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Psychology core studies, Bocchiaro (2012) - Coggle Diagram
Psychology core studies
Social
Levine
Background: Research that was conducted previously found out that people in urban areas tend to be less helpful compared to those in rural settings
Procedure
- Data was collected in 23 different cities around the world including those in North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa.
- In most cities, one local individual collected all the data.
- All of them were males at college
Helping scenarios Drop a pen whilst walking along. (This was done over 400 times)
- Drop a pile of magazines whilst walking with a heavy limp and wearing a large and clearly visible leg brace. (This was done nearly 500 times)
- Act like a blind person needing help to cross the road (they wore dark glasses and carried white canes in this scenario). (This was done nearly 300 times)
How the measures were recorded: The confederates recorded the helping behaviour in the 3 scenarios in city centre areas on clear days during business hours (9-5). These helping scenarios were not performed in front of children (under 17), elderly, or disabled people.
Findings/ results
- The most helpful city was Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with people helping 93% of the time
- The least helpful city was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with people helping 40% of the time
- No correlation between population size and level of helping
- No correlation between collectivism and helping
- There was a trend towards highest helping when pace of life was slower (slower walking speed) but this was not significant
– countries where people earned less were more likely to offer help
Research aims
- To see if cultures vary in levels of help offered to people in need
- To identify characteristics of cultures where strangers are more/less likely to be helped
Piliavin (1969)
Background: The case of Kitty Genovese: Kitty was murdered in her apartment complex, despite shouting for help, nobody helped her. This inspired Darley and Latane to set up an experiment where participants heard someone apparently having an epileptic seizure. They believed that either they alone heard the victim or that there were 1 or 4 others present.
Aims/Research Questions: This study was designed to investigate how a group of people would react if they saw a person who collapsed on a train.
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If a model started helping the victim, would that encourage others to also help?
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Key terms:
Bystander apathy/effect: this is where people fail to act to help someone in need when others are present.
Diffusion of responsibility: This is where there is a victim and lots of bystanders are present, each individual takes less responsibility so no one helps, as they believe someone else will
Altruism: Doing a good deed/helping others without getting any personal reward
Sample: Participants were subway passengers who were on board the 8th Avenue subway express train in New York (making this opportunity sampling)
- They did not know that they were taking part in a study (no consent was given and not debriefed)
- Approximately 4450 participants took part ver 3 months
- 55% were white and 45% were black
- At the end of the 3 months, over 103 trials were conducted on the train.
Procedure: This study took place daily on weekdays from 11am - 3pm over the three months
- Experiment always took place between the same two stops on the train as there was a 7.5 minute period with no interruptions
-on some trials, the victim would be ill and holding a walking cane
- On the drunk trials, the victim would always be dressed the same (in an Eisenhower jacket) and smelt of alcohol.
Using teams of university students, a situation was created on the train to see how passengers would react to it.
70 seconds into the journey, one of the university students (male) would stagger forwards and collapse on the train.
The student would always collapse in the same spot – designated the ‘critical area’. The other side of the carriage was called the ‘adjacent area’.
Participants’ reactions were then observed covertly by two observers.
The RACE of the victim would also vary. Sometimes he was white, and other times black.
In some groups, a MODEL (one of the students, who was acting) would help the VICTIM.
The number of passengers on the train would also vary.
Findings
Quantitative findings
- Help was given on 62/65 cane (ill) trials compared to only 19/38 drunk trials.
- Help was offered more quickly to the cane victim (a median of 5 seconds compared to 109 seconds delay for the drunk victim).
- 90% of first helpers were male
Qualitative findings
- Comments made by passengers were also recorded
- More comments were made by passengers in the drunk than the cane condition and most comments were made when no help was given within the first 70 seconds.
- Some comments recorded were: "it's for men to help him" & " I wish i could help- but im not strong enough"
Conclusions
- The state of which the victim was in affected how likely people were going to help
- Males are more likely to help compared to females
- There was no diffusion of responsibility (help came quicker and in greater numbers when more people were present on the carriage), which contradicts the previous research into bystander apathy.
Milgram (1963)
Background: Following WW2, Milgram wanted to test whether Germans are different or if anyone else is capable of being as obedient as the Nazis if they are put in a similar situation.
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Procedure: Participants played the teacher and there was a fake learner in another room. The participant was given a 45V trial shock from the experimenter to make it seem real.
Electric shocks
If he answers incorrectly, you are told by the experimenter to give him an electric shock.
Every time he gets a question wrong, you must increase the voltage, starting at 15V and increasing by 15V each time up to a maximum of 450V.
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After 300V, he stops answering the questions and the experimenter tells the teacher to treat the silence as an incorrect answer and to administer the shocks.
Paired-word task:
The teacher then reads a single word, along with 4 options for the learner to choose from
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The learner has been given a set of word pairs to remember and the teacher’s task is to check that he remembers them correctly.
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Research Aim: The aim was to investigate the process of obedience by testing how far ordinary Americans would go in obeying an authority figure
Cognitive
Moray
Background: Colin Cherry had noted that even if you are in a deep conversation at a party, your attention can be drawn away from this if someone mentioned your name in another conversation. (Cocktail party effect).
Aim: Moray wanted to test whether hearing your name would break through the "barriers" put up in the process of focusing attention on a shadowing task.
Sample: Moray collected a sample of undergraduate students and research workers of both sexes.
- The sample in the first experiment is unkown
- 12 participants took part in the second experiment and 28 in experiment three (14 in each group)
Procedure:
Experiment 1: A short list of words were spoken 35 times as the rejected or blocked message. At the end of this task, participants were asked to recall all they could remember of the rejected passage .
After an estimate of 30 seconds after this shadowing task, participants were given a recognition test of 21 words (in which 7 of them were from the shadowed passage, 7 from the rejected, and 7 from that were not present in either passage).
Results:
- 7 words from shadowed passage: 4.9 mean number of words recognised
- 7 words from rejected passage: 1.9 mean number of words recognised
- 7 similar words in neither passage: 2.6 mean number of words recognised
Experiment 2:
- This aimed to test whether an effective cue would penetrate the block and be attended to. This cue would be of the participants name and an instruction alongside it. (i.e John Smith, change to your other ear)
- Participants listened to two passages that were playing at the same time. They were light fiction. Each one was played in each ear.
- In all cases, the passages had an instruction to listen to their right ear and in two cases the instruction was immediately followed by a warning that the participant would receive instructions to change ears.
The instructions that were contained within the passages took three forms:
- Three comprised affective instructions (participants name prefixed the instruction)
- Three comprised non-affective instructions (name was not mentioned)
- In four cases, there were no instructions within the passage.
Experiment 3:
- Two groups of 14 participants were asked to shadow one of two simultaneous dichotic messages.
- In these messages, however, spoken numbers (digits) were said out loud towards the end of the message. (Digits were chosen as these would be fairly neutral and non-affective)
- To make these digits ‘important’ some participants were told to listen out for digits.
One group was told they would be asked questions about the shadowed passage at the end of each message while the other group were specifically told to remember as many of the digits as possible.
- This experiment used an independent measures design.
Results: Results showed no difference in the mean scores of digits recalled correctly between the two set conditions.
- Author concluded that this was because the numbers were not important enough to break that barrier, unlike their name which holds importance to people.
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- Almost none of the verbal content from a rejected message penetrates a block when attending to another message.
- A short list of simple words wasn’t remembered, even when repeated several times.
- Subjectively Important information like someone’s own name can penetrate the barrier on attention.
- It is difficult to make ‘neutral’ material (e.g. digits) important enough to break the inattentional barrier.
Loftus & Palmer (1974)
Background: Bartlett suggests that Our memory is not like a film where the event is played back exactly as it happened.
Instead we reconstruct the event. This reconstruction is affected by our past experiences and pre-existing beliefs about what typically might happen (schemas).
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Sample:
- 45 student participants took part in experiment 1.
- 150 student participants divided into 3 groups took part in experiment 2
Procedure:
Experiment 1:
- Participants watched video clips which included staged car crashes.
- Following the clip, they were given a questionnaire which included several smokescreen questions to disguise the aim, and the critical question
- About how fast were the cars going when they ___ each other?’
Results:
- Participants were not sure whether to say 30 or 40mph but the verb smashed biased them towards giving a higher estimate.
- The verb used caused a change in the participants’ memory for the event so “smashed” led them to remember the event as being more serious than it was.
Experiment 2: A new set of 150 participants watched one video clip containing a multiple car crash.
- Following the clip, they were given a questionnaire which included several smokescreen questions to disguise the aim, and the critical question
- About how fast were the cars going when they ___ each other?’
- A second questionnaire was given out and it contained 10 questions about the accident. The critical question was " Did you see any broken glass?"
Results Participants in the "smashed" condition gave a significantly higher speed estimate than those in the "hit" condition. (10.46 mph v 8 mph).
Participants in the smashed condition were also significantly more likely to answer "yes" to the question of "did you see any broken glass?" than those in the hit condition.
Conclusions: The questions that are asked after an event can cause a reconstructions to someones memory of that event.
Simons & Chabris
Background: Inattentional blindness is where people fail to see an event or an object that is in their field of vision because they are focusing on other elements of what you can see.
Aim: Simons and chabris wanted to confirm that inattentional blindness can occur in a realistic, complex situation.
Sample: consisted of 228 participants almost who were all undergraduate students based at Harvard University.
Method:
Materials used in this study:
- Four video tapes were created and they all had the same actors, recorded on the same day and location
- Each video lasted 75 seconds each
- Each video showed two teams made up of three players (black or white shirts)
- Teams either passed a standard basketball, using both aerial and bounced passes.
- Between 44 and 48 seconds into each video the unexpected event would occur. This would either be a woman carrying an umbrella or a shorter woman crossing the scene in a Gorilla costume.
- Each event lasted for 5 seconds
- The two video conditions were transparent (similar to Neisser's study) and opaque ( more realistic looking)
Findings
Since 36 participants were not included due to a variety of reasons, researchers were left with only 192 participants' data to analyse.
- The overall level of inattentional blindness ws 46% with 54% of them noticing the unexpected event.
- As the difficulty of the task increased, so did the levels of inattentional blindness. 64% of participants seeing the unexpected event in the easy condition while 45% only saw it in the hard condition.
Procedure:
The procedure was scripted and standardised and a team of 21 experimenters gathered data from the 228 participants.
Participants were always tested individually and were informed on the task that they would be doing ( which involved watching a clip of basketball players and that they should either pay attention to either the black team or the white team). - They were also told to count the number of passes of the ball each players of the team they were told to focus on.
There was either an easy or hard task that the participants were given.
- The easy task was where participants had to keep a mental note on the number of passes their team made
- The hard task was where they had to keep mental notes on separate material which was the number of aerial passes and the number if bounce passes their team made.
After viewing the tape, participants were asked to immediately record the number of passes on paper and were then asked a number of surprise questions.
- Did you notice anything other than the 6 players?
- Did you see a gorilla/ woman carrying an umbrella walk across the screen?
If participants said yes they were then asked to provide details. If they mentioned the unexpected event at any point, they were not asked the rest of the questions.
At the end of the procedure, participants were fully debriefed and were shown the video if necessary.
Conclusions:
- Authors concluded that inattentional blindness occurs in dynamic events that are sustained, lasting more than 5 seconds.
- The study shows that objects can pass through our central field of vision and still not be seen if they are not specifically attended to.
Grant (1998)
Background:
Godden and Baddeley (1975) studied the effects of context-dependent memory using deep sea divers. Some of the divers learned the words underwater and others learned the list of words on land. Then half of each group were tested on land and the other half under water. When the environment matched, the divers recalled more words than when they did not match.
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Sample:
- 8 psychology students from a class acted as experimenters and each recruited 5 acquaintances . Data from 39 Participants was recorded.
- Participants ranged in age from 17 to 56 years (mean age = 23.4), 17 females and 23 males.
Procedure:
- Participants were asked to read through an article once on psychoimmunology.
- Half of the participants did this while listening to background noise taken from the university cafeteria and the other half completed the task in silence.
They then completed 10 recall questions and 16 multiple choice questions on what they had read. They again did this while wearing headphones with half the participants in each study group doing the tests in silence and the other half while listening to background noise.
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Conclusions:
- Both recall and recognition of information is better when the context matches – participants recalled significantly more information about the article when the study and test conditions matched (silent-silent or noisy-noisy) than when they did not match (silent-noisy or noisy-silent)
Biological
Sperry (1968)
Background: Sperry previously did research which involved splitting the brains of cats and monkeys. He discovered that you could teach one hemisphere a task while the other hemisphere was unaware of the information learned.
Aim: To investigate the effects of this deconnection and show that each hemisphere has different functions.
Sample:
- 11 patients (both male and female) who had already undergone a commissurotomy prior to the study.
- All participants had a history of severe epilepsy which could not be resolved by drug therapy.
Procedure: There were two tasks that were carried out, these were either visual or tactile
Visual task involved investigating what the patients could do when information was flashed on a screen in front of them to one visual field (i.e. one hemisphere)
Participants sat down in front of the tachistoscope with one eye covered
They were asked to stare at a fixation point on a screen in front of them and images were flashed up on the screen for 1/10th second
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Tactile task involved investigating what patients could do when then touched an object with one had (unseen)
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Findings:
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The right hemisphere of the brain gets information from the left side of the body and the left visual fields
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Conclusions:
With the corpus callosum cut, one side of the brain does not know what the other side is doing (they have their own separate consciousness)
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Left hemisphere controls speech, writing, language and right side of your body (and RVF in both eyes)
Right hemisphere controls the left side of your body (and LVF in both eyes) and is able to communicate information it has been presented non-verbally (but not verbally).
Casey (2011)
Background: Previous research was done by Mischel in 1972, which tested 4-year old children on their ability to delay the urge to eat the marshmallow in front of them when the researcher had left the room.
Aim:
- Experiment 1:The aim was to see if the low delayers in the Marshmallow test still had problems resisting temptations in adulthood.
- Experiment 2: The aim was to examine activity in areas of the brain thought to be associated with the ability to resist temptation.
Sample:
- 562 people originally took part in the Marshmallow test.
- They were followed up in their 20s and 30s using a self-report measure.
Participants in their 40s were contacted and asked to take part in this study. These were only those who were consistently high low delayers were contacted.
Procedure:
Cool task
- Participants completed an impulse control task called the Go/No-Go task
They would have to press a button when they saw one stimulus (e.g. a female face) and NOT press a button when they saw the other stimulus (e.g. a male face)
Hot task
- In addition to the cool task, the study also used a hot task.
In this task, faces with happy expressions acted as ‘hot’ stimuli, so would be ‘alluring’ or tempting to adults in the same way as marshmallows were to 4-year-olds. Research had previously shown this to be the case.
- This time the two stimuli were happy or fearful faces
Participants had to press a button when they saw one type of emotion (e.g. fearful faces) and NOT press the button when they saw the other emotion.
Findings
Cool task
- There was no difference between high delayers and low delayers on the COOL task - both groups made a similar number of errors
Hot task
- BUT on the HOT TASK, the low delayers made more errors than the high delayers
- HIGH DELAYERS made a similar number of errors on the HOT TASK to the COOL TASK
- BUT LOW DELAYERS made significantly more errors on the HOT TASK than they did on the COOL TASK (p=0.005).
Conclusions - Low delayers (people who struggled to resist temptation as 4-year olds) showed more difficulty suppressing responses to happy faces in their forties.
Maguire(2000)
Brain Plasticity This is the ability of the brain to adapt in response to changes in demand from the environment.
Background:
- The hippocampus is an important part of the brain which is involved in memory and navigation.
- Research has shown that animals that migrate or store food have a larger hippocampal volume relative to their brain and body size.
Aims:
- To investigate the differences in the hippocampi of London taxi drivers compared to controls
- To further investigate functions of the hippocampus in spatial memory.
Sample: - 16 male London Taxi drivers
- All right handed
- Between 32 and 62 years old
- All passed "The knowledge test"
- The control group was used to compare to the taxi drivers.
- Researchers selected 50 scans from the MRI database at the centre where the taxi drivers were scanned.
- All were right handed males aged between 32 and 62
Procedure:
- They compared the 16 taxi drivers’ brain scans to 16 scans from the control group that had been matched for age.
- Data was collected through two techniques used to analyse MRI scans – Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and pixel counting.
Results:
- Significantly increased grey matter volume was found in the taxi drivers’ brains compared to the controls’ brains in both sides of the posterior (back) hippocampus.
Conclusions
- Showed that there was regional differences between the hippocampi of the London taxi drivers and the control group
- seems that relying on navigational skills as part of your job is associated with a redistribution of grey matter in the hippocampus
Blakemore & Cooper
Background: Hirsch and Spinelli investigated the visual cortex of the brain in kittens.
- Kittens wore special goggles so they could see only horizontal stripes in one eye and vertical stripes in the other.
Aims: The aim was to investigate the effects of being raised in a restricted visual environment on the kittens behaviour and the neurophysiological effects in the visual cortex
Kittens were used as their eyes are similar to a humans eye. They can see in colour and have good vision
- Cats' brains have a visual cortes in a similar location to humans' brains
- It would be unethical to do this experiment on human infants
Procedure:
- Newborn kittens were raised in a completely dark room for 2 weeks.
- At 2 weeks the kitten was placed inside a 2m high x 46cm diameter cylinder for 5 hours per day. (Then returned to dark room for rest of the time).
- The kittens were only able to see either horizontal or vertical lines until they reaches 5 months old.
- After 5 months (this was thought to be the critical period for brain development) they were put in well lit room with furniture (including tables and chairs) and their behaviour was observed over several weeks.
Controls used in the study:
- kittens wore a collar so they could not see their body
- same amount of time each day in the cylinder
- kept in a dark room when not in the cylinder for the first 2 weeks
Results: The initial defects the cats had were:
- no visual placement when carried towards a table
- no startle reflex when objects were thrusted towards them
- The would navigate using touch
- Would often bump into objects
Individual differences
Freud (1909)
Background: Freud's theory of psychosexual development and that sexual instincts are already present in newborn children.
Aim:
- To investigate the case of Little Hans, a young boy who was experiencing a phobia, and to provide evidence to support his theory of psychosexual development.
Sample: One singular boy from Vienna, Austria, who was given the pseudonym of "Little Hans".
- He was around 3 when the research began
Conclusions
Freud claimed that he had learned nothing new from studying Little Hans’ case and that the study provided support for:
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That boys during the phallic stage develop an Oedipus complex (little Hans wanted his father ‘out of the way’ so that he could have the affections of his mother all to himself)
That phobias are the result of unconscious anxieties which have been displaced onto external objects (the fear of his father finding out about his desires displaced into a fear of horses)
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Procedure
Hans’ father recorded details of Hans’ behaviours and conversations, and made his own interpretations. He would then send these in a weekly letter to Freud
Freud replied with his own interpretations of the behaviours and conversations, and would give guidance on what Hans’ father should be discussing with Hans, and which behaviours to look out for.
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Baron - Cohen (1997)
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Aims: Baron-cohen wanted to create another advanced test of theory of mind that would test the mind of adults
Theory of mind is the ability to infer what another person is thinking or feeling and recognise other people have different thoughts, knowledge and emotions to our own
Sample:
- 16 people with autism or asperger's syndrome.
- 50 "normal" adults (25m:25f)
- 10 adults with tourette syndrome
Procedure:
The Eyes Task:
- Participants were shown 25 photographs for 3 seconds each. They were all taken from magazines and were all in black and white and were all the same sizeof 15 x 10 cm.
- The photos were of the eye region of the person.
Participants were asked what word best describes what the person is feeling or thinking.
- Underneath the photos were two mental state terms that they had to choose from (i.e. relaxed or concerned).
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control tasks
Gender recognition task:
- Participants saw the same 25 sets of eyes that were used in the eyes task.
- They had to state if the person in each picture was male or female
Basic emotion recognition task:
- Participants shown black and white photographs of a whole face.
- Each of 6 faces showed a different basic emotion (happy, sad, angry, afraid, disgust, surprise)
Findings
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Other results:
- Adults with autism also performed worse than both ‘normal’ participants and the Tourette’s syndrome group on the strange stories task
- BUT they did not show any differences in performance on either of the control tasks.
Gould (1982)
Background:
- The first intelligence tests were developed in France in early 1900s. Used to identify children that were of low IQ and needed to be placed in special schools based on their mental age scores. These tests were later adopted by schools in the USA (Stanford-Binet test)
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Sample:
- 1.75 million US male army recruits
Procedure
There were 3 tests, which were:
- Army Alpha: Literate recruits would be given the Army Alpha - a written test.
- Army Beta illiterates and those that failed the Alpha would be given the Beta. This included picture-based tests so should be more accessible for those who were illiterate.
- Individual interview: a spoken test to be used if people failed the beta test.
Army Alpha:
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Its tasks included number sequences, unscrambling sentences, multiple choice questions and solving analogies.
In Yerkes’ test, tens or hundreds of recruits would complete the task at the same time, with the sergeants and officers shouting instructions at them
Army Beta:
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e.g. maze running, cube counting and translating numbers into symbols, picture completion (opposite).
The instructions were written (in English) and in three of the seven parts the answers had to be given in writing.
Findings:
Fact 1’: The average mental age of a white American adults (13) was just above that of a moron (the standard score was set at 16).
‘Fact 2:’ The darker people of southern Europe and the Slavs of Eastern Europe were less intelligent than the fair people of Western and Northern Europe (e.g. Russians had a mental age of 11.34, Poles 10.74)
‘Fact 3’: Black recruits scored lowest of all, with an average mental age of 10.41. [Some camps furthered this by separating black individuals into 3 groups based on intensity of skin colour. Lighter individuals scored higher!]
Conclusions:
- There were ‘systematic errors’ in the design of the tests and how they were administered which led to black recruits and immigrants scoring lower.
The tests were carried out in such a disorganised way that they were not a true reflection of people’s intelligence and the conclusions led indirectly to the deaths of millions of people.
Hancock (2011)
Background:
- Psychopaths are people who often come across as charming, intelligent and articulate.
However, what makes them psychopathic is that beneath the surface they lack any empathy and see other people as there to be used in order to achieve their own personal ends. Psychopaths are extremely self-centred and manipulative.
Aim: To investigate whether psychopaths use language differently to non-psychopaths (such that we could detect psychopathy based on how someone speaks)
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Procedure:
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Step 2:
Participants asked to describe their homicide offence in as much detail as possible (using the step wise interview procedure).
25 mins – two senior psychology graduates, one research assistant – all blind to psychopathy scores
Narratives were audiotaped and then turned into transcripts that were as close to what was said as possible (including any disfluencies, pauses, etc.)
Step 3: Results/Analysis
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WMatrix – analysed the percentage of each feature of language used (use of nouns, verbs, disfluencies, etc.)
This was done after all the speech from the psychopaths (corpus) was put together and compared against all the speech from non-psychopaths
DAL – compared used of emotional language (positive vs negative emotions, high vs low intensity, etc.) by each individual
Results:
Psychopaths (1.82% of their speech) used more subordinating conjunctions (because, since, as, so that) than controls (1.54%). This suggests a more causal view – I committed the murder because…
Psychopaths talked more about basic needs (sex, food, shelter) and less about higher level needs (meaningful relationships, family, spirituality)
Psychopaths tended to use less pleasant and less intense emotional words, as well a using significantly more disfluencies in their speech
Conclusions
- The language that psychopaths use to describe emotional events (like their crimes) is different from non-psychopaths. They seem to operate on a lower emotional level.
Developmental
Bandura(1961)
Background:
- At the time it was believed that children would imitate the way they had seen an adult behave. It was however believed that children needed to see the adult behave this way multiple timed before copying it themselves.
Aim: - To see if children would imitate adult behaviour when given the opportunity even if they saw these behaviours in a different environment
Sample:
- 72 children from Stanford university nursery.
- Aged 37 - 69 months
- Equal gender split
Procedure:
Key notes:
- This was opportunity sampling as they used children that were present at the nursery at that time
- This was a matched participants design as each participant was paired with another participant that had a shared characteristic ( age, gender, sex, IQ, etc)
- Participants were matched on their: physical aggression, verbal aggression, aggression inhibition, amd aggression towards inanimate objects.
- Children were pre-tested. This involved the researcher and the teacher to make a judgement how aggressive they are initially before the experiment started.
- The inter-rater reliability was 0.89
The model conditions were:
- Aggressive male model
- Aggressive female model
- no model ( posed as a control)
- Non aggressive female model
- Non aggressive male model
Stage 1: Each child was individually taken to a room where a model was invited to join in to the game. There was a table with games such as: potato printing, and stickers.
- The model sat at another table with tinker toys, a bodo doll, and a mallet. The child was told by the experimenter that those were the model's toys and then left the child with the model.
- In the Non-aggressive condition, the model played with the tinker toys and ignored the bodo doll
- In the Aggressive condition, the model began to play with the tinker toys but after 1 minute, they started to be aggressive towards to the bodo doll for the rest of the time. (total time was 10 minutes).
Stage 2: Children were then taken to a smaller room with some attractive toys such as a toy fire engine, jet plane, cable car, etc.
- Children were allowed to play with these for 2 minutes before the experimenter said that those were their best toys and they had to be saved for the other children to play with
Stage 3:
- In the third room, there was a range of toys which was always set up in the same place for each child, (these included all the toys in the first room and a small bodo doll)
- There were also some aggressive toys such as dart guns, and a ball hanging from the ceiling.
- The non-aggressive toys included a tea set, crayons, cars and trucks, etc.
- The child was allowed to play with either of these for 20 minutes in the room in which they were observed through a one way mirror.
- Every 5 seconds, a note was made on the behaviour that was shown on one of the behavioural categories
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Results
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Boys watching an aggressive male model gave 25.8 aggressive acts vs only 1.5 when watching a male non-aggressive model.
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Conclusions: Children learn behaviour through observation and imitation. This more so happens when they see a role model (such as a teacher or parent) act in a certain way. This is why it is important to behave in a way that is appropriate for a child to see as if it negative, they will imitate this behaviour. (Social Learning Theory).
Chaney2004)
Background: If we accept the behaviourist principle that behaviour is repeated if it is rewarded then the environment that the child is brought up in will have a large impact on their behaviour.
Aim: Chaney wanted to investigate whether the principle of reinforcement can be applied to a health setting.
Sample
- 32 children from Australia aged between 1.5 and 6 years old, (22 boys and 10 girls).
- They were being had for asthma for 2.2 years and were being treated for it using various inhalers.
- were in a repeated measures field experiment
Findings
- When using the standard inhaler, 10% of parents found that they had always successfully medicated their child compared to 73% when they had used the Funhaler.
- 61% of parents found out that their children were unwilling to breathe through their existing device, but this figure has decreased to 7% when the Funhaler has been used.
- 13% of parents had a strong concern with their child existing inhaler, but when the Funhaler was introduced, their concerns reduced to 0%.
Procedure
- Parents were then given the Funhaler for their child to use for 2 weeks. They were then contacted randomly by telephone and were asked if their child had used the inhaler the previous day.
- Questionnaires were given out to the parents of the children, which covered their attitudes to the standard aerochamber inhaler that the children are currently using and how the children were medicated.
- This also covered questions on problems with delivery of the medication and the child's attitudes.
A second questionnaire was given out to the parents in which now measured thier:
- adherence towards the Funhaler
- their childrens attitudes towards the Funhaler
- any problems with it
- and parents attitudes towards the medication.
Conclusions: It would appear that the Funhaler led to an increase in use and correct use at that, as children achieved four or more breaths per cycle.
Lee(1997)
Background: One aspect of moral development is honesty, and how "it is wrong to tell lies"
Aim: Lee wanted to see if Western and Chinese cultures have differences in how they regard to moral behaviours of lying and truth telling in good deed and bad misdeed situations.
Sample: - 120 chinese children and 108 Canadian children
- Chinese sample consisted of 40 7-year olds, 40 9-year olds, and 40 11-year olds. There was an equal gender split in each group.
- Canadian sample consisted of 36 7-year olds, 40 9-year olds, and 32 11-year olds. The gender split was 58 boys and 50 girls with an imbalance gender split with each group.
Procedure:
There were 4 types of stories that were presented to the children for the four conditions:
- Pro-social setting - Truth telling stories (physical and social)
- Pro- social setting - Lie telling stories ( physical and social)
- Anti-social setting - Truth telling stories ( physical and social)
- Anti-social setting - Lie telling stories ( Physical and social)
In the Physical stories, the children take pages out of books so there is no social issue, just the physical act.
In Social stories, someone gets hurt (anti-social) or helped ( pro-social).
Children were randomly allocated the social story condition or the physical story condition and were each explained to individually the rating chart.
- Each child listened to all four social or physical stories and had to judge whether what the character did in the story was: very very good, very good, good, neither, naughty, very naughty, or very very naughty.
Results:
- With regard to a character telling the truth about something pro-social they have done, children in collectivist China came to view this less positively as they got older (seeing this as “begging for” or “wanting” praise)
- With regard to a character lying about something pro-social they have done, children in collectivist China came to view this positively as they got older (saying that one should not leave one’s name after doing a good deed)
Conclusions: Lee et al concluded that there are differences in moral development between different cultures, which is not just due to cognitive development – i.e. children’s views of right and wrong change as they get older but also because of social and cultural rules
Kohlberg(1968)
Background: He looked at the behaviourist perspective which would say that people learn morals through their parents (e.g. bad behaviours get punished and good deeds are rewarded, or through observation and imitation of parents as role models).
He looked at the psychodynamic perspective which explains morals as a results of the super-ego
Jean Piaget's theory: Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who said the children’s thinking (including morals) develops in two stages:
- Heteronomous moral thinking: where children only judge whether an action is right or wrong based on the consequences of the action.
- Autonomous moral thinking: where the children now consider the intention behind the action rather than just the consequences (from about 8 years old).
Aim Kohlberg aimed to investigate how children move through the stages of moral development as they got older, and if there is any cultural differences in how this happens.
Sample: Kohlberg used a sample of 75 American boys who were aged 10-16 at the start through to when they were around 22-28 years old.
- Each child was presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas every 3 years for a 12 year period (making this a longitudinal study).
Procedure: Every boy was presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas every 3 years during the 12 year period.
- The most known dilemma was called the Heinz dilemma.
There were 3 levels when explaining a childs moral development:
- Pre-conventional level - People (usually children) are well behaved but only because of the physical consequences to them of being good or bad. If there is no-one there to judge them, they are likely to be naughty.
- Conventional level - people conform to the social norms and expectations of their family, social group or nation. Rules must be followed.
- Post-conventional level - people set their own personal moral principles which may differ from those of their social group.
He also wanted to compare the morals of people around the world, so he tested out his dilemmas in a range of countries such as:
- Great Britain
- Taiwan
- Turkey
- Malaysia
- Canada
- Mexico
Kohlberg's conclusions:
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This means everyone, regardless of culture, social background or religion moves through the same 6 stages in the same order.
They never skip a stage or move backwards through the stages (although not everyone reaches the last stage).
Bocchiaro (2012)
Background: Whistleblowing Often involves people in business or government reporting misconduct to managers, etc.
Research Aims: To create a situation that allowed them to test whether people would obey, disobey, or blow the whistle on an authority figure who was encouraging immoral behaviours
Sample: 149 (96F:53M) undergraduate students that were recruited by flyers in the campus cafeteria at VU university in Amsterdam
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Procedure
Room 1: The preliminary stage: This was where the participant met the researcher in the lab of the university. The researcher was formally dressed and had a stern demeanour
The researcher had asked them to write down the names of 5 students and then gave them a fake cover story about the research he was conducting
Room 2: The task: : Participants are taken into a new room, are sat in front of a computer and asked to write a statement for their fellow students recommending the research.
They would also find that there was a research committee form and a mailbox to post it in. If participants had ticked the box it would mean that they had whistle blown
The researcher leaves the room for 7 minutes
The participants are now left to either write the statement or not, and decide whether or not to report the research to the ethics committee
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