Question

As you saw from the lab PowerPoint slides last week, you will be doing a research study looking at ‘Aggression Priming” for your first paper. For this week’s discussion, I want you to discuss with your group what you think this study is about. What is the hypothesis? What theory does it come from? What do you predict will happen (do you expect something different than the hypothesis in the researcher instructions? If so, what and why?)? Do you think this is a good, testable hypothesis? Where do you think the idea came from (systematic source, serendipity, everyday occurrence, non-systematic sources etc.?). Finally, do you see any ethical problems with this study? If so, how should you deal with those problems? With your discussion group, assess your project. I also want you to note one thing different you would do if you had the chance to design a similar study on your own (Hint: You’ll get the chance to build a follow-up study to this Aggression Priming study in a few weeks, so think about what you would do different right now and you may get the chance to follow through with that new study!).

Your First Task in This Course

? In this course, you will carry out two studies. In the first study, you are going to see if participants alter their responses to a series of questions based on a manipulation that we will present to them

I want you to be a part of that study right now. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes.

Are you ready to begin?

– Let me first give you the study instructions (which are the same instructions that YOU will give to participants when YOU collect data for study one)

Your First Task in This Course

? Instructions: This semester in my psychology research methods class, we are collecting different types of data (demographic information, open-ended questions, scaled questions, etc.) that we will analyze in our statistical lab. We would greatly appreciate you completing the five parts of the survey below!

? Part I: Facebook Page

? Part II: Word Recall

? Part III: Impressions Survey

? Part IV: Theme

? Part V: Demographics

Your First Task in This Course

? Part I: Imagine you saw the following Facebook Page. Carefully read EVERYTHING on this page (Well, I’ll need to use a few slides to show you everything!).

Your First Task in This Course

? Part I: Continued

Your First Task in This Course

? Part I: Continued

? Finished! Ok, there are a few things I want to focus on
First, consider the word-recall task in Part II. How many of the

words related to aggression did you recall seeing?

Second, what were your impressions of Larry? Did you see him as a friendly, educated, and well-rounded person, or did you see him as more of an aggressive, hostile guy?

Third, and most important, did you notice the advertisements at the bottom of the Facebook page?

? This semester, we are going to examine the concept of Priming. More specifically, we will look at how advertisements might prime people’s recall of aggressive terms as well as their impressions of a Facebook user.

? Let’s start with the advertisements you saw at the bottom of the Facebook page (in Part I) ...

? You saw these “Aggressive” related advertisements (I know, the McDonalds one doesn’t fit well, but the other three are related to aggressive videogames or guns!):

? But, what if you saw the following advertisements instead ....

? What if you saw these “Finance” related advertisements:

? Or, what if you saw these “Education” related advertisements

? In our study, we have one independent variable with three levels: One third of our participants will get a Facebook page with

Aggressive (A) advertisements at the bottom of the page One third of our participants will get a Facebook page with

Finances (F) advertisements at the bottom of the page Our last third will get a Facebook page with Education (E)

advertisements at the bottom of the page

? Note: All other questions and materials in the questionnaire are identical. ONLY those advertisements differ

Let’s Discuss Your Study

? Throughout the rest of this section, I want to focus more on your role as a researcher as well as your performance to the questions in the survey you just completed. Here, we will cover

A. You Are The Researcher
B. Think About Your Performance

– Independent Variables – Dependent Variables – Hypotheses

? A. You Are The Researcher: Finding Your Surveys
First, find your surveys in your “Short Lab Assignments” folder

under Assignment #2: Study One Materials

They will also be in your “Papers” folder under Paper II: Study One Methods, Results and Discussion. Look for them under the name “Study One Materials”

When you open the Study One Materials, you will see four items. Three are “Main questionnaires” and the fourth is “Researcher Instructions”

My suggestion is that you read the “Researcher Instructions” document RIGHT NOW. It will make the slides to come easier to understand. I also suggest you look over the questionnaires after reading the instructions.

When YOU collect data, I want you to collect data from three different participants. That is, print out all three versions of the main questionnaire and find three people to complete them

– These must be three DIFFERENT people. They only read and complete one version of the survey

– They must NOT be family or friends of yours (you will use family and friends for a follow-up study later in the semester, so you don’t want to use them up for this first study!)

– Hold onto your three completed surveys, as we will use them a lot in the next few weeks!

? B. Think About Your Performance – Independent Variable (IV) So let’s talk about our Priming Aggression study a bit more

Again, the three versions of the questionnaire represent our single independent variable (or IV) for this study, the variable the researcher controls. This single IV has three levels ...

– 1: Aggression Prime (participants see Aggressive ads) – 2: Financial Prime (participants see Financial ads)
– 3: Education Prime (participants see Education ads)

? B. Think About Your Performance – Independent Variable (IV) So let’s talk about our Priming Aggression study a bit more

Notice the same McDonalds ad is present in all three versions. I did this on purpose (I didn’t want to make the type of ad (aggressive, financial, or education) TOO obvious!

Also notice that the size and placement of the ads is similar across all three surveys, and all questions and instructions are identical. This is to control for potential “extraneous” variables (any variable other than the IV that might influence responses). The ONLY thing that differs across conditions is the ad theme

? B. Think About Your Performance – Dependent Variable (DV)

A dependent variable “depends” on the study manipulation. That is, the DV is the response the participant gives, which depends on the IV. In our study, we have a lot of different dependent variables.

– There are word recall DVs in Part II, ten scaled impression questions in Part III, a manipulation check in Part IV, and a lot of demographic questions in Part V

– I know, that’s a lot of DVs! The good news is that we won’t look at all of them, but there are some really important ones to pay attention to ...

In Part II, we ask participants if they recall seeing specific words anywhere in the Facebook page. There are essentially three different kinds of words in this 32 word section

– There are ten words that DO APPEAR on the Facebook page. These include: “Education”, “Computer”, “Science”, “Life”, “Food”, “Visit”, “Times”, “Sunshine”, “Box”, and “Elk”.

– To be honest, we don’t really care about these words. We can see how many of them they recall seeing, which can serve as a manipulation check to make sure they read the whole Facebook page, but I’d rather ignore these words

? B. Think About Your Performance – Dependent Variable (DV)

In Part II, we ask participants if they recall seeing specific words anywhere in the Facebook page. There are essentially three different kinds of words in this 32 word section

– There are twelve neutral words that DO NOT APPEAR on the Facebook page. (“Details”, “Hospital”, “Tuna”, “Sweet”, “Monday”, “Card”, “Tree”, “House”, “Sport”, “Batteries”, “Quail”, or “Phone”)

– Again, we could look at these words to see if participants recalled seeing them (when they did NOT appear), but they are not very important so we can ignore them

In Part II, we ask participants if they recall seeing specific words anywhere in the Facebook page. There are essentially three different kinds of words in this 32 word section

– There are ten aggressive words that DO NOT APPEAR on the Facebook page, including: “Hit”, Armed”, “ “Kill”, “Gun”, “Complain”, “Soldier”, “Angry”, Annoyed”, “Irritated”, “Force”

– THESE words are important. Although participants should recall seeing ZERO of them, I think those in the Aggressive Prime condition will recall seeing more of them (compared to participants in the Education and Finance conditions)

– After you finish with the participant, I want you to go through and count how many of those ten aggressive words your participant recalled seeing. This can range from zero words recalled to ten words recalled.

?At the bottom of the second page of the survey, put that number in the ___ that follows the phrase “# Words ___”

?We will use this # as one of our primary dependent variables in the study. Add ONLY the aggressive words

? B. Think About Your Performance – Dependent Variable (DV)

For Part III, participants will provide their impressions of Larry. This task is pretty self-explanatory. Participants will rate on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) their impression of Larry on ten traits

For Part IV, we want to see whether participants paid attention to the advertisements. We ask them to think about the general theme of the ads and give them three options to choose from

? B. Think About Your Performance – Dependent Variable (DV) In Part V, we asked participants to provide demographic info

– These questions include gender, age, ethnicity, language, and FIU student status. We will report these in our paper when we discuss the experimental sample

?We will report descriptive statistics (which “describe” the sample), including the average (or mean) participant age, the number of men and women, the race/ethnic breakdown, etc.

? B. Think About Your Performance – Hypotheses

Another big part of this study are our hypotheses. This is very important: You have a separate hypothesis for each dependent variable (though some hypotheses will overlap if the question asks something similar). Let’s discuss two sets of hypotheses

– 1). Word recall task (Part II)
– 2). Larry Neumann Impressions (Part III)

? B. Think About Your Performance – Hypotheses 1). Word Recall Task (Part II)

– “First, we predict that participants who saw ads related to aggressive games or guns will remember more aggressive related words (like “Kill”, “Gun” “Armed”, and “Angry”) from a word recall task compared to participants given financial or education ads, even though none of the aggressive words actually appeared in the stimulus materials.”

?Note: You can also find a similar hypothesis in the debriefing statement in your research instructions!

? B. Think About Your Performance – Hypotheses 1). Word Recall Task (Part II)

– “Second, we predict that participants in the aggressive advertisement condition will find a social media user more aggressive, more competitive, and more hostile than those given financial or education related advertisements.”

?Note #1: Again, you can also find a similar hypothesis in the debriefing statement in your research instructions!

?Note #2: I combined several similar DVs here, but I could have separate hypotheses for the aggressive rating, for the competitive rating, and for the hostile rating

? B. Think About Your Performance – Hypotheses
Well, that's our study for this semester in a nutshell!

Keep in mind our hypotheses for this study over the next few weeks, as it will become an important part of your future papers (Hint: Look at the student instructions for the study as well as prior slides in this presentation!)

For now, I want to talk about some of the upcoming papers ...

Part Two

Your First Experimental Papers

Paper I: Study One Literature Review
Paper II: Study One Methods / Results / Discussion

Your First Experimental Papers

? Paper I: Study One Literature Review
For your first paper in this class (Paper I), you will write a short

literature review based on the Priming Aggression idea

– When you go into Canvas, find a folder of articles related to the Priming Aggression. Using this set of articles, your first task is to read three or four of them (plus one more article that you will find on your own) and then combine the information from them into a literature review that ends with the hypotheses for your study (the ones we just discussed)

– Instructions and examples are available on Canvas

Your First Experimental Papers

? Paper II: Study One Methods, Results and Discussion

A few weeks after your study one literature review, you will turn in a second paper, which focuses on the methods, results, and very brief discussion of the data you collected for study one.

Paper II thus focuses on the methods (specific details about what you did and how you did it), data analysis (all of those fun statistics you hopefully remember from your stats class, like chi-squares, t-Tests, and ANOVAs. Don’t worry right now – we will help you out with these along the way!), and a very brief (paragraph or two) discussion section

? Just breathe – it will be okay!

I know you are probably wide-eyed at this point knowing how much work lies ahead, but keep in mind that this is a required course in psychology and ALL students taking the course go through the same steps you are. I have taught this class many times before, and most students survive (!). So will you!

Over the next few weeks I will go into a bit more detail about the paper instructions and the expectations I have for your papers.

Answer 1

The given study is based on an exploration of the causal relationship between priming and emotional memory and the effect of priming on interpersonal attitude and attribution. The study involves experimentally presenting a group of participats three distinct categories of independent variable namely- aggression priming using advertisements which are followed by exposure to aggressive words, financial priming which involves recognition of greater number of finance related words, and educational priming using advertisements on education.

Thus, the study can be said to test several hypotheses based on th three categories of the independent variable. The major hypothesis being: ‘participants who were presented with aggression related words will recall more aggressive words including the ones which were not originally presented’

the second major hypotheses is with respect to the evaluation of the personal attributes of social media user. According to this second hypothesis, there is a greater tendency to attribute aggression to a Facebook user whose name has been primed with display of aggressive advertisements. Thus, greater the pairing of the perosn’s face With aggressive content, the greater will be the priming effect in judging the individual’s characteristics.

the given study seems to flow from an observation of the everyday experiences on social media where emotional associations or priming is found to influence memory and judgement about other people. it follows an objective means to approach the relationship between cognitive evaluation and memory research and seeks to provide a highly valid evidence in the support of the priming effect on the recall of words, names etc.As such, the experimental method provides a useful and accurate tool to measure the priming effect in memory and attribution and it helps to establish a causal relationship by controlling or neutralising the effect of any intervening variables such as gender, age, class, ethnicity, language etc. in establishing the effect of priming aggression on the correct recall of related terms.