This document provides an overview of key concepts in psychology and research methods, including: - Different approaches to psychology like psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive. - Common research methods like observation, surveys, experiments, and longitudinal studies. - Key terms like independent and dependent variables, experimental and control groups. - Ethical standards for psychological research involving informed consent and protecting participants. - Ways of organizing data like frequency distributions, and measures of central tendency and variability like mean, median, and standard deviation.

2. • Psychodynamic
• Behavioral
• Humanistic
• Cognitive
• Biological
• Sociocultural
• Do genes effect your
personality?
• Can study habits be learned?
• How do people from different
cultures interact?
• How do negative childhood
experiences affect how
people view stressful
situations?
• How can I achieve my goal
of becoming a doctor?
• What effect will rewards have
in training my dog?

3. Hindsight Bias
Hindsight Bias is the “I-knew-it-all-along”
phenomenon.
After learning the outcome of an event,
many people believe they could have
predicted that very outcome. We only knew
the dot.com stocks would plummet after
they actually did plummet.

4. Overconfidence
Sometimes we think we
know more than we
actually know.
Anagram
WREAT WATER
ETYRN ENTRY
GRABE BARGE
How long do you think it
would take to unscramble
these anagrams?
People said it would take
about 10 seconds, yet on
average they took about 3
minutes (Goranson, 1978).

5. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking does
not accept arguments
and conclusions blindly.
It examines
assumptions, discerns
hidden values,
evaluates evidence and
assesses conclusions.
The Amazing Randi
Courtesy of the James Randi Education Foundation

6. Scientific Method
Psychologists, like all scientists, use the
scientific method to construct theories that
organize, summarize and simplify
observations.

7. Hypothesis
A Hypothesis is a testable prediction, that
describes the relationship between two
variables.
They are often prompted by a theory, to
enable us to accept, reject or revise the
theory.

8. • Observe in a natural setting without
interfering
• Example: Rosenhan’s Mental Hospital Study
(1973)
– Pseudopatients checked themselves into
mental institutions and faked schizophrenia
– Demonstrated that normal people cannot
be distinguished from the mentally ill
– “If they are here, they must be crazy”
– People who are treated in a certain way
over time may begin to behave that way

9. • Involve an intensive investigation of one or
more participants
– Results cannot prove or disprove
anything, but can be used to generate
new hypotheses
– Used by Freud
• Anna O.

10. • Information is obtained by asking many
individuals a fixed set of questions
– Can include both interviews and
questionnaires
• Interviews allow for modification
• Questionnaires take less time and reduce
the possibility the researcher will influence
the participant

11. How Surveys are conducted
• Establish your population.
• Population: all people with the
characteristics a researcher wants to
study.
• Example: all high school seniors in the
U.S., all retired teachers in Rhode Island

12. How Surveys are Conducted
cont.
• Most populations are too large to study.
Therefore, samples are drawn from the
populations.
• Sample: a limited number of cases drawn
from the larger population.

13. How Surveys are Conducted
cont.
• representative sample: sample that
accurately reflects the characteristics of
the population
• The most common way to gather a
representative sample is by random, or
chance.

14. • Studying the same group of people
at regular intervals over a period of
years to assess how certain
characteristics change or remain the
same during development
– Minnesota Twin Family Study
• Twins reared apart study- twin similarities are a
result of genes
• Able to estimate the heritability of
traits

15. Cross-Sectional Study
• A research technique that compares
individuals from different age groups
at one time
• Study a number of subjects from different
age groups and then compare the results
• Cheaper, easier than longitudinal studies, but
group differences may be due to factors other
than development.

16. Longitudinal/Cross Sectional Study

17. Correlation
• This is the measure of a relationship
between two variables or sets of data.
• When one trait or behavior accompanies
another, we say the two correlate.
• CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL
CAUSATION!
• Can be positive or negative
• Example: vaccines and autism
– The majority of autistic children are diagnosed between the ages
of 18 months and 3 years old.
– Children receive many immunizations in this same period of
time.

18. Correlation
When one trait or behavior accompanies
another, we say the two correlate.
Correlation
coefficient
Indicates strength
of relationship
(0.00 to 1.00)
r = +0.37
Indicates direction
of relationship
(positive or negative)
Correlation Coefficient is a
statistical measure of the
relationship between two
variables.

19. Scatterplots
Perfect positive
correlation (+1.00)
Scatterplot is a graph comprised of points that are
generated by values of two variables. The slope of
the points depicts the direction, while the amount
of scatter depicts the strength of the relationship.

20. Scatterplots
Perfect negative No relationship (0.00)
correlation (-1.00)
The Scatterplot on the left shows a negative correlation,
while the one on the right shows no relationship between
the two variables.

21. Correlations
•Range from -1.00 to +1.00
–The greater distance from 0, the stronger
the correlation
•Positive correlations indicate that as one
variable increases, the other increases
too
•Negative correlations indicate that as
one variable increases, the other
decreases

24. • One young woman died in fear in a most
peculiar way: When she was born on
Friday the 13th, the midwife who delivered
her and two other babies announced that
all three were hexed and would die before
their 23rd birthday. The other two did die
young. As the third woman approached
her 23rd birthday, she checked into a
hospitals and informed the staff of her
fears. The staff noted that she dealt with
her anxiety by extreme hyperventilation
(deep breathing). Shortly after her
birthday, she hyperventilated to death.

25. • A situation in which a researcher’s
expectations influence that person’s own
behavior, and thereby influence the
participant’s behavior
– We consciously or unconsciously tip off
people to what are expectations are; people
pick up on those cues and act as expected.

26. Variables
• Variables are factors that are
capable of change.

27. Independent Variable
An Independent Variable is a factor
manipulated by the experimenter. The
effect of the independent variable is the
focus of the study.

28. Dependent Variable
A Dependent Variable is a factor that
may change in response to an
independent variable. In psychology, it
is usually a behavior or a mental process.

29. Experimental Group
• The participants in an experiment
who are exposed to the independent
variable
• Also called the experimental condition
• The group being studied and compared to the
control group

30. Control Group
• The participants in an experiment
who are not exposed to the
independent variable
• Results are compared to those of the
experimental group
• Also called the control condition

31. • Enables the investigator to control the
situation and decrease the possibility that
outside variables will influence the results
– Hypothesis
– Variables (Independent and Dependent)-
If/then
– Experimental Group and Control Group
– Results must be replicated

32. • Methods of conduct or standards for
proper behavior
– Informed consent
– Protection from harm
– Confidentiality
– Debriefing

33. • Single-Blind Experiment- participants
are unaware of which participants received
the treatment
• Double-Blind Experiment- neither the
experimenter nor the participants know
which patient received which treatment
– Drug evaluation studies

34. • 1960- Would participants administer painful
shocks to others merely because an authority
figure had instructed them to do so?
– 2000 male participants
– Told they were participating in a study on
learning
– Each time the learner made a mistake, the
“teacher” was ordered to push a button to
deliver an electric shock
– Shocks were false, but they did not realize
this because the learners displayed distress
and pain

35. • 65% of the volunteers pushed the shock
button until they reached maximum
severity
• Implied that ordinary individuals could
easily inflict pain on others if such
issues were ordered by an authority
figure.
• Ethical issues?
• Replication?
– Has been replicated with young, liberal
college students

36. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PassGyF8X8&feature=related

37. • A change in the participant’s illness or
behavior that results from a belief that the
treatment will have an effect, rather than
the actual treatment
•

39. • What type of correlation did we find
between height and shoe size?
• What would a graph of a negative
correlation look like? No correlation?
• What intervening variables might have
been at work affecting our results?

40. • The branch of mathematics concerned
with summarizing and making meaningful
inferences from collections of data

41. • The listing and summarizing of data in a
practical and efficient way, such as
through graphs and averages

42. Hours Spent Studying Frequency
0 2
.5 8
1 15
1.5 10
2 6
2.5 3
3 1
Total 45

44. • Mean
• Median
• Mode

45. • A measure of the difference or spread of a
set of data
• Range – Subtract the lowest from the
highest
• Standard Deviation
– Average distance of every score from the
mean
– The larger the standard deviation, the more
spread out the scores are

47. • Describes the direction and strength of the
relationship between two variables
• Pearson Correlation Coefficient = r
– (+)= positive- as one variable increases, so
does the second variable
– (-)= negative- as one variable increases, the
second variable decreases
– Can range from -1 to 1 including 0

48. • Roll your die 10 times. Make note of the
results.
• Make a frequency distribution
• Make a frequency polygon
• Find the mean, median, and mode of the data
– Mean= sum of all rolls/10
– Median- what was the median number of
times rolled?
– Mode- what number was rolled the most
frequently?