and still got the picture of the emotion for comparisons. As mentioned in a previous post, experiments like this make me thankful for stricter IRBs (Institutional Review Board), that will prevent unethical experiments such as this one from ever taking place.

The Stroop Effect

In the picture below try naming the color of the words out loud from left to right.

Once you past the second row it gets a little more difficult right? The Stroop Effect is a famous phenomenon in cognitive psychology. This shows the conflict of two mental systems because the reading of the word is automatic and takes over your thinking at first, while naming the color takes longer. Children who can’t read yet (about age 4) are very good at naming the colors of the words quickly with less mistakes because they can’t read the word anyways therefore the automatic effect of reading hasn’t taken over yet. Once children learn how to read, the Stroop Effect takes over their reading of the words so it becomes a difficult for them just like adults. This is applicable to everyday life because when designing products, professionals have to be careful that they don’t design a product that goes against the automatic mental system or human errors will occur.

Gender Roles

This video is a portrayal of how people in our society conform to gender roles. A social norm is an accepted way to act within a society, such as leaving a tip for a waiter. Gender roles refer to the accepted different social norms of males and females. This video is funny because people going through the doors took time to stop and go through the door that they identified with the posted gender even though no one was around to make them do it. This shows how our culture will conform to what we think is socially acceptable such as going through the right gender door, even when no one else is around.

Background Check

In order to form a good hypothesis and design an effective experiment in psychology, you must first complete a literature review. A literature review is where you search for articles that have been peer reviewed and published about existing research relating to your topic. This allows the field to expand because researchers can see what’s out there already and then build upon it with their new research. The easiest way to look up articles is using a research article data base such as PsycINFO or PsycARTICLES. By searching keywords you can easily find articles that relate to all aspects of what variables you are testing. For example, if you type in “facebook” into the search bar on PsycARTICLES you will find an article about facebook and personality and also one about facebook and academics. If your hypothesis was about personality and academics then both of these articles would be useful combined into your literature review section of your research project. The first couple literature reviews you do are the hardest, because after that you know what to look for and become better at searching key terms over time.

Getting the Go-Ahead

Every wonder what keeps researchers from conducting unethical experiments? The IRB (Institutional Review Board) is a committee that is designated to approve experiments in order to protect the rights and welfare of participants. In order to conduct any experiment, first you must fill out a form that contains details of your planned study to the IRB. It is usually helpful if you can cite articles in research journals. The IRB then meets to debate the pros and cons of the study and whether it protects the participants. Once approved, you will be contacted by the IRB and can continue with your study, however, if rejected you must stop the study. In order to study helping behaviors at Northwest last year, we submitted an experiment to the IRB that was first rejected. We wanted to leave something of value (i.e. cell phone, iPod, or calculator) out on a table and ask the participant (unaware subject of the study) to watch them for our confederate (person involved in the study) as they used the restroom. Another confederate would then have come along and picked up the item of value, in order to see if the participant would say something. It was rejected because the IRB felt that if the participant reacted with rage or anger then they may possibly harm the confederate that was stealing the valuable item. Our team had to modify our study to the dropping of an envelope in order to be approved by the IRB. I am very thankful we have IRBs because without them unethical research could take place that would lead to the discredit of anything scientific that the field could produce.

Selective Attention Test

WATCH VIDEO BEFORE READING :)






This video was used in the awareness test by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris and it’s called “The Invisible Gorilla.” When I first watched it I saw the gorilla, but when they show this in a psychology course it makes you become more aware that there may be something else going on. Most people never see the gorilla the first time because our brains’ have selective attention and when you are focusing on the number of passes, your attention is held so you don’t see the gorilla dance through the middle. I like videos like this that show that psychology research can be fun and that creative ways are the best way show psychology concepts. Hope you enjoy this video!

"Helping Behaviors" at Northwest

If you were walking through the Union and noticed a girl drop an envelope as you walked by, and were then asked questions about your year in school and hometown size last spring then you were part of a “helping behaviors” research study. Social Sciences Research Group (SSRG) is an organization on campus that teaches students research through experience. The “helping behaviors” study was conducted by several students including myself, to test whether students would help out a fellow student by picking up the envelope or letting her know she dropped it. We also asked year in school and hometown size, and noted their gender to use as variables in the experiment.  Although no significance was found, it was good to see that most of the students helped regardless of gender, hometown size, or year in school.

Pictured above is our group after we recieved 1st place in our research presentation category at the 2010 Great Plains Undergraduate Psychology Conference.

An Introduction...

As a Psychology major planning on going on to graduate school, psychology research is very important to me. It sounded kind of boring and nerdy to me when I first heard about it, but after I got into it I realized there was much more to it than just statistics. Now I find myself constantly thinking of how to measure behaviors and reactions, and how to design experiments to test out these measures. Once you get past the technically terminology, it’s surprisingly interesting and fun.

On this blog I plan on posting research studies that I find interesting and also my current research topics. For now I am working on a study that has to do with the career choices of my generation, which has been labeled “Generation Me,” and the career choices of “Generation X.” This will see if things like the economy have had an effect on what careers students are choosing to study in order to have a good chance of scoring a job after graduation.  I also plan on posting about events or mini explanation sections that relate to my undergraduate research experience.