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.