Exam 2: How Psychologists Do Research

Professor Marshall wants to know whether eating sweets before bedtime causes children to take longer to fall asleep. In his experiment, whether or not a sweet is given before bedtime is the:

Techniques such as meta-analysis are useful in psychology because:

Medical placebos usually take the form of pills or injections that contain active ingredients.

A correlation between "A" and "B" does not necessarily mean that "A" causes "B." Why? Explain using this example: The higher a male monkey's level of the hormone testosterone, the more aggressive he is likely to be.

The APA's ethical guidelines require researchers to show that any deceptive procedures are justified by a study's potential value.

A group of individuals that matches the population on important characteristics such as age and sex is called a(n):

Field research may yield more applicable results than laboratory research because:

Experiments have long been the method of choice in psychology. However, the experiment does have its limitations. Describe these limitations and explain why many psychologists have called for more field research.

Descriptive methods yield characterizations of behavior but not necessarily causal explanations.

Dr. Littman-Smith is conducting research in Kenya to learn about the ways that mothers and their toddlers interact as they go about their day. It is most likely that she is engaged in:

Single-blind studies are conducted in order to avoid the powerful influence of experimenter effects on the results of an experiment.

Hadley is told that the achievement test he is taking is a standardized test. This means that:

Which variable does an experimenter manipulate when conducting experimental research?

The variable that an experimenter manipulates is called the independent variable.

Descriptive statistics allow researchers to draw inferences about how statistically meaningful a study's results are.

A _______________ is a measure of how strongly two variables are related to one another.

A correlational study determined that the higher a male monkey's level of testosterone, the more aggressive it is likely to be. This means that:

When Joyce takes a personality test, she is told that the test is reliable; that is, it:

A statistical measure of the relationship between two variables is known as:

Psychologists typically consider a result to be significant if it would be expected to occur by chance _______________ times in 100 repetitions of the study.