Life Satisfaction and Experience of Daily Stress

Which of the following correctly explains the relationship between a moderator and a spurious association? They are different: A moderator indicates the association is not spurious. When examining an association in which one variable is categorical and one is quantitative, which of the following is most likely to be used? - A bar graph RESEARCH STUDY 8.1: Dr. Guidry conducts a study examining the relationship between the number of friends one has and the experience of daily stress and life satisfaction. She randomly samples 1,500 elderly men and women in Nashville, Tennessee (the state capital), located in the southern United States. Below are her findings: • Life satisfaction and experience of daily stress: r = –.57, 95% CI [–.77, –.37] • Number of friends one has and experience of daily stress: r = .09, 95% CI [–.27, .45] • Number of friends one has and life satisfaction: r = .36, 95% CI [.12, .60] Considering Dr. Guidry’s sample, which of the following statements is true? - The association found in her study could probably generalize to elderly people in other large cities in the South. What is the relationship between moderators and external validity? Moderators suggest that associations may not generalize to all subgroups of people. RESEARCH STUDY 9.2: Dr. Finkel is a social psychologist who studies romantic relationships. Several researchers have found that there is a link between income and marital satisfaction (e.g., Dakin & Wampler, 2012). Dr. Finkel is curious as to whether there is a causal link between the two variables, such that having a higher income causes higher levels of marital satisfaction. He is confident that he cannot reasonably or ethically manipulate people’s income level, so he decides to use a multivariate design. He is also curious as to whether there is a causal link between these two variables or if two other variables (number of arguments and life satisfaction) can explain the relationship. He measures his three variables in a sample of 124 married couples recruited from a local community center. Below are his results: Which of the following is NOT a predictor variable in Dr. Finkel’s study? marital satisfaction Cross-lag correlations are NOT helpful for answering/addressing which rule of causation? - Are there third variables that could explain the relationship? Parsimony is the - simplest explanation of a pattern of data. ________ can be examined in both simple bivariate designs and longitudinal designs. Cross-sectional correlation A regression table in an empirical journal article includes columns for betas and p values. What can you determine from p values that are less than .05? The 95% CI for that beta does not contain zero. An independent-groups design is also known as a design __________. - between-subjects RESEARCH STUDY 10.1: Dr. Lonsbary is a cognitive psychologist who is curious about how mood affects memory. She recruited 60 high school students and divided them into three groups. Group A listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel happy (“Happy” by Pharrell). Group B listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel sad (a song titled “Home Is Such a Lonely Place” by Blink-182). Group C listened to no music and instead was asked to sit quietly for 5 minutes (thought to make them feel neutral). When a participant would come to her laboratory, Dr. Lonsbary would greet the participant and then ask them to roll a six-sided die. Participants who rolled a 1 or 2 were assigned to Group A. Participants who rolled a 3 or 4 were assigned to Group B. Participants who rolled a 5 or 6 were assigned to Group C. The participants were then given an unlabeled CD to listen to based on their group assignment. The CD contained either the song selection or 5 minutes of silence. They were then escorted into a different room, where they were greeted by a research assistant who conducted the experiment. The research assistant sat the participants in front of a computer screen and told them that a list of 25 words would be displayed on the screen. They were instructed to listen to the CD with headphones while trying to memorize the list of words. All participants were given the same list of 25 common words to remember (e.g., desk, gray, plane, car, mask). When 5 minutes had passed, the screen displayed a question asking them whether they felt happy, sad, or neutral. After the participant responded, a new screen was displayed asking them to type in all the words they could remember from the list of 25 words. All participants were given 3 minutes to type the words they remembered. Afterward, the participant was thanked and dismissed. In response to the mood question, a majority of Group A participants said they were happy, a majority of Group B participants said they were sad, and a majority of Group C participants said they were neutral in their mood. Dr. Lonsbary found the following results in response to the number of words remembered: Dr. Lonsbary’s colleague, Dr. Chavis, recommended randomly assigning the participants to the three groups. His recommendation was designed to avoid which of the following? a selection effect RESEARCH STUDY 10.2: Dr. Dormeur studies sleep and sleep disorders. She is curious as to whether technology exposure before bedtime causes people to fall asleep more slowly. She recruits a sample of 60 middle-aged women from a local church who reported no history of sleep problems. She creates three conditions. All participants come to the sleep lab for three nights in a row and experience all three conditions. In the first condition (A), participants were asked to play an online game (Candy Crush) on an iPad for 10 minutes prior to going to bed. In the second condition (B), participants were asked to read an article using an iPad that discussed tricks and tips for improving one’s score on Candy Crush (which took about 10 minutes). In the third condition (C), participants were asked to read a newspaper article about the inventor of Candy Crush (which took about 10 minutes). With the use of an electroencephalograph (EEG), the researcher measures how long it takes participants to fall asleep. Dr. Dormeur was concerned that asking participants how long it took them to fall asleep would lead them to suspect that was the purpose of the study. Her decision to measure how long it took participants to go to sleep using the EEG instead of self-report was meant to decrease which of the following? - demand characteristics Researchers conducting an experiment can ensure temporal precedence by doing which of the following? manipulating the cause before measuring the effect Which of the following is an advantage of within-groups designs? - These designs rely on fewer participants. Dr. Persaud is curious as to whether children in a daycare center will share more after watching an educational video on sharing. Immediately before and after the video, she has several undergraduate research assistants code the sharing behavior of a group of 33 four-year-olds. Which of the following would you recommend to her to decrease the threat of instrumentation? using clear coding manuals Dr. Deveraux has conducted a study that has resulted in a null effect. Nonetheless, she suspects that there truly is a causal relationship between her independent and dependent variables. Which of the following is UNLIKELY to be to blame? - too many participants Dr. Biswas designs a study comparing the effects of mindfulness training to cognitive training on flexible thinking. In designing this study, what would be an appropriate manipulation check? adding a third group that receives flexibility training The likelihood that a study will return an accurate result when the independent variable really has an effect is called - power Dr. Flores wants to determine whether a new therapeutic technique for treating depression in adolescents is effective. Which of the following is a method Dr. Flores could use to increase power in the experiment? - double the sample size A study finds that exercise improves concentration, especially for students who took a yoga class as opposed to step aerobics. Which of the following statements can we infer about the study based on this finding? - There was an interaction in the results. RESEARCH STUDY 12.1: Dr. Singh was interested in the way people recognize objects as members of categories. For example, what makes us recognize a dog as being a dog and not a cat? More specifically, she was curious as to whether people think about categories in a more complex way if they contemplate an “opposite” category first. For example, does a person think differently about the category of “southern” if they first think about the category of “northern”? She was also curious as to whether people categorize differently if they are shown examples of those categories (e.g., looking at pictures of different animals) compared with generating those examples themselves (e.g., drawing pictures of different animals). Dr. Singh has four groups of participants (with 30 people in each group). In Group A, participants were told to cut out pictures of dogs and cats from magazines. In Group B, participants were told to cut out pictures of just dogs from magazines. In Group C, participants were told to draw pictures of cats and dogs. In Group D, participants were told to draw pictures of just dogs. After doing this for 30 minutes, participants in all groups were asked to list the attributes that define the “dog” category. Having a higher number of attributes listed was considered to be an indication of thinking about the category in a more complex way. The results of her study are below. In Dr. Singh’s study, how many possible main effects exist? - 2 RESEARCH STUDY 12.3: Dr. Yared is interested in memorization techniques and motivation. He splits his participants into four equal groups of 20 people each and gave each participant a list of 30 words to try to memorize in three minutes. Two groups were told to repeat the words silently to themselves and two groups were told to make up a story using the words. Two groups were offered 10 cents per word they recalled and two were offered $1 per word. The table shows how many words each group was able to recall. There appears to be a main effect of memory technique Dr. Gavin is conducting a 2 × 4 independent-groups factorial design. How many main effects will Dr. Gavin need to examine? - 2