Research Study Assignment

Directions:
Find a news article describing a scientific study in the field of Psychology.
You can use any news source (i.e. CNN, LA TIMES, NY TIMES, FOX News, Science Daily, etc.).
I personally recommend going to ScienceDaily and then selecting either ‘Mind & Brain’ or “Living Well’ from the main Health tab on the top banner of their website.
Alternatively you can also Google ‘Psychology study finds’ and see if anything catches your interest.
If there’s a particular topic you know you’re interested in, search for that!
Read the article and answer the following questions below that will help you generate a research idea and hypothesis based on the study.
Important: your idea has to be something you could feasibly test using COLLEGE STUDENTS as your participants!
It can’t be something that involves children, animals, or a specific disorder
It should be something that could be administered online (like a survey)
Question 1:
What news story did you select? Write in the title and source as well as a link to the article.
Note: To get full credit it has to be a news article describing a Psychological study in which they had participants take a survey or participate in an experiment (no review articles or blogs!)
Question 2:
Briefly describe their research question/hypothesis and their findings (2-4 sentences).

Question 3:
State your rough research idea based off of this article.
This should just be a general question or something interesting related to their study
Question 4:
State your research question (What relation exists between 2 or more variables?)
this can either be a correlation between 2 variables or difference between groups
Question 5:
How could you observe and test this research question using a survey/online test using college students as your participants?
Note: To get full credit it has to be something you could actually perform using students from my other class this semester and you need to clearly express how your variables could be observable/measurable.

Examples Answers:

Q1: ‘Don’t smile too big to be effective in online marketing ads, study funds – ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170124111324.htm#:~:text=2-,Don’t%20smile%20too%20big%20to%20be%20effective,online%20marketing%20ads%2C%20study%20funds&text=Summary%3A,results%20depending%20on%20the%20context.

Q2: Does how big someone smiles cause different judgments on that person? They analyzed smiles on Kickstarter.com and found that smiles which elicit more warmth seem to be more effective in promotional ads for a service that would carry less risk. However, photos with a slight smile did better in marketing scenarios where services were higher risk, such as a medical procedure, legal representation , or investment in a startup company.
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Q3: I want to see if there is a relationship between level of attractiveness and whether they feel someone is competent between genders.

Q4: Do people judge levels of competence based on a scale of attractiveness in males and females? I think that women who are found attractive are seen to be less component , and it would be the opposite in men.

Q5: I would use pictures of different degrees of attractiveness probably found on the internet . I’m sure there are different feeds of some of the most attractive people that have been voted on. I would not use celebrity pictures to avoid some biases and would include groups of different races. The participants could then rate them on a numerical scale for how much they trust that person to be their doctor or lawyer.

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