Exam 2: Doing Social Psychology Research

Buster runs an experiment in which she finds that participants placed in a good mood by a happy film clip are more likely to offer help to a fellow participant than participants who see a sad film clip.Bob suggests that perhaps this difference simply results from the fact that the participants in the happy film clip condition were more helpful people______________to begin with.What methodological aspect of a successful experiment can Buster point to in order to refute this criticism?

Johanna is participating in a study on social contacts and subjective well-being.Each evening around 6 p.m. ,Johanna______________is supposed to record in a journal the number of social interactions she had that day that were longer in duration than______________5 minutes.The researcher is using self-report in this study.

What are the two essential characteristics of an experiment? Why,and how,is each of these important for the internal validity of the experiment?

Which of the following correlation coefficients reflects the strongest meaningful relationship?

The reliance of many social psychology studies on college student participants poses a threat to

Professor Collison studies the impact of violent video games on aggression.Aggression is the______________in this research.

Achieving______________is typically more of a challenge in a field study than in a laboratory study.

In a well-designed experiment,all participants must

Which statement concerning self-report measures is false?

A researcher was interested in the effects of mood on aggression.She decided to see how receiving an insult or a compliment affects aggression,and she measured aggression by having participants administer small shocks to______________ another participant.The researcher found that participants in the insult condition were more aggressive than those in the compliment condition.One of her colleagues reads about this research and voices concern that people in the______________ insult condition may have been more naturally aggressive than people in the compliment condition,causing the differences observed by the researcher.This concern about pre-existing differences between participants in the two conditions would only be valid if participants were not

Melissa's research examines the cognitive processes involved in persuasion and how those processes can be used to persuade women to have yearly mammograms.This work represents an integration of

In principle,the purpose of random sampling is to make sure that research participants

Which of the following best describes the primary goal of basic research?

Advocates of basic research argue that the more______________the principle being studied,the______________it matters who participates in the study in terms of sample representativeness.

Including culture as a subject variable in a study helps improve the______________validity of the study.

Latrell,the editor of a popular sports magazine,would like to know more about the demographics of the magazine's readers.He designs a questionnaire to assess this information and sends it to a random sample of the magazine's readers.Latrell is conducting a(n)

Your book describes a study in which participants were provided with information about either the success rate or failure rate of condoms.The findings of this study indicate that

Which of the following is not mentioned in your text as a technology used by social psychologists in obtaining data?

When decreases in one variable are accompanied by decreases in another variable,the variables are described as

Robinson manipulates two variables in his experimental investigation of test-taking performance: the number of participants seated in the room and the room temperature.He finds that regardless of the temperature in the room,participants do better on the test when the room is less crowded.Which statement about this study is true?