Class Exercise # 1Dr. Smith, a sports psychologist, is studying the effects of mental imagery on sports performance, specifically swimming. All research participants follow their normal training routine, except that Group 1 swims 10 extra lengths per day, Group 2 vividly imagines swimming 10 extra lengths per day, and Group 3 reads a book about the physical benefits of swimming, for the amount of time per day that it takes to swim 10 lengths. Non-experienced and Experienced are randomly assigned to the 3 groups; each person participates in only 1 group. The dependent variable is the amount of time it takes to swim 10 lengths of the pool in seconds

Results for #1

300

275

262.5 287.5 312.5

Swim Imagine ReadNon-

experienced 275 300 325

300275250

A Mean

B Mean

Experienced

Results for #1

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Swim Imagine Read

Non-experienced

Experienced

Class Exercise # 2Dr. Jones was interested in testing a cognitive theory of emotion. She showed her participants a gory film of an automobile accident that was meant to arouse strong emotions. Dr. Jones explored how different sound tracks would affect the level of emotional response to the stress-inducing film, as measured by heart rate. She compared the arousal effects of the original silent film with 3 different sound tracks. The first she called trauma track, which simply narrated what was happening in the film. The second track was intellectual, with a detached and clinical description. The third sound track was the denial track, which tended to gloss over and deny the vents in the film. Dr. Jones also wanted to explore a participant variable , so she pre-tested participants, and selected 2 groups: those who were high on a scale that measured how much they become “carried away” by books & movies, and those who were low on the same scale

Results for #2

92.5

75

Silent Trauma Intell.

High 100 110 80

708080

A Mean

B Mean

Low

80

70

Denial

90 95 75 75

Results for #2

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Silent Trauma Intell. Denial

High

Low

Class Exercise # 3Kendra was interested in studying conformity as a function of sex of participant. However, she also thought that the type of task would be important. She pretested several tasks by asking males and females to rate them as to whether a man or a women would be more “expert” at the task. Kendra selected 4 “male expert” tasks, such as automobile repair, and 4 “female expert” tasks, such as sewing. She then brought equal numbers of male and female participants into the laboratory and randomly assigned them to 1 of 2 types of tasks. Kendra measured how much each person conformed to the instructions of a confederate (1=low conformity to 10=high conformity)

Results for #3

5

6

Male-expert

High 2

9

A Mean

B Mean

Low

8

3

5.5 5.5

Female-expert

Results for #3

0123456789

10

Male-expert Female-expert

Males

Females

Class Exercise # 4An experiment was done on vocabulary learning in which there were two independent variables. Each of ninety-six introductory psychology students was asked to learn twenty unfamiliar English vocabulary words. Participants studied the vocabulary words either along with a familiar synonym (Synonym condition), along with a dictionary definition (Definition condition), along with a literary passage in which the word was used correctly (Passage condition), or without any accompanying information (Control condition). In addition, half the participants were asked to write sentences using the new words during study (Active Processing) while the other half simply studied without writing (Passive Processing). Thus there were eight groups of twelve participants in this 4 × 2 design. Participants were randomly assigned to the eight groups

Results for #4

13.125

13

Control Passage Defin.

Active 9.5 13 16

1513.510

A Mean

B Mean

Passive

14

13.5

Synon.

9.75 13.25 15.5 13.75

Results for #4

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

Control Passage Definition Synonym

Active

Passive